• Respond to negative feedback promptly ? Research shows that if a customer has a negative issue, they will be likely to return to your place of business if they feel the complaint was handled in a timely manner. Make sure your customer feedback program allows you the ability to be immediately notified when negative feedback is left. More importantly, be sure to reply to this customer as soon as possible. Be empathetic and come to a resolution quickly ? most likely, this customer will end up satisfied in the end. How you handle the complaints will be the deciding factor when saving unhappy customers.



• If you haven?t already, include customer contact information ? Why is this so important? First, it is especially important if customers are dissatisfied. You can quickly follow up with them if they provide their contact information. Secondly, you can implement a program via email to alert these customers of specials and upcoming sales, or offer special coupons or discounts to them. These are known as ?bounce back? promotions, as they will ?bounce? the customer back into your business. Doing this will increase the number of return customers.



• Ask the right questions ? are you inquiring about the customer?s gender, year of birth, or shopping preferences? If not, you might want to consider adding this information. This information will help you gather a good base of information regarding your customer demographics. Armed with this information, you will be able to make solid marketing and promotional decisions to optimize revenue.



• Get suggestions from your customers ? sometimes the best ideas come from your customers! Asking the appropriate questions, such as ?What items would you like to see added to our menu?? or ?What is one thing we can do to improve?? will give you valuable insight into your customers? needs. By using analytical reports, you can look for trends in areas that might need improvement that you didn?t realize before you started gathering feedback, or it might prompt you to provide new services or products that your customers want, but you never considered in the past.

As you can see, gathering customer feedback is not only valuable when determing the level of customer satisfaction and the level of your customer service ? it can provide you with a wealth of information that you might not be able to collect as easily using other methods. Ask the right questions and think about the big picture when creating your program, and your customer feedback program will be a huge success!