Is it possible to survive as a business without client feedback?

Possibly not. After all, if you don’t know what your customers think about your products, service or brand, how can you grow, evolve and, ultimately, give them exactly what they want?

Risk Evolves has recently completed our annual customer feedback survey (assisted in no small part by the brilliant team at Glued), and it really got us thinking about the true value of client feedback.

Why do we want to know what our clients think?

It’d be pretty easy to simply stick our heads in the sand and just assume that every Risk Evolves client is super-happy. But, that would be foolhardy.

We want to understand whether we’re simply meeting expectations (boring, right?) or exceeding them (far more exciting, if so).

Equally – and here’s the rub – we’d like to know if we’re failing. We’re human, after all, but if we’ve made any missteps along the way, we need to know about it.

As they say, you should only fail once, but the stuff you can learn from failure is absolutely priceless. You just have to be confident enough to ask your clients how you’re doing.

From our perspective, we also need to ensure we’re living up to our ISO9001 certification by meeting client requirements. The same might go for your business.

Why bring in a third party for client feedback?

You might wonder why we reached out to an external team to obtain client feedback. After all, isn’t this something that should be done internally – and by the people running the business?

Not necessarily. We have close, long-standing relationships with a lot of our customers, and they’re a lovely bunch. Often, that means delivering the most honest feedback isn’t particularly easy on their part – and that’s totally understandable.

By asking a third party to undertake the client feedback research, we’re far more likely to receive an unedited version. As we all know, it’s much easier to feedback anonymously, particularly if there are difficult messages to convey.

But, “what about SurveyMonkey?” we hear you ask. Platforms like that have their place, but in our experience they’re pretty ineffectual. Respondents simply rush through the answers or delete the request immediately from their inbox.

We wanted someone else to probe as deeply as possible and get the answers we want to help us improve. You can’t do that in a “pick one of five answers” survey.

What can you do with client feedback?

You can rejoice when it’s good and momentarily get a bit grumpy when it’s less than stellar. But what else can you do with client feedback?

Here are some ideas:

• develop new services or products from any gaps your clients have spotted currently (we did this with our Phishing Protection and GDPR Critical Friend services);
• share it with the team – good or bad, it’s vital they see exactly what clients think of the work they undertake each day if they’re to grow and evolve as employees;
• improve existing services – every business should be looking to constantly improve and evolve, but that’s near impossible without customer feedback; and
• use the good stuff to add social proof to your website, social media, and proposals.

Our client feedback has even given us more tangible case studies and quotes to add in to awards submissions. It’s almost definitely why we were recently shortlisted for the Midlands Business Service Provider of the Year award.

What we learned

To give you the inspiration to go out and obtain your own client feedback, here’s some of the lovely things our customers said about Risk Evolves:

“I think of them as part of us. A special arm to what we do, they have a vested interested in our success, that is more than just a contractual arrangement. That’s about being aware, being concerned, looking for what could happen and that is what I would call a real partnership.”

“I think it comes down to their ability to understand an organisation and what the organisation does, enabling them to determine what the organisation needs. I think their USP comes down to really defining for that organisation what is right for them.”

“It’s their adaptability. If the circumstances for my organisation change, which they do, I am confident in turning to RE and in their ability to be able to respond appropriately.”

“Risk Evolves are a partner that we will continue to work with. I see them as part of us not just someone we have contracted with.”

If you’d like to join these happy customers and benefit from the Risk Evolves service, just get in touch with our friendly team.