Most business owners equate feedback with complaints, because it is only after a bad experience that a customer bothers to take the time to voice an opinion. A typical business does not proactively solicit comments from customers after every interaction, so left to their own devices, customers will only leave feedback if the experience negatively impacts their life.
If you were to request feedback from every customer and make it extremely easy to leave this feedback, you would find that consumers are happy to provide comments and suggestions that are not only positive, but also help improve the business.
Changing the question from “how was your experience” to “how can we serve you better” takes the focus away from critical analysis, engages your customer in the process of improvement and lets them know you care about their opinion.
Everyone loves to hear positive feedback, but it is human nature to feel badly after someone is critical of our business. Always remember, negative feedback offers a valuable opportunity for your business to improve, but when it is dealt with haphazardly and without priority it becomes more of a nuisance than a benefit. When all feedback is organized and manageable, you can make the most of the feedback and use it to drive your business forward.
Our list of key items for an effective feedback system has “Be Persistent” in the number two position. Many businesses use customer surveys or mystery shoppers for monitoring business performance. While these services can deliver good information to a business, these feedback channels do not provide for continuous monitoring of your business’s performance, are not likely to capture an unusual or minor service failure before it escalates into something larger. More often than not, these services also come with a price point and time commitment that can be excessive for many business owners.
An effective feedback system should be monitoring a business continuously, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It needs to provide a business owner with peace of mind that should something out of the ordinary be happening at his or her business there is a good chance a customer will comment on it with feedback.
Be creative in placement of signs to encourage suggestions. Shop owners can use hangtags and counter signs to request feedback or restaurants can request feedback with messaging on the menu. You want to ensure comments are received from paying and non-paying customers, so only requesting feedback upon payment or on the back off the receipt ensures you may lose an opportunity with a large number of customers in your business.
People have become accustomed to leaving feedback for businesses and it is becoming commonplace to do it over the mobile phone. A business must have a persistent method to capture feedback from customers whenever, wherever and however they choose, which means embracing the mobile phone as a primary point of communication with customers.
Over 90% of U.S. adults own a mobile phone and of those
68% use text messaging,
55% use picture messaging,
28% browse the web and
26% use email.
Source: Federal Communications Commission
Of course, you want to encourage every customer to leave feedback after making a purchase. This is the most typical time to request feedback and customers will appreciate knowing you care to hear their opinion and there is no downside to requesting it. It should be done every time! In exchange for requesting the feedback, you need to make it easy for the customer to provide.
Do you have tools in place to listen to your customers? How do you know you are getting all the feedback you customers are willing to deliver? Every retail business must have a customer feedback strategy that runs 24/7 giving every customer the opportunity to deliver comments to you in whatever format they choose. It is the only way.
The statistics from the The Retail Consumer Report, commissioned by RightNow and conducted online by Harris Interactive is packed with useful information emphasizing the importance of a system to manage customer feedback. In today’s world of transparency, a retailer must be accountable for everything that happens at their location. They must embrace the power of social media to drive brand value even when the same tools are being used to drive complaints.
68% of consumers who posted a complaint or negative review on a social networking or ratings/reviews site after a negative holiday shopping experience got a response from the retailer. Of those, 18% turned into loyal customers and bought more.
By listening and proactively responding on the social web, says the report, retailers have a chance to turn disgruntled customers into social advocates. The survey found that, of those who received a reply in response to their negative review:
33% turned around and posted a positive review.
34% deleted their original negative review.
The data underscores that customer experiences shape consumers’ decision to buy or not to buy from a specific retailer. After a positive shopping experience, half of consumers cited great customer service and/or a previous positive experience as influencing their decision to buy from a specific online retailer.
Retailers need use other tools to proactively solicit feedback, so that social media is not the only outlet. Every contact with the customer should be used to gather feedback. This is the advantage a traditional outlet has over an online business and one that has to be leveraged.
Customers service during a recession. How many of these thing have happened to you? The reason this is funny is because it happens to us all, all the time. The ending is great. Make a customer happy, even after a bad experience, and they are more loyal than if the problem never happened to begin with.
Enterprenuer Magazine covers shopkick in this month’s issue and talks about the Rebirth of Retail. The article provides an overview of issues facing the industry and how mobile technologies can lend a hand.
“The number-one challenge facing every retailer in America is getting people through the door,” Roeding says. “Conversion rates in the physical world are so much better than online–between 0.5 percent to 3 percent in the virtual world, and between 20 percent to 95 percent in the real world. So if foot traffic is so important, then why hasn’t anyone rewarded people for visiting stores? The answer is simple: It’s because nobody knows you came through the door.”
Getting people in the door is a huge challenge for retailers, but getting them to spend or spend more may be the number-one challenge. At Hoot Ratings, we are concerned with improving on the 5% to 80% of people that walk into the store and do not convert. The age old question that troubles every retail owner, “clearly that customer walked into the store because they thought we may have something that they need, but they walked out without making a purchase, why?” Without an effortless feedback channel to collect this information, a shop owner will never be able to get the answer. Moreover, without tools to motivate employees to get each customer to convert you may not be optimizing every customer interaction.
Mobile offers tremendous opportunity for retail to not only get people through the door, but also get them to convert once in the store.
Whether you are a shop owner, restaurateur, doctor, stylist, designer, accountant, or any business owner, you must make the most of every customer interaction. Why is it that the majority of businesses let a customer walk out the door without requesting feedback even though that customer represents the single greatest source of information on a business? If every customer were given a simple way to provide feedback, a business owner is guaranteed to recognize benefits in three critical areas: profits, personnel and peace of mind.
1. Profits
Customer feedback is a topic rarely talked about independent of its larger counterpart customer service, but the activity of soliciting and managing customer feedback is a crucial business process in its own right. Feedback directly impacts a business’s profits by improving word of mouth marketing, improving customer loyalty, improving customer satisfaction and improving customer problem resolution. In addition, studies have shown that incremental brand loyalty will occur just because you allow your customer to provide feedback.
2. Personnel
Customer-facing employees are a key component of any business, and their behavior can determine the success of a business. Motivating employees to serve every customer is difficult and monitoring performance at all times is nearly impossible. Regardless of whether they choose to use your feedback system, customers ability to report their experiences will be a motivating factor for those employees that are not currently providing superior service to every customer.
With feedback managed in a central location it can be used to measure and compare employee performance and simplify employee reviews, training and retention. Evidence of performance excellence or failure can be collected in the form of voice messages, pictures or emails, making defense of any personnel decisions simple and easy.
3. Peace of Mind
A continuous feedback system gives you peace of mind that there is always someone monitoring your business and if anything out of the ordinary arises, whether it is good or bad, there is a good possibility it will be delivered directly to your ears. You are empowering your customers to be an on-site supervisor with the ability to let you know that your business is running optimally and that their interests are being served.
For businesses already operating at peak efficiency, maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction requires continually going above and beyond customer expectations. Continuous feedback will allow you to gather quality information for improving your business and will ensure you are giving customers what they want. Moreover, even the most successful businesses will benefit from a tool that helps get an early warning of any customer satisfaction issues.
A feedback system does not need to be an elaborate process involving new technologies or large capital expenditures, it just needs to be a set of steps outlining why, when and how to solicit feedback and what to do when it is received. How are you going to know what your customers are thinking if you don’t ask?
How simple is it to leave feedback for your business? Take a look at the list below and use this scoring system to assess your performance: 1 – 2 ways is poor, 3 – 5 ways is OK, and 6-8 ways is excellent.
Eight Ways to Collect Feedback
In person
Over the phone with a voice call
Over the phone with a text message
Over the phone with a picture message
Over the phone with a mobile application or website
Consumers have more options than ever for where they want to spend their money and more resources than ever to learn about a business before they step out the door. Despite these figures, 70 percent of purchase decisions are still made in-store. In this environment, it is critical that you do everything possible when running a business to not only provide the best service when a customer enters your business, but also provide them with a channel for expressing their feedback while they are there. Whether you are a shop owner, restaurateur, doctor, stylist, designer, accountant, or any business owner, you must make the most of every customer interaction, so you can be assured you are giving the customer reason to return again in a world that is filled with other alternatives.
The collection and management of customer feedback should sit at the center of any customer centric business, but less than two percent of businesses have a standard process for handling customer comments. Why don’t more businesses actively solicit feedback if they know it will improve their business? Because it is hard! Business owners and managers have enough headaches to deal with each day, so why introduce another process that may require dealing with a bunch of unhappy customers?
In reality, collecting customer feedback is not hard. Feedback is made hard because a business lacks a system for collecting and managing this information in a structured fashion. Typically, each piece of feedback is dealt with on an ad hoc basis, which then gets lost in the haze of weekly activities. Rarely is feedback captured and leveraged to its full extent for training purposes, testimonials, employee performance evaluations, product changes or any other business purpose.
A feedback system does not need to be an elaborate process involving new technologies or large capital expenditures, it just needs to be a set of steps outlining why, when and how to solicit feedback and what to do when it is received.
Hoot Ratings has outlined the following ten elements required in an effective feedback system to provide the business and the business owner with the best chance for receiving feedback with the least amount of headaches.
Key items in an effective feedback system
1. Integrate private and social media feedback in a single location
2. Be easy for the customer to leave feedback whenever, wherever, however and about whatever they want
3. Be persistent, 24*7, 365 days a year
4. Be measurable, so you can track and monitor behavior over time
5. Be affordable
6. Be easy to implement
7. Be easy to manage
8. Take employees out of the process
9. Be able to motivate personnel
10. Include an escalation path for emergencies
