3 reasons why listening to your customers is essential

The customer is king. Right?

Whether you agree with that statement or not: your customers' input is hugely valuable! Think of your customers as a kind of 'free advisers', often called ambassadors.

Why?

It's very simple: your customers are already familiar with your product or service and have actively used it. So they know better than anyone else what aspects need improvement, or how your company solves a problem.

This information is incredibly valuable: incorporate the input in your website, e-mails and advertisements to reach new customers and immediately address their needs and desires, increasing the odds they will make a purchase. And as a side-effect, your current customer base feels heard, seeing their requests turn into reality.

Listening to your customers allows you to build long-term relationships with customers, and increase your revenue and turnover.

Sounds good, doesn't it? Let's dive a little deeper in the 3 reasons, and discuss how to hit the ground running!

The most powerful medium? Word of mouth.

People trust their loved ones the most when it comes to purchases. Actually, research has shown that 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family more than any other form of advertising.

So create positive experiences and turn your customers into your ambassadors. It's the best form of marketing there is!

The more sales the better, right?

The principle is simple: if a customer is happy with you, your service and your product, they're more likely to make a repeat purchase.

So you get more profit out of the same customer in the long run.

And do you have a subscription-based product or service? If so, you will naturally avoid cancellations (churn) this way.

What was the reason that customer placed an order with you? What problem did you solve? What did they like best about your product or service? And how can you improve it even further?

Who better to ask these questions than your customer? After all, they know better than anyone else what they missed and what they liked best about your product and/or service.

Asking your customers for their feedback is a cost-effective and efficient way to collect information to improve your business, your advertisements, and helps you define your roadmap for the upcoming year(s). Naturally, making these improvements to your business model will help you bring in new customers, as well as retain your current customer base.

It's not very efficient to start calling every customer and interviewing them at length. Therefore, there are some other tricks to still get the 'conversation' going.

• Via e-mail: Use a tool to ask customers to leave a review or fill in a form after making a purchase, for example after a few days.
• Via a poll: There are also a lot of ways to place a short poll on your website, allowing you to ask a few short questions to customers and/or website visitors.
• Calling: Of course, calling is always an option. Pick a few customers and call them. It doesn't get more qualitative than that! But of course, it takes a lot of time.

Keep track of what most of your questions and/or comments come from. That way, you will know where you still need to do some polishing. Also, while it's good to pick either option to listen to customers, you can also use all three options simultaneously! Using e-mail does not rule out the possibility to also implement a poll, for example.

Of course, listening to your customers is one thing, doing something with the input is another!

At Rinkel, we dedicate ourselves daily to our customers and do our best to listen to them. For instance, we always take our customers' feedback into account when we (want to) build new features. It also helps us define our roadmap and brings in new ideas to improve!

And that customer rating we flaunt (9+!) also says a lot about where we stand. Listening to customers is one of the most important things at Rinkel!

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