Know What Your Business’s Customers Are Thinking
This post is one I of a few that I wrote to be originally written for & published on the Heligonix Blog.
Last week, I wrote a guest post at Don Harkey’s Galt Consulting blog in a series on Failures to Communicate sharing 6 Tips for Avoiding Miscommunication. These tips focused on creating shared meaning in the workplace, but there’s another place you need to be sure you have a shared meaning with your audience: Your communication with customers!
Advertising
When you publish any sort of advertising, you’re trying to send a message to your customers & potential customers. Are they receiving the message you’re trying to send? Or is there a failure to communicate? The only way to really find out is to ask. That’s why the research field (polls, surveys, focus groups, etc.) is so important to any broadcast advertising campaign. If you’re going to spend tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars on an advertising campaign through a medium that doesn’t provide for any feedback, you’d better test & be sure the message you want to send is getting through. Of course there are methods of testing that feedback that are more reliable than others (that can be an article on its own). If you want to avoid a failure to communicate with your audience, you had better be soliciting & listening to their feedback.
Lost Customers
Another place a failure to communicate can be costly is in lost customers. All businesses lose customers at some time & it’s rare that those people come back to you let you know why they left. Perhaps they needed a service you didn’t offer? Or perhaps you do offer it & they just didn’t know? Perhaps they were looking for a quicker turnaround?
Unless you ask, you’ll never know why they left or how you can improve to better serve your clients. This is some of the most valuable information you can have as a business owner or marketer! As Heligonix owner Steve Visio likes to say, “Pearls come from irritated oysters.” Customers or former customers who are irritated are your best source of information to improve your business. They’re also the least likely to share that information with you if you don’t ask. So ask your past customers what they’re thinking & avoid a failure to communicate some of the most helpful information you can find.
Seeking Feedback
Advertising & Lost Customers are just a couple examples of areas where you need to be seeking feedback in your marketing & communication. You should subject every part of your business to a similar Discovery Process periodically. Because if information is only flowing one way through a channel, failures to communicate are pretty likely. And that’s not something you want for your business.
For more interesting articles from the Heligonix team visit http://blog.heligonix.com/heligonix-blog.
