We Let Customer Feedback Drive Our Decision-Making — Here’s Why

There will always be tough decisions to make when you’re running a business, and they don’t stop or slow down as you get bigger. Each hard decision presents you with a challenge, but also with an opportunity to improve your business and your products.

And the truth is, if you let your customers drive your decision making, if you put them and their feedback first, you’ll find that the right decision becomes clear. Your business revolves around your customer, and a decision that isn’t in their best interest can come back to haunt you.

That sounds simple enough. Just do what’s best for the customer. But there are plenty of situations where other considerations begin to cloud those waters.

A Fork In The Road

When ThirdLove started out, we were manufacturing in Mexico. And that made sense for a variety of reasons. For one, it was close to San Francisco, which meant that we could be on-site in Mexico more often, working hand-in-hand with our partner. We invested a huge amount of money in raw materials and finally started production. I can’t tell you what an exciting time that was. Our vision was finally becoming a reality.

Except it wasn’t: we quickly realized that we weren’t getting the level of quality we had expected, and that our customers had expected from us.

It was a huge disappointment, and we were left with a difficult decision. We had invested so much time and money into manufacturing there. And we were fighting tooth and nail to try to get the product to the level of quality it needed to be at. But it just wasn’t working. We had to make the decision to change our manufacturer.

Asking The Hard Questions

It wasn’t an easy decision, but we had to ask ourselves, “Are we proud of this product? Is this what our customers deserve?” The answer was no. We walked, and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, but it was the right decision to make for our customers, for our product, and for our brand.

It’s easy to get caught up in the business aspect of those decisions and concentrate on the bottom line, the dollars and cents, but you have to stay focused on the customer.

No one wants to be in that situation and have to make that decision. But if it happens, ask yourself, “Am I doing the right thing for my customer?” If the answer is no, then it’s time to make a change.

Letting Feedback Drive Decisions

Since we first launched ThirdLove in 2013, we received feedback from customers saying that they wanted more than our standard beige shade of “nude.” It just didn’t match all women’s skin tones, and our customers wanted bras in shades for all women.

We listened to what they had to say, and that led to our New Nakeds Collection, which has been wildly successful. Why? Because we knew from feedback that it’s exactly what our customers wanted most.

We did the same thing with our Nursing Bra Collection. We were getting a steady stream of inquiries about nursing bras, and our customers were very vocal about their issues with most nursing bras on the market. They were uncomfortable. They were unattractive. They didn’t fit well. Again, we listened to our customers and designed our Nursing Bra Collection. It filled the exact gap that our customers were telling us about.

Listen And Act

Both of those successes came from not only listening to customer feedback, but acting on it. We were extremely passionate about designing these lines because we knew how important they were to our customers. We wanted to make sure these were the best bras out there because we had heard so much feedback over the years about what was missing in our collections and in the market as a whole.

Your customers will tell you what they want, but you have to act on that feedback when you begin to see those recurring themes.

Just remember, if you can keep your customer at the forefront of everything you do, you’ll always have a shot at building a successful business.