Times of economic uncertainty have an uncanny knack of focusing our attention on the performance of our business, particularly if sales figures begin to slide. For those lucky enough to be enjoying buoyant sales, the temptation is to maintain the status quo, but as always, the potential exists to do better for the sake of our customers and in doing so, our balance sheets too.

Whilst still at school, undoubtedly many of us received report cards that stated ‘could do better’ for some of our subjects, but infuriatingly few teachers provided concrete actions which could be taken to make those improvements. This same situation can present itself when we ask our customers direct ‘how are we doing?’

Providing clients with the opportunity to give feedback is a no-brainer, but it is important to find out more than just ‘on a scale of 1-10, how did we do?’ every time you make a sale. The customer needs the space and encouragement to elaborate on their initial rating so you have some genuinely useful feedback with which to work.

By far the easiest way to garner feedback is to provide your clients with a short online survey which should give some indication of each of the key points of your service. If they loved your product or service, provide space for them to comment. If they hated the experience, don’t shy away from the criticism, but welcome it – if one customer hated your service, it is unlikely they are alone.

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Once you have some feedback from customers, take the time to analyse what they have said and look for common elements. If you are getting praise for something look at how you can apply that to other areas of your business. Likewise, if receiving negative comments, don’t ignore them but look at putting things right for future transactions. You would also be well advised to contact those customers and offer to rectify the situation for them to – try and turn a negative to a positive for them as it will enhance your brand reputation in doing so.

Next time we will talk about the secondary benefits of customer feedback

We can help design online questionnaires, email shots or mass mailers to elicit the information you need to improve the effectiveness of your business. If you would like advice on soliciting customer feedback or putting the findings or consumer research into effect, get in contact with Tech Write today.

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In the past, I used to think I was fairly impervious to Google, I could take it or leave it because there are plenty of other search engines out there which yield reasonable results after all. But as I was thinking about pay-per-click advertising last night it suddenly dawned on me that perhaps I trust Google far more than I initially believed.

Over the years I have trained myself to ignore advertising almost completely. I rarely watch advertisement breaks on TV and when I do, there is little chance I can tell you which adverts I have seen. Similarly I have a banner ad blocker installed so miss most of those when surfing. Flyers, posters and billboards are all unconsciously blocked because I would rather find out information about products myself, rather than listen to what brands think I should know.

And so it is when I come to Google. When I search, I never even notice the promoted search results at the top of the page. Or the right hand side. And if I ignore these ads, I never, ever click on them. The advertiser is charged by Google for showing those promoted search results to me, the browser, regardless of whether I click through the link or not.

So what am I getting at? I trust Google to deliver more accurate results than I do people paying Google for the privilege of trying to lure me to their site. It also follows that I have inherent distrust of marketing. Clearly marketers can view the statistics associated with advert displays vs click through rate (CTR) so they must decide whether the investment generates enough of a return to continue this form of promotional activity. Google themselves have reported a reduction in revenue gained from their Adwords offering as marketers focus advertising efforts elsewhere, or simply slash their budgets.

Does anyone else find they trust Google more than they thought? How does this revelation affect PPC marketing in general if I am not alone in ignoring promoted search results? Would brands be more reluctant to invest if they knew their adverts were being completely ignored? Is there a residual value in simply getting the company name ‘out there’?

The statistics are clear that PPC and cost-per-click (CPC) online advertising are still massive, but are they now being superseded by other marketing techniques? Leave me a comment below and let me know what you think.

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