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Fight the Fear: The 5 Golden Rules of Customer
Feedback
Opportunities are often missed because we are
broadcasting when we should be listening.
The biggest obstacle to knowing what customers really
think about us? Fear.
We fear they’ll tell us our product or service stinks,
that we’re horrible people and we should never have set
foot on earth.
Yet most companies never hear that type of painful
feedback. Our research finds that companies with strong
word of mouth and customer devotion behave like
high-performance athletes when it comes to focusing on
customer feedback. In effect, they are feedback
machines. Customer feedback drives their marketing
strategies, product development and service
expectations.
Australian beer company Blowfly has integrated customer
feedback into its company’s decision-making process by
asking customer “shareholders” to determine marketing
plans, product names, street-team strategies and
operational decisions usually made by executive
committees. In many ways, Blowfly has turned ownership
of the company over to customers. This has caused so
much positive word of mouth that the company—even before
it was a year old—landed a hefty North American
distribution deal with hip grocer Trader Joe’s.
Toy retailer Build-A-Bear Workshop sends out weekly
surveys to its database of six million customers asking
them to rate their recent store experience, including
the cleanliness of the bathrooms! Company founder Maxine
Clark attributes her company’s success—it has grown to
113 stores in five years doing $200 million in
revenue—to its intense focus on gathering customer
feedback.
The opposite approach to proactively gathering customer
feedback—waiting for it arrive on its own—is fraught
with peril. Research firm TARP has found that for every
person who complains, there are 26 who do not. That
means if 10 customers complain, another 260 may have
quietly dumped you, never to call again. To know what
customers are thinking, we must ask.
Companies that operate as feedback machines—using a
plus-delta model of understanding what customers love
(the plus) and what they would improve (the delta)—make
improvements to their operations quickly and
efficiently.
Overcome the fear of customer feedback and make a bold
move toward creating volunteer referrals with these
tips, the 5 Golden Rules of Customer Plus-Delta:
1. Believe that customers possess good ideas
How often does someone in your organization respond to
an innovative idea by saying, “Our customers don’t want
that.” But you already have had customers indicate
otherwise. The naysayer is operating from a level of
otherworldly omniscience and is in the wrong the field
of work. Other killjoys will argue that customers are
incapable of knowing what really makes a product or
service valuable, and therefore customer input is
unnecessary. Asking customers to participate in your
problem-solving and idea generation is an act of
courage, not of weakness.
2. Gather customer feedback at every opportunity
Every customer interaction is an opportunity for
feedback. Avoid the trap of “we don’t want to bother our
customers.” If are customers are busy, they will
politely decline.
3. Focus on continual improvement
As Peter Drucker once said, a business has two purposes:
marketing and innovation. Enlist the aid of your highly
affiliated, most passionate customers to help you
improve an aspect of your business every week so that it
builds monthly momentum. Word will spread quickly when a
company’s quality starts improving, especially if you
thank specific customers for their assistance.
4. Actively solicit good and bad feedback
The first part is relatively easy. The second question
is usually the source of feedback fear. Finesse the
situation by asking “what is the one thing you would
change or improve about your experience with us or our
product?”
5. Don’t spend vast sums of money doing it
Multiple-page customer surveys that take six months and
cost the equivalent of two salaries may impress the CEO
and board of directors, but they may be outdated by the
time the data arrives. Short, fast surveys deliver
better response rates and allow you to react rapidly to
issues raised. Solve one or two problems at a time, not
everything at once. Tell your customers how their
feedback directly contributed to your changes.
You can’t move a mountain in a day, but you can make it
easier to climb by clearing a path. Customers who
evangelize their friends and colleagues love a
responsive organization, especially ones that keep them
in the loop of how their feedback was used (or wasn’t). |
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