Businesses cannot stand still.

The world we operate in moves quickly and as businesses we need to keep up.This means constantly questioning your product or service and how it could be improved.

Gather customer feedback

One way to do this is to get feedback from your customers, this may be informally face to face or via email surveys.

There are tools available online such as SurveyMonkey which you can use free to do professional looking surveys.

If you do decide to go ahead why not trial the new product or service on a small group of customers you know you can trust to be honest with you. This will make sure there are no glitches which will have a detrimental effect on your business.

• what they like about the product or service they buy from you
• what improvements they’d like to see in your product or service
• what you could add which would persuade them to buy more.

Look at the possible changes which develop from this feedback and work out what effect those changes would have on your sales and profit. It’s pointless making changes which won’t bring benefits to the business. Don’t forget when working this out to take account of any time investment which would be needed in the development of the new offer.

You should also consider whether there are other routes to market you should be exploring to attract new customers or sell more to existing customers.