Startup growth comes from getting a hold of those loyal customers who will certainly share their opinions about your business. Feedbacks are inevitable to the growth of any startup. However, proper discernment is pertinent in the determination of what information is useful and which is not. Listening to customers feedback does not necessarily imply implementation of every bit, rather, your task is to decipher which opinion is vital to the growth of your business because it never ends with simply satisfying a particular customer in the short-term but rather aids in the shaping and pruning of your long term startup goals.
Is feedback important? Even an eight year old would scream YES! But just how so?
Development of business model
For a startup to gain wide acceptance and successfully build a strong customer base, feedback is very essential. Customer feedbacks help startups work on their original intuitive hypothesis till it has arrived at a workable and viable business model. Thus, through feedback, a startup can either postulate a new hypothesis or adjust the existing one to make it more workable and viable.
Demographics
Ever wonder why all those telecommunication companies always ask for your name and location when you call the customer care line? The answer is simple-demographics. They want to know who their customers are and where they reside; saving themselves the cost of doing a field survey. Experts advise that startups should both openly ask for feedback and utilize their acumen to circuitously detect the customers view about their business and products. So next time someone calls, pay attention and don’t shy away from asking for information you require.
So, how do I effectively handle feedback?
- You need to make a constructive analysis of the feedback you get, resist the temptation of handling it emotionally. When you get a collection of complaints that suggest improvement, ensure that you work on it to forestall further occurrence but for a single, isolated complaint take note of it and examine how accurate it is but don’t do hasty implementations.
- You should train your team to be good ambassadors of your startup. Any useful feedback should be relayed to all those who work with you. Those in customer service section must be trained to know the necessity of passing on information they get to the management.
Although, you may think you know what your customers’ needs are, giving them a chance to express their true feelings regarding your business will set your startup towards an early growth path and ensure its sustenance overtime.
Just think about it for a sec, amongst the thousand and one customer complaint emails, phone calls and social media messages you receive, you jut might find the key to that growth hack your startup desperately needs.
