Top 25 Success Secrets – Getting Customer Feedback

Posted by Steven Wagenheim on October 10, 2010 in General

In the last installment of Top 25 Success Secrets, I went over getting legal protection. Unless you’ve got a high priced lawyer in your back pocket who is willing to work for nothing, you better make sure you have the proper disclaimers on your sales page and site. If you didn’t read the article, you might want to go back and read it after you’re finished with this one.

In this particular installment, I’m going to cover another very important part of success…getting customer feedback. I can’t believe how many people DON’T do this. If you absolutely want to make the best products and get the most out of your business, you MUST get customer feedback. Otherwise, you might end up getting it in the form of complaints and refunds. This article explains.

First of all, by customer feedback, I don’t mean that it necessarily has to be bad or good. You essentially want to know where you stand in regard to your product or service.

Now, you’re probably thinking to yourself, “I don’t have to go out of my way to do this. My customers will give it to me if they want to.”

Really? Let me ask you a question. How much customer feedback HAVE you gotten? For that matter, how easy do you make it for your customers to contact you?

Do you have an email address on your sales page or your thank you emails? Do you have a help desk that they can log into? How many hoops do your customers have to jump through to even contact you? Can they even contact you?

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve tried to contact somebody about a product to question them on it and couldn’t find a contact address anywhere. Even doing a whois search came up with a proxy. If these people don’t want to be contacted, why are they even in business?

On another point, customer feedback can also apply to prospect feedback. You don’t only want feedback on your existing products but on products that your prospects might be interested in. You never know when somebody is going to request something that, if you were to create, would turn into a HUGE seller.

And, you aren’t just looking on feedback on your products and services. You want feedback on very aspect of your business from your sales page all the way to your customer support system. If there is anything that isn’t as good as it can be, you want to know about it.

Now, having said that, you don’t take the word of ONE person as gospel. You weigh all the comments you get and decide which things are worth pursuing. If one person doesn’t like the off color language in your email followups, do you eliminate them? What if the rest of your list loves the way you write? The Rich Jerk ticked off a lot of people with his writing style. He also made a ton of money.

So while getting feedback is important, what you DO with that feedback is even more important and not everything you hear are you going to want to act on.

Knowing what to act on and what to disregard is a skill that’s learned.

But we’re jumping ahead of ourselves as learning, or education isn’t coming up for quite some time in this series.

Bottom line: Get feedback!

To YOUR Success,

Steven Wagenheim

Sick and tired of spinning your wheels trying to make a buck online? Visit the products page of my blog at http://stevewagenheim.com/blog/products and get a 6 figure education for pennies.