Your prospective and existing customers are your company's quiescent assets -- a giant treasure chest of diversified and multidimensional resources just waiting to be tapped into. Customer feedback, especially on a continuous relationship-centered basis, is one of your organization's greatest tools for:
1) Product and service ideas, designs and improvements;
2) Sample testing an advertising or promotional idea before expending a great deal of money committing to it and launching it -- you can always survey your customers to find out which ideas, slogans, formats, logos they would prefer. Every customer has an opinion and a voice, wanting to be invited, heard and taken seriously. customer polls, surveys, questionnaires, contests for "the best..." are generally very well-received by customers;
3) Brilliant new ideas, applications or markets;
4) Fully-integrated collaborative crowdsourcing;
5) Building a proactive, interactive consumer community or forum to integrate customer's commentary into every aspect of your business.
Your customers have experiences, expertise, opinions which they would be delighted to share with you. And to carry it further, recognize and reward or quote the best ideas coming from your consumers. Give them a feeling of active participation, ownership and pride of authorship.
To best use these customer-centric business strategies, you must:
1) have active social media platforms, forums and outlets;
2) have multiple ways for your customers to offer you their feedback on your site -- an open, bilateral line of timely communication in a "CONTACT US" or "HAVE YOU ANY FEEDBACK?" box, button, chat screen or IM helpline;
3) frequently use polls, surveys, questionnaires and other data-gathering or feedback generating sources -- you might wish to look into WuFoo Forms, Survey Monkey, PollDaddy and other tools devised for this purpose;
4) a system of rewards (psychologically if not financially) for customers with wonderful, fresh ideas, or useful input;
5) formulate aggressive, outreach programs to consistently keep your customers engaged and involved.
Viewed from a slightly mercenary Mad Marketing Tactics Blog standpoint, your customers pay you (by purchasing your product or service), and offer you valuable information (feedback) at no cost! Get your tools from searching your favorite engines for "social sharing buttons," "customer feedback and response tools," "survey and poll creators," and "graph and chart generators" to be able to add a powerful visual aspect to the results generated from every customer interface and campaign.
Douglas E. Castle for The Mad Marketing Tactics Blog
#MadMarketing
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