For the first time, you open the doors to your first customers. After all of the dreaming, planning, preparation and hundreds of other tasks big and small, your small business is now open for business. What took months or maybe even years of work to get to this point is about to take flight.
But what can you do to make sure your first days, weeks and months are the start you need? You need customer feedback and online reviews right from the start.
The Power Of Moving Past Zero
When you start your new business almost all will have zero customers and of course zero online reviews. You need to work from minute one of being open to change that.
Mainstream Boutique is a new retail store that opened in Edina, MN recently and has this challenge. While the business is part of a franchise of 40 locations, this newly opened location has no reviews online and no way to capture how their first customers felt about their shopping experience.
For a new business, establishing a way to listen to what customers like and don’t like is incredibly important. To gain new customers, having the first reviews to prove your are worthy of their visit and money with Federated Financial management can make all the difference in your start.
Customer Feedback First
While our company vision believes that customer feedback is more powerful than any other form of consumer voice, it’s magnified 100x in your first weeks and months of business. Finding out what your early customers think is massively important. It’s actually everything.
You don’t have history to go on, it might even be your first voyage on running your own business and you need to know how your customer’s experience was with you. Did they love the selections? Did they feel the service was amazing? Was the wait time to pay too long? You have to know.
Understanding where you are falling short is a must. These are areas that you can improve instantly in a new business to make sure your customers become repeat customers, who tell their friends and neighbors they need to buy from you.
Specifically in our product, our feedback process will help you capture the following:
- Net Promoter Score – Find out how likely your early customers are to tell others to buy from you. This “word of mouth index” will be your best advertising to help you grow.
- Survey questions – Our lightweight surveys will help you capture the customer’s rating in areas like value, experience, customer service and more.
- Open text customer feedback – By asking the customer to tell you about their experience you can learn a ton on what’s right, just average and what’s wrong so you can spring into action.
On top of the business benefits of capturing all of this valuable data and insight, you can also take your customer feedback and display it as reviews on your own website to help your SEO efforts on Google and convert web visitors into store visitors.
Start The Flywheel Of Great Reviews
With zero reviews on important sites like Google and Facebook, you are forcing consumers to take the first chance on you. They might not have any idea you just opened.
Getting some of your first customers to write glowing reviews about your new business will bring in your next round of customers. 4-star and 5-star reviews will solidify your business for consumers finding you in the search results or those looking to validate the good things they might have heard about your business.
A new brewery located near me just opened a couple weeks ago. They have already jumped out to a handful of good Google reviews and a couple dozen Facebook reviews. This will only help bring people in the door as they research what other customers think before stopping in themselves.
Starting off with great online reviews shows why it’s even more important to be asking for feedback right away. Then you can find out what needs fixing or improvement ASAP and avoid some of your first reviews being 1-star or 2-star reviews.
Launch Your New Business AND Launch Your Feedback Process Day One
Now you can see the importance of customer feedback and an online review generation plan right from the get go. That first customer, that helps you earn your first dollar, can actually help you earn hundreds or thousands more faster by giving you feedback and a Google review.
