Customer feedback guides and informs your decision-making
and influences your product roadmap. It’s also essential for measuring customer satisfaction among
your current customers.
But the question is: What are you doing with
that customer feedback? Are you using those customer thoughts, ideas and
opinions to strengthen their experience with your organization? Before you
begin collecting feedback from customers, you need to make sure you have
clearly defined why you are seeking feedback.
Outlining the process as well as desired outcomes is
essential for gathering customer feedback the smart way; otherwise, you may be
blindly asking for feedback that will only muddy your understanding of your
customer.
I want to focus on some actionable tips that can help you
start utilizing that customer feedback to drive performance for your business… There
are a many ways of utilizingcustomer’sfeedback but I will only be discussing
about some of them;
·
Don’t procrastinate.Make sure you’re busy doing something productive and meaningful with your
customer feedback. Some organizations have no set or loose discipline, principles
and structure to leverage what customers tell them through actions or words, online
or offline. Enroll and empower the people within your organization who make
decisions (both the direction-changing and the daily kind) to set yourself up
for performance payoffs down the road. You must operationalize the change. Act
Now.
·
Minimize customer effort. Newspaper advertising in Lagos is a valuable marketing
tool that helps businesses. So through listening or observation, find out how
many times prospects and customers have to interact with you to get what they
need. Understand their point of view regarding how hard they’re working to get
what they need. This direct feedback can lead you directly to customer “pain
points” you could probably easily solve to create added value for a much larger
group of customers.
·
Turn feedback into ideas. Use customer observations, ideas, answers and feedback
to drive product and service innovation for your company. Most times, customers
have ideas you haven’t evenconsidered since they’re the ones actually using
your products and services on a regular basis. Create simple processes where
you can get that direct customer feedback into the hands of product designers
and innovation leads for your company.
·
Identifyemerging customer
needs. Use customer feedback to identify
needs that haven’t been solved or even articulated yet. Don’t just take
customer comments and feedback at face value,dive in. Social networking tools
like Twitter or Facebook may be particularly helpful here. Emerging needs are
the headwaters of demand for your organization. Give yourself the opportunity
to solve a greater number of customer needs in the future.
·
Get involved emotionally. Identify the emotional tone your customers convey when
they talk about your product, brand or organization. Does it match what you
hoped customers would feel in your defined target, or ideal customer
experience? If not, how can you relate with that? Are the emotions you
hear consistent across customers? Are they consistent for each customer over
time? While the tangible elements of your customer experience most directly
solve a customer’s need, the emotional elements build loyalty. You must
consider the emotional elements of your customer experience. More often than
not, it’s the emotional connection to your brand that is much stronger than
rational one. Work to strengthen that by listening intently to customer
feedback. As the wise Maya Angelou once said, “I’ve learned that people will
forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never
forget how you made them feel.”For
instance,a customer may complain about pricing and after several missed
sales, you may adjust prices. A customer may say you don't have a large enough
selection and you may consider ordering more inventory. A customer may compliment
you about the cleanliness of your store or helpfulness of your salespeople so
that you know you are doing something right.
Research has shown that this modern and competitive age, the
average business loses about 10% of their customer base every year, and some
don't know why. To gain a competitive advantage over your competitors, and to
grow a healthy and successful business, intelligent owners and their managers
are using customer feedback to their advantage. Make it easy for your customers
to provide feedbacks, then use their feedback to find out what is important to
them, and focus your effort on surpassing those needs. You will definitely get
the benefit of their patronage and that of many new customers.
