Is offering a good customer service important? Of course it is. You don’t need me to tell you that, because we all know it already. Although that’s a sure truth, it doesn’t harm anybody to take a look at the stats showing why we need to pay attention to this part of our businesses.

Customer service is important because it can make the difference in your business. It can be the reason for a customer to switch either towards you or towards your competitors, depending on who offers the best customer service. A research conducted by RightNow on Customer Experience Impact in 2011 revealed that 89% of customers gave up being a company’s client and turned to competitors after receiving poor customer service. That’s quite a high percentage, definitely worth considering before raising the voice at your client because he’s asking you the same question over and over again.

Providing quality customer service is even important when it comes to pricing: as the data from a Customer Experience Survey says, 86% of customers are willing to pay a company more money just to get better customer service and to feel more valued as a client.

While we already concluded good customer experience through offering quality service is important, unfortunately only 37% of brands got scores like “good” or “excellent” for their customer service, the rest ended up with values like “average”, “poor” or “very poor”, according to Forrester’s Customer Experience study from 2012. Thus, clients have pre-defined standards and ideas on how their experience with the brand or the company should be and, eventually, they’re straight forwarded when it comes to rating your service.

Considering the facts, there’s absolutely no doubt every company should provide not just customer service, but excellent customer service. Besides the key-data presented above, one more reason speaks for striving towards high-quality customer service. That reason emerges from the practical aspect that keeping a customer is generally more cost- and time-effective than trying to find a new one.

Hence, you might consider undertaking measures to at least maintain customer satisfaction, if not try to constantly raise it, because a satisfied customer is a loyal customer. And a loyal customer might become a brand advocate for your company, promoting it to their environment and, directly or not, recommending it to others.

What about feedback surveys (customer satisfaction surveys)?

One crucial step towards maintaining or raising customer satisfaction is through running feedback surveys. Such type of research can be conducted by yourself, as long as you have an online tool aiding you in this process. A free or paid survey building tool can enhance the feedback gathering while offering multiple customization & publishing options.

Feedback surveys have become more and more popular because of the advantages that come to light after conceiving a feedback survey and publishing it on your website, blog or even Facebook page:

– you give your clients the opportunity to tell you what they like/dislike regarding your business or your product
– it’s a good way of finding out what your customers really want, instead of assuming that you know what they desire
– you can correct past actions and practices which didn’t appeal to your customer
– future actions and business strategies can be planned to be more effective and more customer-oriented
– the business budget can be directed towards the aspects your clients suggest you, thus you avoid throwing money in vain.

A tricky thing about customer satisfaction surveys lies in the way they’re designed. Oftentimes, companies run long and boring surveys which just annoy the customer and don’t really provide useful (honest) data. Did it happen to you to purchase an online product from a big seller and afterwards receive a feedback survey through your email, asking how your overall experience was? Because it happened to me. Since I didn’t have a reason of discontentment and the survey was quite complex, I just didn’t feel like filling it out.

If you want your survey to have a high completion rate, keep it short and simple (that’s always a good advice, even when it comes to market research). You can opt, for example, for asking just one or two questions on core aspects you want to find out and post them on your website or Facebook page. By giving people the opportunity to find the survey themselves on your site, they’ll feel more likely to share their feedback with you. Thus, not stuffing a questionnaire under your visitor’s nose might be more action-inviting for them.

While these are a few recommendations which evolved from user experience, fact is that a good mixture between listening to your customers’ feedback and offering them good service should generally be an infallible recipe to success.

http://smallbusiness.yahoo.com/advisor/importance-excellent-customer-feedback-surveys-113002268.html