How To Ask Your Clients What They Want

Guesswork is a dangerous activity in business.   Think you know what your clients want?   How can you be so sure?

The bottom line is to accurately find out you must ask your clients what they want.

And you should, no, must, do this regularly!

The great news about asking your customer base questions is that it is a complete win-win.

You gain some valuable insights into what your customers think about any number of wide ranging topics.

They feel valued and that they are being listened to (assuming you follow up on this of course, but more on that later).

Using Surveys In Your Beauty Business

There are a number of ways you can utilise surveys in your business.

Firstly, you should certainly be checking how you’re doing in their eyes, and where there is room for improvement.

A simple feedback questionnaire should certainly be a consideration for you.

Whether they were happy with treatment or not (and why), whether they’d recommend you to a friend and whether they have any suggestions on how to improve your product or service are the types of questions you should consider asking.

Surveys on how you’re doing aren’t the only type, however, and you may want to get more creative with your surveys.

I recently asked my client base for ideas on new treatments that they’d like to see introduced to our treatment menu.

We had to reprint our price lists anyway, so this was the perfect opportunity for us to mix things up and make sure there was nothing that our audience wanted and that we weren’t offering.

The response was overwhelming!   Lots of great suggestions were made and some may yet be introduced.

We offered the added incentive of a free treatment if any made it onto the menu; something you should consider too.

BORING! Would you be inclined to complete a survey like this one? Me neither!

 Rules For Your Surveys

If you’re going to try a survey to your clients, then there are a few simple rules you should abide by.

• Keep it short!   The most important rule to stick to.  Nobody wants to spend too much of their precious time completing your survey.  It might be important to you but don’t expect it to be as important to them.   So be ruthless with your questions, only including those of the most importance for you.  They must be all killers and no fillers!
• Make it worth their while!  You should consider a gift or freebie of some description to entice people to complete your survey.  You may want to consider a discount, giveaway, credit or prize draw.   If possible something of instant gratification is best, such as a 5% discount code upon completion of the survey.
• Get specific!   There is only so much you can learn from yes/no questions or even from strongly agree or disagree type questions.   The real gold for you within the survey responses will be the reasons why.   Consider this carefully when structuring your questions, and always keep the end results in the front of your mind.

Getting Your Survey Out There

There are a number of ways that you can get your survey out to your audience.

You may want to consider having it hosted by a third party.    I use and recommend Survey Monkey (www.surveymonkey.com) however there are plenty of others too.

Most of them offer a watered down version with a limited number of responses for free, with additional features being paid for.   I’ve always found the basic level to be adequate for the needs of most small businesses.

They offer convenient reporting tool and the ability to share with social media using one click.

A Google search for ‘free survey’ brings up plenty of other companies to choose from too, if your heart desires.

You’ll get all excellents, right?!

Putting It All Together

So once you have your survey constructed and ready for feedback, you simply need to get it out there!

The type of survey and the reasoning for it will largely determine how you’ll want to promote it.

If you’ve a customer satisfaction survey then I’d recommend sending out a short email with the link attached immediately after every customer you serve.

Of course not everyone will open or reply, but this also serves the purpose of opening up the lines of communication and conditioning your audience to expect to receive emails from you (you email them every week, right?!).

Be sure to thank people who respond, and of course if there are some serious issues uncovered then be sure to address this directly with them.   They’ll be pleased that you did and you may turn an upset customer into one who is happy again and willing to return.

You should also promote your survey on your social media channels, on your website – anywhere your customers are!

Finally be sure to actually put into place what you learn!   This may sound simplistic but there is no point in finding out this information if you do nothing with it.

Listen, learn and implement!

Whilst we are on the subject of surveys, it would be great if you could complete my 90 second survey to help me serve you better.   You can do so by clicking here.   Shameless, I know!

Have you implemented surveys in your business?  What have you learned?   Share your experience in the comments section below!