Best Customers' Satisfaction Ultimate Goal

How to Satisfy Your Customers Successfully?

Running a home based business is no different than running a storefront business when it comes to managing customer expectations. Your product/service must meet the needs and expectations of your customers and there must be a demand for what you have to offer.

The voice of the customer is invaluable information for running a successful home business. This data helps home entrepreneurs to;

• Decide what products / services to offer.
• Identify critical features and specifications for those products / services.
• Decide where to focus improvement efforts.
• Obtain a baseline of customer satisfaction to measure improvement against.
• Identify key drivers of customer satisfaction.

Generally there are two sources of data for customer input; reactive (historical), and proactive (go and get it). While historical data is a good starting point (assuming you kept adequate records), it is the proactive sources that will provide the most valuable feedback. This is because it is the one time where you are saying to your customer "what you think matters to me, so be frank and tell me what you think of my products/service".

The following lists provide some examples.

Your method of choice for proactive data depends on several factors, including size of customer base, customer location, buying patterns, touch points, and contact methods. The two most popular methods are interviews and surveys.

When seeking feedback from your customers you should give considerable thought into what you want to know about how they VALUE your product/service. The following questions should be included in the feedback process;

1. What is important to you about our product/service? (Ask them to rank each of these needs in order of importance.)
2. What do you think of as a defect?
3. How are we performing on the areas you consider important?
4. What do you like about our product/service?
5. What can we improve about our product/service?
6. What can we do to make your job easier?
7. What specific recommendations would you make to us?

To maximize results, make sure you ask questions that provide the information you need to solve your problem. Limit the use of technical terms and be sensitive to the feelings of the customer. Make sure you organize your questions into logical group, and ask the important questions first (save the demographics stuff to the end).

Designing your product/service delivery around what the customer actually wants and needs will go a long way to growing your home business and ensuring future success. Listen to your customers and your response will generate some great financial results.