Customer Feedback is important (and required at eHandshake) because Members want to know be assured that the businesses they're connecting and referring are reputable and trustworthy. So do their customers! 

Customer Feedback is also very important in helping businesses improve and grow, and here's some reasons why...

Trusted Referrals:  Positive Recommendations about your business bring new customers in for free, and that helps your business grow. You don’t want a customer to have any reason why they wouldn't recommend you wholeheartedly; in fact you want them to be raving about how good you are.  So you need to make sure they are happy with your products and services. Hugging and Kissing them is OK too!

Repeat Business: You want customers to welcome your offers and promotions, not bin them. You understand that it is their money, and they will only be willing to spend it on people who do a great job for them. So you need to make sure they are happy. Then your marketing will never fall on deaf ears.

Loyalty: You don’t ever want to be surprised that you’ve lost a customer. So you need to find out any issues immediately, and fix them straight away, so that they’re amazed by great service.  That will mark you out as radically better than nearly every other company they deal with.

Retention: When you ask customers face-to-face how things are going they always say "fine" even if that’s not what they’re thinking, because they don’t want an awkward conversation. But you know that, despite your best intentions, even small niggles can build up over time and make them more receptive to a sales pitch from a competitor. We’d rather make the grass greener on this side of the fence before that happens, so we’ll make it clear we welcome candid feedback, and we make it fantastically easy for them.

Customer Acquisition: Publishing the feedback from your customers is evidence that you’re great to do business with. That will make people much more confident to buy from you.

Competitive Advantage: You want a trump card for winning when we’re in competitive bids. If you have independent reviews, and you’re level on price and capability, having evidence that you’re better at service will make you the obvious choice because the customer will not feel like they’re taking a risk.

Reputation: You want your customers to tell you how they feel about you before they tell their friends.  If it’s good, you can learn from it, celebrate, and thank them.  If it’s not so good, you’d rather fix it and keep them as a customer….and make sure that problem doesn’t happen again.  You can only learn these things if you make it easy for them to tell you.  By the time they tell their friends, you’ll have had the chance to shine!

Sales Opportunities: You know that some of the best sales opportunities come when customers are happiest with you. Sometimes that’s just after you’ve helped them solve a problem. By checking that you’ve done work to their complete satisfaction you can spot not only problems, but also these brilliant sales opportunities.

Morale and Motivation: You get a real boost when a customer gives you praise. It gives you confidence that your business is on the right track, peace of mind that another customer is secure, and when this happens someone in the business will feel like a hero.

Education: When you get verbatim comments from customers there’s nowhere to hide.  All the training courses in the world are no substitute for lessons learnt through personal experience. Sometimes it can feel a little raw, but providing you learn from it and put things right, you’ll never make that mistake again.  And somehow it’s easier to hear it from a customer than from a colleague because you know there’s no agenda.