The Value of Customer Feedback
“The customer is always right” is one of the most time-honored mantras of business, no matter what the industry. While you may not always agree with this sentiment, the idea behind it remains true - your customers can best tell you what is working (and especially what isn’t) about your product, brand, or the services you provide.
However, customer feedback is only as useful as what you and your employees (or your boss or manager) do with it when you receive it. Collecting experience surveys or soliciting feedback forms from customers is a popular tool among many companies, but if the feedback simply languishes in a spreadsheet or Google Form without review or analysis, what was the point of asking in the first place?
The essential element to collecting feedback from customers is truly listening to them - understanding their concerns and compliments, reflecting on their experience with your business and their views on how they were helped or not, and then developing plans to improve business operations in response. But that’s not all when it comes to truly listening and learning from your customer’s concerns. Below are some best practices to consider incorporating into your company’s interactions with customers.
Most people know from extensive experience with the Internet that, unfortunately, many customer service practices have become depersonalized or tedious. From interacting with automated chat windows to waiting on hold for an actual customer service representative, many customers lament the lack of care or feeling of personal attention that they receive, even from some of the most trusted brands in the world.
That’s why when you collect customer feedback, you should make every effort to add in personalized touches that let your customers know you truly care about what they think. These might include:
- Having a team member follow up with a customer personally, no matter if their experience was good or bad. When customers receive confirmation that their comments were heard, you can often gain even more knowledge about what potential fixes or changes they (and other similar customers) would like to see from your business.
- When major changes are made due to customer feedback to your website or app, or even to a brick-and-mortar business, you could give credit to the customers who gave feedback that helped inform the change.
- Incentivize customers who provide extensive and valuable feedback with promotions or small tokens of gratitude. Even a bumper sticker with your brand on it not only offers a nice unsolicited gift for a customer but also works as free branding!
Every business owner feels personally invested in the brand and services they offer. It makes sense, given the extensive time and effort you invest into helping your vision become a reality. But this can make things difficult if a customer offers particularly critical or negative feedback after a bad experience, no matter what the reason.
While it’s never easy to avoid taking criticism personally, some of the most productive changes businesses can make come from evaluating negative customer experiences and fixing things to avoid those types of experiences in the future. Furthermore, acknowledging and empathizing with a customer who had a negative experience can not only provide valuable information, but can also build brand loyalty by demonstrating how much you value their time and money, and keep a customer coming back in the future.
Giving customers a platform to connect with you and truly provide feedback goes beyond a simple comment form on your website, or a comments section on your social media pages. While those are both good starting points, most of the major companies know that offering a variety of options for customers to provide feedback on their experience is the best way to truly measure how customers feel about your business and its goods or services.
Business coaches will often talk about trying to “take a bird’s eye view of your business” - to extract yourself from day-to-day operations when you can view your entire business from the lens of a customer. If you do this, you may see a variety of opportunities to solicit customer feedback and show customers how much their feedback matters to you. Some of these include:
- Native feedback forms that serve as the last step of a subscription, purchasing, or ordering process
- Social media outreach campaigns specifically soliciting customer feedback, and perhaps offering incentives, giveaways, or discounts
- Rewards programs that award points for customer feedback and engagement
- Personalized emails and messages from business owners, which allow you to connect with your customers who may only know you as a headshot on your “About Me” page
In a
nutshell, Canon ITS learns everything there is to know about your company, even
before you decide to collaborate. Canon ITS team members learn your history,
the products and services you offer, the key points of your brand, as well as
places ripe for growth. Through due diligence, Canon ITS helps you tailor a
platform of customer service solutions that combines the best of the many
methods listed above into a comprehensive plan for delivering real results to
your bottom line. Whether that’s reducing your return rate, helping to generate
and convert more customer leads, or improve customer satisfaction scores across
a variety of methods, Canon ITS is proud to offer its award-winning expertise
to help solve customer service issues and optimize your customer service
process in ways you might not even have realized you needed!