Gathering customer feedback gives you a wealth of insight you can use to make improvements to your franchise. Whether you want to gain an advantage over your competitors, grow the number of franchise locations or the volume of business at each location, or ensure your customers have a consistent and great experience at each locaation, look no further than the people who walk in your door every day.
You can solicit customer feedback through surveys — such as customer satisfaction and Net Promoter Score (NPS). But the best kind of feedback is unwarranted — such as reviews. You can also collect feedback from Google and other online reviews that appear on third-party review sites, social media, or your website. You can even get valuable feedback during in-person customer interactions just by asking.
But what do you do with the data once you’ve got it?
Here are five ways you can strategically use customer feedback data to improve and grow your business.
1. Improve your product or service offerings
Take any negative feedback you might get — customer complaints, dissatisfaction with a product or service — along with requests for updated features and apply it to what your franchise sells. If you’re in retail, maybe you add a new popular brand to your product lineup or a new mobile app that makes delivery easier. If you’re a restaurant, maybe you improve the food quality or change up the menu.
Improving your product and service offerings makes your franchise more attractive to new and existing customers alike and helps ensure you don’t lose market share to the competition.
To learn more about about how Clean Juice, a juice and food bar franchise uses GatherUp to get customer feedback and insights that have grown their business to over 130 locations and counting — read it here.
2. Inform your content strategy
Figure out the types of questions your customers are frequently asking or the information they’re seeking, and turn it into content for your subscribers. You can create videos, emails, blogs, and social media posts, or even build out the FAQs section on your Google Business Profile with the specific knowledge and answers your customers are looking for.
Giving your customers quality, relevant content that establishes your franchise’s credibility and authority encourages more engagement from your customers and leads to more conversions.
3. Create an SMS opt-in list or loyalty program
Identify your satisfied customers and create an SMS (text) marketing list. You can ask them to opt in to get text communications with special offers, discounts, appointment confirmations, reminders, and more. You can also invite those same satisfied customers to join a loyalty program where they can earn points for making purchases and cash them in for a free product, service, or other reward.
Reinforcing customer satisfaction by providing convenience, relevance, and rewards helps build and maintain customer loyalty and retention.
SMS Marketing: Local Business & Franchise Guide
3. Build ad groups for customer acquisition
Segment your customer feedback based on different needs, preferences, challenges, and expectations, and then decide which customer groups you can target with ads. Then create ad copy that uses the customer’s own language and keywords to speak to the group’s specific pain points, barriers, and desires.
Using the customer voice to create highly targeted, relevant ads helps you gain traction with your target audience so you can attract and acquire new customers and grow your franchise.
5. Create employee training and retention strategies
Finally, take into consideration what your customers say about their interactions with your employees and use it to come up with employee training and retention strategies that address questions like:
- Are your employees under-equipped to serve customers efficiently?
- Are they empowered to answer questions or solve problems?
- Are they overworked, burned out, and ready to quit?
- Conversely, are there employees who are doing an amazing job and deserve more recognition?
- If so, what are they doing right and how can it be replicated across all locations?
Properly training and encouraging your employees not only reduces customer complaints and creates a more positive customer experience, it also ensures that your franchise is well staffed with competent, empowered, happy employees who are capable of handling business volume and growth.
Gather feedback and get insights with GatherUp
To utilize customer feedback, you first need a reliable way to gather and make sense of it.
With GatherUp’s customer experience and reputation management platform for franchises and multi-location businesses, you can turn customer feedback into actionable insights that help spark innovation and ideas, expose much-needed improvements, and drive business growth.
GatherUp’s comprehensive tools and features enable you to survey your customers, request and collect customer reviews, and analyze the feedback in one place — whether you’re operating just a handful of franchise locations, or hundreds.
With the insights you get, you can take specific steps that reward your customers, increase engagement and loyalty, boost revenue, and even nurture happier, well-trained employees.
To learn how GatherUp can support your franchise, schedule a demo.
