What every business should keep in mind.
Customers are the life-blood of any business. Staying in tune with their changing wants and needs, as well as their perceptions of your business, is integral to deepening your relationship with them over time.
The best companies keep customer feedback at the strategic heart of their business. Customer centricity is not a slogan or department, but rather a culture of service. Simply speaking, there are three steps to being customer centric: 1) monitoring customer feedback, 2) sharing what you’ve heard – with both employees and customers, and 3) taking action. I’ll write about the second two in later posts. And beware – when businesses don’t do all three, they risk doing more harm than good.
Key Considerations
When a business asks for feedback, customers expect that the business will do something with it. That’s the first question that should always be asked, “If we begin asking for customer feedback, are we ready and able to act on it?” Especially in a world struggling with feedback fatigue it’s important to not just think about what the business needs, but also on how it will impact and benefit your customers.
When a business decides they are ready, there are a couple large buckets to consider for the method(s) chosen: the investment required, the ability to measure feedback, and the level of expertise needed. Fortunately, innovations in technology are enabling improvements in each of these areas.
Investment
Like most things, it requires resources and the backing of key leadership positions to not just monitor customer feedback, but to enable the impact it can have on a business. Within this bucket includes the approximate costs of infrastructure, human capital (either hired or outsourced), time, and political capital (either through the attention required or public support needed to push a collection method through).
Measurement
As Edward Demming puts it, “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” When I speak of collecting or monitoring customer feedback, I’m implying a structured process to consistently collect customer feedback. Structure and consistency provide the foundation for measurement. Whether tracking customer feedback over time or comparing feedback with operational data, measurement plays a key role in understanding where we currently stand and where we are going. This bucket alludes to how difficult it is to measure feedback.
Expertise
At the end of the day, the methods used to collect feedback are tools or processes. They still require skilled people or technology to make them work as intended.
- Which questions do we ask?
- When do we ask them?
- How many questions are too many?
- What collection methods should we use?
If you don’t have the expertise to answer these questions, and don’t want to develop your listening process internally, then identify a turnkey product or outside expert to make work easier. Those with in-house capabilities will likely prefer custom solutions to create the exact feedback infrastructure they desire.
If you’re in the process of learning what it will take to collect customer feedback, there are multiple methods that are typically used. You can read here for 6 common methods of monitoring customer feedback.
Written by Michael Manross, CXO of getSayDo.com
@mmanross
