MBA1451 4 Low Cost Ways to Gather Customer Feedback

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Hey oh. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA show. Because your business deserves the best Every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn four low cost ways to gather customer feedback. Customer feedback is like gold for your business. It's what's going to allow you to grow. It's going to allow you to stop doing the things that are preventing you to grow. To lower churn, to lower refunds. And you'll know what to start doing so you can start maximizing revenue. Without feedback, it's really hard. You're working in the dark. So you need a systemized way to to gather feedback from your customers. And today I want to share with you four ways we've done in our business that are quite low cost. There's really no excuse not to implement all four of these in your business. It's important for you to gather feedback at different parts of your customer's journey so that way you can get different types of information to improve each aspect of the experience. Let's get that feedback and improve our business today. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. Like I mentioned at the top of the episode, customer feedback is so important to gather. A lot of us, we think we could just build in isolation. That's only going to get you so far. At some point your business is going to plateau and you're going to need to know how to move forward. How can I improve? And of course, how can I stop doing the things that is causing my customers to leave me or not buy from me again? So here are four low cost ways to gather customer feedback. The first one is a pre cost customer survey. Now this is a survey you're going to send to people that are not your customer yet. They're on your email list, they're shopping around, they still haven't made the commitment to become a customer. Why is this survey so important? Well, you want to learn a little bit more about your buyer, your customer, what they're looking for so you know how to market to them and know what to offer so you can close the deal. This will help you improve your product or service, your whole experience for your customer. Now these are not super, super easy to get because they're not happy customers yet. So I encourage you to incentivize your potential customers. And this could be something as simple as a coupon code or free shipping or something that they can get in exchange for their time. It could be a simple email saying, hey, can you give us feedback? It will take 5 minutes in exchange, take $10 off your next order. Well, how do you gather this feedback? It's pretty simple. All you got to do is create a Google form. Google forms are absolutely free. All you need is a GMA and it allows you to create all kinds of surveys, all kinds of forms that you can later review and export to a spreadsheet. It's brilliant. And you can literally just send an email out from your newsletter asking your potential customers to fill out the survey, learning more about how they shop, what are the important features they're looking for. You can ask them to prioritize things like what their preference is in terms of colors or sizes or features or, you know, special options. My advice though is to keep the survey short. 10 to 20 questions max. Keep them shorter if there are open ended questions because that takes a bit of more time to fill out. And again, you literally just send out the link to the Google form via your email newsletter. Nice and easy and absolutely free. The next way to gather customer feedback that I feel is super important is a cancellation feedback. Some people call it cancellation feedback or exit feedback. And this happens during a Customer leaving or canceling your subscription or product or something like that, or asking for a refund, preferably you do this before you process the refund or cancel their account. You want to get some information while you have their attention, while it's fresh in their brain. Why are they canceling? Learn a little bit more about what's the main reason. This can be easily done with a Woo form. Woo forms are absolutely brilliant. There's a free plan and paid plans that start at $15 a month. And you can embed these forms right on your app or on your website. And it could be just a step before they cancel. So first they fill out the form. They submit the form. Once they do, you can have them go to that cancellation page where they cancel. This is really important, and we believe at Webinar Ninja, it's the number one thing that helps us improve our product. We learned very quickly from our customers that are leaving us, why they're leaving us, what's going on, what they love about the product, what they don't love about the product. And that basically built out our roadmap for years. We know exactly what to build because, you know, the top reason why people are leaving is because this reason. The next reason is this reason. And this is what we're going to build in that order. This is how we're going to improve our product, the whole experience, all that stuff. Getting them to provide feedback when they're canceling is a pivotal time. It's fresh in their mind and. And they're going to give you the feedback because they are incentivized. They want to, you know, cancel their account or get a refund. So it's kind of like a little hoop they have to go through to make it happen. It may be a little bit inconvenient for them, but it's worth it for you to get the information so you can improve. It's, you know, a small price to pay for you to improve. And you can say that in the form. Hey, we want to improve the product. We want to learn more about why you're canceling or why you're asking for a refund. Can you please fill this out before we move on with the cancellation? On the spectrum of inconveniences, it's pretty low. Many companies require you to call in and get permission from a manager and send a, you know, a particular email or fill out a form. It's really hard to kind of cancel. For example, try canceling your cell phone plan, right? A simple survey, you know, and I Would keep this super short. Three, four questions. Gather feedback. Next is a survey you can send out to your current customers. Customers that are not canceled, they're not leaving you, they're buying your products, their members or whatever it is and they're paying you money. They're happy, right? They're content. And I encourage you sending a annual survey to your customers. This is a great snapshot to learn more about what your customers love about your product, where you can improve, how you can improve their experience. Again, it's a different perspective from a different cohort, different group of people. This is a little bit of a longer in depth survey, something like 20 to 30 questions and it's going to take them a bit of time, maybe 15 to 20 minutes to complete. Again, I encourage you to incentivize them. Say, hey, this information is super vital for us. It helps us grow, helps us improve the software for you, our customers. Give them an Amazon gift card, give them a Starbucks card, whatever. But the information is important. You don't have to incentivize them. Many people will get responses. If they have a great culture in their business and they have raving fans, they're going to get people responding to this survey. But if you want massive results, you want like the majority of the people to answer the survey. Incentives work. This is just something that we've tried and we really, you know, the proof is right there. When we incentivize, it's exponentially a bigger response to the survey. And make it clear this is just a gift to you to thank you for taking the time. But please answer the survey as honestly as possible to your current customer. So this is a third way to gather feedback. Low cost. Again, you can use a Google form. It's an annual in depth survey to your customers. Number four, one on one calls with your customers. These are priceless. And I covered this in depth in a previous episode on the Hundred Dollar MBA show. And you don't need to do too many. You can do about a dozen every six months as a minimum. And this is basically sending out an email to your customers, maybe your best customers or your most active customers. I would say people that frequent your business and say, here's my calendar link. You can use calendly, they have a free plan. You can use acuity schedule and they have a free trial. Here's my calendar link. Schedule a time on my calendar and get on a call with me. A phone call, a video call. I like video calls because I like to see expressions on their face, body language and it's basically a 15 minute call to learn more about them as a customer, who they are, what they do for a living, why they chose your product, how they use your product, how to describe your product to other people, how what would they do if the product wasn't available anymore, what their favorite feature is, what is one thing they wish they had. These calls are great because you get honest answers. You learn more about your customers, you know who to target, what customers like them. You can find out there. You have a real customer avatar because you're speaking to real people and it's the best market research you could do. Understanding your actual avatar, understanding actual customer. But you also learn about their relationship with your business, with your product, or what they love about it, what they wish was better, how they actually describe your product. You might be surprised how they perceive your product much differently than what you perceive it as. And you've been describing it on your sales page completely wrong. You got to use the same language as your customers because you're trying to attract more like them, right? People that are happy and are paying you. We like to record these calls and we tell the customer on the call we're recording it so that we can review it later. We transcribe it. We save these videos so we know the language that they're using again. We use it in all our sales copy or emails, our website, our marketing materials or ads. Customer calls are great. And again, low, low cost. It's an email. You use a calendar app that's free. You can run a free video meeting using Google Meet. So it's not going to cost anything. So simple. It's just the time you need to invest today.

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How can I remember to invest every month? With the Fidelity app, you can choose a schedule and set up recurring investments in stocks and ETFs. Oh, that sounds easier than I thought. You got this? Yeah, I do. Now where did I put my keys? You will find them where you left them. Investing involves risk, including risk of loss. Fidelity Brokerage Services, LLC Member NYSE SIPC to wrap up today's lesson, customer feedback is absolutely priceless. You have to have to have a consistent plan to gather customer feedback from them at different stages. Just like I mentioned before, they're a customer when they're a customer, right? When they leave you when they are no longer a customer when they're canceling. And my last one, doing that call gives you that intimate connection with that customer, learning more about who they are, learning more about why they chose you so you can get more people like that into your funnel, into your business. It's priceless. Thanks again for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, hit subscribe. Right now you'll be doing me and the whole team a favor by hitting subscribe because it's the best way to support the show. Also, a huge benefit is by hitting subscribe on whatever you use to listen to Podcast, Spotify, Apple Podcast, Stitcher Radio, or on all of the podcast apps. By hitting subscribe, you have access to over 1400 business lessons, our whole archive. And that's the only way you can have access to it. So go ahead and do that right now. It costs nothing, but it gets you so much. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Without customers, you have no business. So you have to value them. And you have to understand that a lot of the answers to your problems, to your challenges, lie in their brain. Right? They're inside their brain and you got to extract it. That's your job to get that information, to learn more about what makes them tick and learn more about their pains and their problems and how you want to solve them and all that kind of stuff. It's just not going to happen by itself. You have to ask for that information. You have to pull it out of the customer. And here today I shared with you four ways to do it. Incredibly low cost. It just takes planning and time to start with one and then build upon with the next one. The next one, the next one. So start. Get the ball rolling. Start with one of these. Whether it's the pre customer one, whether it's the annual survey or you're doing calls, or even if you're doing the exit survey, any one of these are going to really help you learn more about your customers and retain more of them and improve your product or service. Thank you so much for listening and I'll check you in. Tomorrow's episode Free ride Friday. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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