Use Feedback to Retain Customers  

If you want to grow your children’s services programs, you need to acquire new customers. But you also need to impress them enough to keep them coming back. The way to do this? Give customers an amazing experience — every time.  

The challenge is, how do you really know if the experience you’re delivering is amazing? Your franchisees work hard to maintain good relationships with customers and ensure quality offerings. But if you’re not sure what customers are really thinking and whether your brand is meeting their expectations, then it’s harder to hit that next level of success — both at the corporate and franchise level. Instead, customers may come and go but never stick around. And you may never know why. 

Customer feedback is one of the best ways to engage with customers and figure out how to boost their experience with your brand. Here’s a closer look at how important it is to gather customer feedback through Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) surveys, the role feedback plays in business and franchise growth, and how technology is central to effectively using customer feedback.  

The Importance of Customer Feedback in Children’s Services Franchises 

Children’s services franchises have an important job to do: please parents and delight kids. But they’re also doing this in a competitive ecosystem in which parents and kids have a lot of options to choose from. One center may be conveniently located, another may be the most affordable, and a third may have that super-cool playground. So what makes them choose your business — or not? 

Whether your business provides daycare, early childhood education and learning, or physical development and play, you need to know if your programs and offerings are on target. Are kids getting what they need? Are parents happy with the results? Do the families see value in returning? 

Asking for and analyzing customer feedback with NPS® surveys is a critical step in understanding the overall customer experience — what’s working well, what isn’t, and which aspects of the business could benefit from updates and improvements. At the end of the day, 83% of companies that think customer happiness is important are able to grow their revenue. That means it’s worth it to make a concerted effort to gather and take action on customer feedback. 

How Customer Feedback Leads to Business and Franchise Growth 

If you want to prioritize business growth, customer feedback is an important tool for doing so. As McKinsey states, “A strategy that enhances customer care and deepens engagement, effectively shifting customer care from a cost center to a profit center, is essential.” 

Here’s how customer feedback helps you engage with customers and build the kind of lasting, loyal relationships with them that can enable business growth. 

Surface areas of improvement 

It’s wonderful to receive positive feedback, but negative feedback is sometimes more rewarding because it shows you exactly where you need to improve. When customers are honest with you about what they don’t like, think of it as valuable information pointing the way to necessary changes that can make your business more profitable.  

Know what to prioritize 

Running a franchise means giving attention and resources to a multitude of tasks and challenges every day. Customer feedback focuses the franchise’s attention and resources on the things that truly matter to customers. When the franchise prioritizes the customer, they’re effectively giving customers more of what they want — leading customers to spend more in return.  

Increase customer retention 

Acquiring new customers is important, but so is retaining them. When you gather customer feedback, you’re giving yourself the knowledge you need to keep existing customers happy and increase customer retention. You can enlist a variety of ways — such as communication campaigns and loyalty programs — to show them how much you value their patronage. 

Improve referral rate 

Loyal customers have the added bonus of talking to their friends. When they’re happy, they refer others in their network to your business, which means you can bring in new customers just by caring for the ones you already have. 

Spur innovation and new offerings 

Listening to your customers and understanding their experiences opens up doors to innovation. You’re able to see how your customers might benefit from a whole new offering that your competitors don’t have or that meets an emerging need. Even better? When you develop a new offering, your existing customers are 50% more likely to try it. 

The Role of Technology in Customer Feedback 

Technology is key to boosting customer happiness effectively because of its ability to efficiently capture, centralize, process, and analyze information without adding administrative burden. Adopting a customer engagement platform like Listen360 enables you to: 

• Continuously gather and actively listen to customer feedback 24/7 
• Capture feedback through NPS® surveys and other methods  
• Reach customers through a variety of channels, including email, the web portal, phone calls, and interactive voice response (IVR)  
• Get real-time alerts when feedback comes in so you can quickly respond 
• Use monitoring and historical information to follow up, ensuring customer issues are addressed and resolved 
• Calculate NPS® by brand or location and track other metrics and key performance data to understand business impact 

With technology-enabled customer feedback, you’re able to uncover high-impact opportunities for your business, delight your customers, and cultivate customer loyalty and retention over time — in ways that are much easier than relying on manual feedback methods at the franchise or corporate level. 

Get Started with Listen360 

Building customer relationships, gathering feedback, and retaining the customers you acquire takes effort and focus. To start off on the right foot, consider Listen360’s customer engagement platform. Backed by an experienced team, Listen360 can help you survey and collect important customer data and make smart business decisions that keep customers coming back.  

For more information, contact us today and we’ll be happy to chat.