It takes humility to seek feedback. It takes wisdom to understand it, analyze it and appropriately act on it.
Stephen Covey
Complaining customers are not your most at-risk buyers – the ones most likely to defect.
It’s the quietly disappointed ones that you have to look out for. These are the ones who, if approached by the competitor with a slightly better deal will abandon you for greener pastures.
Customer feedback has become one of the primary drivers of long-term growth. Present day organizations jump at every opportunity to talk to the customer or learn about them. Businesses are spending huge budgets on setting up feedback channels: emails, reviews, surveys, and website analytics.
The pertinent question now is: how do you utilize these channels to actually learn from the feedback? Before you establish the viability of a channel, it is crucial to develop a clear picture of WHY you are collecting feedback.
Are you seeking first-hand advice on product improvement? Are you building a new feature for which you’re seeking the users’ inputs? Have you been receiving a lot of complaints? Once you have the end goal clear, proceed to the tactical part: how do you collect feedback?
Customers often view the requests for their feedback as a redundant activity. They believe that they are giving the organization feedback each time they buy another product or service, recommend you to others, or remain a customer over time. So the question remains: How can your organization stay current on customers ever changing needs and expectations without annoying or estranging them with traditional customer feedback efforts?
