You don’t have to have the perfect offering right off the bat. You will most likely go through lots of iterations and versions of your service before and after your business launches. Aim to test your services early so that you can make your first sales. Below are some basic tips to follow.

What can you do to improve your service(s)?

1. Get customer feedback to evaluate all steps in your customer service experience as well as your service.

   • Prepare a customer survey for users to fill out on their own time

   • Conduct customer interviews where you ask questions

   • Conduct a test

2. What types of feedback to collect

   • Evaluate how customers talk about you

     • Do other customers say good things about you?

     • Do you have good reviews or at the very least, no bad reviews?

   • Evaluate what questions customers have

   • Some things you should consider asking:

     • Is it easy for the customer to book your services?

     • Have you listed all services you’re providing?

     • Are there services you’re missing? Should you add them?

     • How’s your approach - do you seem likable and kind, are you someone that a stranger would want to do business with?

     • Can you demonstrate results? Can you prove that you deliver the result you promise?

3. Create a way to test your product

   • Complete a trial run: Grab a few friends, family members, or customers and give them the full experience, from initial contact to completion of services. But don’t explain everything. Let them enjoy the experience and ask that they give you feedback at each critical step in the process, especially when they are dissatisfied or when expectations were not met. Then explain the full experience you design, provide reasoning for any “missed” steps and later analyze the differences.

   • Compare: Compare your services to your competitors or your latest version to an earlier version.

No matter how great your business is, it can always be improved through continuous testing. The best way to test your services, is to deliver them to customers and see what they think.

Think of everything you hear as Constructive Criticism. Be able to understand the difference between what is said vs what is meant - every word of input can positively impact your business. Some people aren’t going to like your idea, that doesn’t mean your business is not viable. Create a feedback log where you can record all feedback received and who you received it from. Pay attention to trends you hear in the feedback.  Do your best to avoid feeling attacked or defensive - most people are really trying to help!

Why is service improvement important?

Getting feedback and taking action to improve your business will help you maintain a happy and loyal customer base. If someone has decided to do business with you, the chances that you can convince them to do more business with you are much more likely than convincing someone brand new. Use tools and technology to create an exceptional experience to motivate them to stay. Exceptional experiences are created when you make improvements on your business based on customer feedback. After all, the most successful service-based business are those that are truly customer-centric.

Pro Tip

Continue to improve your service(s). Regardless of how long you’ve been in the same industry, there’s always new technologies ad tools you can use to make your business better, grow your customer base and improve your bottom line - profits.