In today’s hyper connected, value savvy global marketplace, your customers are becoming ever more the key and demanding.
They can talk about you behind your back to the world at the touch of a button and the speed of light.
To quote Jeff Bezos: ‘Your brand is what the customer says when you’re not in the room’
So are you listening?
Research shows, that the vast majority of businesses and organisations are either not listening at all, or listening ineffectively.
Not listening at all: the ostrich with its head in the sand syndrome.
There are plenty of feedback systems to at least help you get started with listening, even if you just monitor google alerts on your brands.
If you are not currently listening, there must be a reason for this: either you are nervous and unsure what to do for the best, or you may be frightened as to how to react to feedback as and when it comes.
In either case you need to start doing something!
Beware, there are plenty of snake oil salesman out there who will try and take a large chunk of your money for systems that work ineffectually or in an incomplete way.
So don’t ignore the problem, but also don’t leap for a quick or cheap fix: it’ll only make it worse, because that’ll mean you’ll be:
Listening ineffectually: we find that the vast majority of businesses who are gathering feedback, are using ineffectual systems, these are systems that have the following issues:
- low response rates
- no real understanding of what the customer means
- lack of true information to help you learn and grow
- perceived unfairness
- lack of consumer confidence that their review will make any difference (so, instead, they don’t bother to fill in your reviews, and, instead just gossip about you to the world behind your back)
- and, probably the biggest issue of all, inability for the customer to feed back to you in an easy and risk free way, while they are still a customer to you (i.e. Before they have left you or completed their transaction with you)
Many of the off the shelf feedback systems that are touted so widely at the moment have all these issues attached to them.
If you wish to know more about all these issues and find out how to put feedback systems in place that would genuinely build your reputation, customer loyalty and referrals, then we are a worldwide leader in feedback audit and accreditation to help you achieve these aims.