Providing a great customer experience is one of the most important aspects of running a successful small business. If your customers aren’t satisfied, they won’t come back and make any further purchases from you. They certainly won’t recommend you to their friends, and they may even air their grievances in public, which has the potential to lose you sales and damage your reputation beyond repair.

The only way to get the customer experience right is to listen to exactly what customers want. This involves collecting customer feedback and implementing changes based on what you learn from their experiences with your business.

At bOnline we have learned a lot by listening to our customers. As part of our everyday processes, we ask our customers to give us feedback and request that they review their experiences with us on TrustPilot, an independent review site.

After several months of listening to our customers’ needs, we realised that many wanted more than just a website. We acted on this feedback, which led to us bringing in a whole new range of packages in 2013. This has been a great move, not only for improving our business but also for ensuring our customers are happy. It’s just one of the reasons we’re number one on TrustPilot in the web design, online marketing, and CMS (content management system) categories. And our customers aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed how effective our feedback-to-action approach has been - just this week we’ve been nominated in the UK Customer Experience Awards 2014.

The good news is you can benefit from this approach too, no matter what kind of business you’re in. The first step is to ask for feedback from your previous and current customers. Don’t be afraid about receiving criticism - negative feedback is usually more useful to identify weaknesses and address them so you don’t suffer the same issues in the future. You can also build engagement with potential customers by asking your social media followers what they would like to see. This will not only help to attract new customers, but is also great way to get ideas for new products and services.

Remember, everyone in the business should be involved in ensuring the customer experience runs smoothly - it only takes one small thing to ruin a customer’s perception of your brand. By asking for feedback along the way, you can quickly hone your products or services to ensure every customer is satisfied.