Taking Action a at Customer Level
If via a transactional customer feedback program the customer tells the company they’ve had a specific problem, but you don’t act-on it, are you really listening?
Put yourself in your customers' shoes ...
You’ve interacted with a company/brand and had a bad experience. The company has asked for feedback and you’ve told them in detail what the issue is. But nothing happened … would you feel like you've been heard?
What do you think might happen next:
A. You resort to social media to get a response and tell everyone you know about it?
B. You stop using their products or services?
C. Both A and B?
One of the key differences between a good and bad customer feedback program is how efficiently and effectively a company can act on individual customer feedback, particularly when the customer has had a bad experience.
Putting it into Practice
Continuous tracking of a customer based experience metric like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Effort Score (CES) is critical in today's hyper experience driven economy.
But, tracking a metric in itself doesn’t change the experience, nor does it increase customer advocacy, retention and share of wallet. What does change these key business outcomes is the actions taken based on what you learn from your feedback program.
Operationalising this knowledge drives up customer experience metric scores and wider business metrics that result in customer retention, customer acquisition, positive word of mouth and share of wallet.
In the Energy market, which has a lot of complaints and has clear reporting of escalated complaints via the Energy and Water Ombudsman, our clients halved the total number of annual complaints pre and post program implementation by simply listening and acting on customer feedback.
An effective program will do two things around listening and acting:
1. Make it easy for customers to share their experiences with you
A proactive post event survey is the best way to make it easy for customers to share their experience with you. Don’t make it hard for your customers to tell you about it. The easier it is, the more likely you’ll hear about it directly rather than read about it on social media when it’s really too late to act. While you can try and act on it in a public forum like a review site, it’s far better to discuss and resolve it privately and with the customer details in hand.
2. Make it easy for the company to act on it by providing a single platform for both the customer feedback capture and the customer action management
When customer feedback and action management aren’t seamlessly connected, the process of ‘acting’ becomes disjointed and hard. When that happens, the closed feedback loop often breaks down and unhappy customers slip through the cracks.
When put into practice our clients see almost all negative online reviews halt, because they're hearing and acting on complaints/problems before their customers resort to social media or online review channels.
Are you looking to Improve?
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking all changes must be huge initiatives requiring large expenditure, and many hours of management consultants. Simply start by listening and acting (recovering) at a customer level.
Are there potentially big initiatives that are identified from customer feedback? Of course, but look for the low hanging fruit first. If you’re not doing the simple stuff first, the big and expensive stuff really won’t make much of a difference.
Get in touch to find out how we help.