Internet Marketing and eCommerce Expert – Nigel Burke's Blog

This is a guest post by Sara Lundgren who designed, setup and analysed the data from a recent survey that I sent out to our web hosting customers. This is part 2 of 2.

The power of knowing your customers
I think many small and medium size businesses are missing out on a lot of valuable information because they believe they don’t have enough time/money/resources to do proper research. I believe this is one of the biggest mistakes a business can do. There is no excuse for not monitoring your customers closely! If you don’t know what your customers want, how are you going to provide a better service/product than your competitors?  If you can’t provide a better service/product than your competitors, how are you going to stay in business? You won’t!

Don’t base your decisions on old information
Another excuse for not continually surveying the customers is that some companies think that they already know their customers‘ needs. But, and this is very important, what you think you know might not be (actually, it seldom is) the truth. We found this out first hand with our survey. Many businesses base their strategies on assumptions and old, outdated information. This is a very dangerous strategy because what was true five years ago, or even last month, might not be true today. In hypercompetitive industries, such as the internet industry where technology and competitive structures changes rapidly, all companies (large corporations as well as small businesses) need to constantly monitor their customers’ needs because they constantly change.

If you know what your customers’ needs are you can adopt your strategies and processes to that and the customers will get what they want, you will get lots of business, and everyone is happy!

What are you doing about it?
Setting up an online survey like the one we did doesn’t take long and it is well invested time. When was the last time you evaluated your customers’ needs? Are you continuously surveying your customers? Do you have any smart tips to share on how to do this? In my next guest blog post I’ll share some of my tips on how to construct a good online survey.

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