How do you become friendly and hot with customers?

Today’s consumers demand transparency and honesty from brands they buy from. They expect their voices to be heard, which means attracting and retaining customers is all about listening to your audience. 

It’s important to consider the interests of your consumers and more importantly, implement their feedback into your products or business model. To help you do this, we asked a panel of Young Entrepreneur Council members for their best advice on how to truly listen to your customers. Their best responses are below. 

Photos courtesy of the individual members.

1. Communicate Regularly To Stay Top Of Mind 

Listening to customers is the key to serving them to the best of your abilities. Every business knows that customer preferences are extremely dynamic. In spring they want one thing, but in summer they already want something else. Find a way to communicate with them often in a way that makes sense for your business. That's what we did at our company. We work in digital marketing and figured that our potential customers had lots of questions that prevented them from buying. So we started breaking this barrier and answering these bothersome questions for free. We've created a podcast, started a YouTube channel and tuned our social media for communication. Now we know exactly what our customers want and can provide value to our audience at the same time. - Solomon Thimothy, OneIMS 

2. Respond Fast 

Whenever there is an issue with a customer, the key to resolving it is demonstrating that you are being proactive in resolving it. A quick response letting the customer know that you received their message and that you are immediately working to resolve their issue is a critical first step. The longer you delay in the initial response, the more upset the customer becomes. Then, you end up spending more time in damage control mode repairing the relationship. Don't wait until you know what the resolution will be or until you have an answer to all of their concerns. Always respond fast with a simple note acknowledging the issue and setting up a time when they can expect an update from you. - Ben Walker, Transcription Outsourcing, LLC 

3. Ask For Their Ideas During Sales Conversations 

Customers are never short on ideas. Their comments, suggestions and criticisms will lead your company in the right direction every time—but only if you get on the phone yourself and become part of the sales conversation. The sales process is the opportunity to learn about what customers want as you talk about your product or service. When you engage in the dialogue, you hear all the important nuances of what customers are looking for and get the chance to dig deeper. If you leave this process to only your sales team, you'll miss key information. Sales reps are always focused on closing and they might miss the important data customers provide along the way! - Vanessa Nornberg, Metal Mafia 

4. Set Up Weekly Touch Points And Surveys 

As your company grows, you may lose touch with how things are going on the ground. We utilize weekly touch points internally to learn of any bottlenecks or potential frustrations from our clients. At the end of a project, we use simple surveys to determine the customer’s level of satisfaction with us. It's not advisable to wait until the end of a project to send a survey as your only pulse on what your customer wants. Having weekly touch points with your customers or your staff on a specific project is a good way to be in the know in real-time so you can make course corrections. Truly listening to their needs and gripes in these weekly calls will help keep them happy and retain them. - Joel Mathew, Fortress Consulting 

5. Create Consistent Experiences 

Keeping a loyal customer base has everything to do with creating consistent customer experiences. Customers need to be able to match their best experience with your company across platforms, products and locations. If you can’t be consistent in your delivery, why should they be consistent with their business? Take all of the data you gather from your customer service reports and find the threads that stitch positive experiences together. Replicate these things across all of your platforms, channels and locations. Aim for consistent, repeatable experiences that match the best feedback you have. If customers comment on speedy delivery or quick answers to customer service questions, make these things a priority. Focus on what your customers say is working. Replicate that. - Jordan Conrad, Writing Explained 

6. Pay Attention To Social Media 

With social media platforms being as prevalent as they are today, there are more ways to listen to customers than ever before. Follow hashtags relevant to your niche. Respond to questions online. Even engage in playful banter. The last point is especially effective if you’re the kind of leader who gets criticized a lot by their audience or adversaries. Show them that there is a person behind the business and that you don’t take things too seriously. Ask questions to your customers and be proactive in showing them that you care about what they want. Roll out a new idea on social media before your company creates it and see how people respond. Do they engage or do they reject your new idea? - Amine Rahal, Little Dragon Media 

7. Observe Customers In Their Natural Habitat 

It's great to directly ask customers what they're looking for, but sometimes it's worthwhile to observe them from afar too. To find potential customers to observe, you can see if they hang out anywhere in person or online in social media groups. From there, be a fly on the wall and start to notice any patterns that come up. Maybe people complain about the same issues with providers in your industry or they praise certain aspects of other companies. Take these observed patterns and see if they might be beneficial in how you design your business and products. If you're able to solve common problems in your industry, you might even be able to share your solution back with the people in these groups. - Nathalie Lussier, AccessAlly 

8. Study Where Your Competitors Are Excelling 

If you want to stay ahead of the competition and increase loyalty and sales from existing customers, you need to study the competition and make sure you are always doing better. Some simple and easy ways to accomplish this are to make sure your pricing is the best in the industry, that services offered are above average and that your online reviews and ratings are industry highs. While this might seem like a lot, it's all part of the process to create a winning business that keeps acquiring new customers while also continuing to grow in size month after month. Focus on the end value to your customers and let your service and brand work for itself. - Zac Johnson, Blogger 

9. Create Focus Groups 

Host a focus group with your most engaged and loyal customers. Bring them together to discuss your business or new product/service launch. A focus group brings you value beyond a simple survey or a single solo conversation with a customer. It offers more in-depth insights and generates a conversation among fellow customers. Instead of a customer simply talking to you, they are now talking to each other while you observe and pick up tips on how to improve. A focus group doesn’t necessarily have to be in person—you can host an online web call to have the conversation conveniently for everyone and open the doors to broadening the customer pool for the focus group. - Jared Weitz, United Capital Source Inc. 

10. Directly Involve Them In Product Development

Engage customers in your product development process. Invite them to sample products that are not finalized and take their input seriously. By listening to their feedback and incorporating their ideas into product development, it makes your customers really feel like a part of the process. In doing so, you build brand evangelists that are eager to continue to share their ideas because they know that you listen. Social media is the perfect platform for this. We specifically dedicate resources on our customer service team to do proactive outreach to our most engaged customers. An important component is to not always let customers come to you. Go to them and tell them you want to hear what they have to say. More often than not, the feedback that you will get is invaluable. - Christoph Bertsch, Vejo, Inc.

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