Why Effective Customer Feedback Management is Important for your Brand
Customer Feedback has monetary implications that every brand promoter ought to know. Many a time, companies treat feedbacks as mere complaints and problems emanating from the customers.
Customer feedback is a two-way communication strategy that guarantees effective engagement of customers and stakeholders within your brand ecosystem.
The customer is under no obligation to provide any form of feedback, whereas, the brand is duty-bound to furnish the customers and stakeholders with all necessary feedback as well as solicit the same from them. The reason is because of the numerous implications customer feedback has on the brand, which we shall explore in this article.
However, If you don’t know how feedback impacts your bottom line, you might just be leaving money on the table.
Effective Customer feedback
Brands spend most of their resources building leads and prospects. They spend money on ads, product packaging, brand promotions through sponsorship and many more, to enable them to reach and establish a relationship with their prospects and customers.
Once these leads move to become paying customers, many of the brands tend to ignore further engagement. However, they may ask the customer for feedback which they often don’t use. But they rarely ever profer feedback for customers when they require it. Even when they do, the feedback is rarely sincere.
They term the act of not providing customers with detailed feedback as ‘’managing the customer’’.
For feedback to be efficient, it must be holistic within the brand’s ecosystem, that is we must pay attention to what customers are saying to us and as well as what they want to know from us.
There are instances, where a customer had complained or reported a service issue to the service support centre, and they delays or outrightly refuse to provide feedback. When talking about customer feedback, you must give attention to what feedback the customer is asking from you as much as you place valuable emphasis on customers feedback.
An effective brand speaks to the customers as much as she listens to them.
Why Feedbacks are Important
The first thing that feedback does for you if properly managed is that it creates a space for you and your brand in the hearts of your customers and consumers.
The consumers can trust you, knowing that you listen and can communicate genuine and vital information that can help you make informed business decisions. Information like buyers motivation is mostly from the feedback received through customers feedback.
Also, providing necessary feedback to customers in time, and through the appropriate channels can put you on top of the ladder of excellent customer service providers. Besides the ease of use, what makes customer experience enjoyable is easy access to support.
The hallmark of a brand support system is issue resolution and feedback. When a customer seeks guidance or clarification, he or she wants his or her issues or complaints resolved. Most often than not, the customer’s complaints are not resolved immediately for understandable reasons.
The customer might become apprehensive because of the poor service and feedback he might have encountered before.
The way to address this and regain customers’ confidence is to engage customers through continuous feedback provision. Customers feel confident and respected when carried along in the course of resolving their complaints.
Stakeholders generally want to put their money where they have some level of control. A brand that responds and acts on feedback from customers and stakeholders quickly earn the trust and the commitment of the people. It portraits your brand as a community were both you and the customers are members, responsible for the development and success of the brand.
The success of your brand becomes a collective responsibility of you and your customers. This way, your customers commit their money, time and energy (in the form of brand advocacy) because they feel they are part of the ecosystem and are committed to seeing the brand succeed.
Creating Effective Feedback Management System
Creating an effective system for managing feedback is a vital part of your business process management. Feedback are raw materials for building and refining effective business models. Brands must be deliberate in creating systems that help them receive and review feedbacks, draw inference and implement strategies from the feedback received.
While the emphasis on feedback from customers to the companies is increasingly popular, the reverse has barely received any serious attention by brand promoters. Providing feedback to customers is one way to enhance customer experience and must be built within your feedback management system.
I recently ordered for cosmetics and asked that they deliver to a location where I can easily pick it up, and the vendor promised quick delivery. Several hours past and I didn’t hear from them, then I decided to call to confirm what had happened and They informed me that they had delivered it several hours earlier.
The painful outcome of the whole event was that I wasn’t able to pick the item I bought until a few days later. It was dissatisfying. What could they have done differently? A simple delivery notice to me would have made the difference, and that service would have been satisfactory.
Sometimes, feedback might appear insignificant, you assume customer should know, and there isn’t need for that call, mail or chat. But the fact remains that feedback can and does separate brands with an enjoyable experience from those with poor customer service. Like in my case narrated above, the only extra step that would have made that experience satisfactory for me would have been simple delivery feedback.
With this in mind, brand promoters need to be strategic in devising means for receiving and managing feedback. But the brand must first present herself as one that esteems feedback, one willing to hear it as it is from consumers and stakeholders, and ready to take necessary actions to implement the recommendations arising from the said feedback.
It is necessary because most of the feedback will come in the form of criticism, comparisons and complaints. If you are not willing to accept criticism and complaints as part of the package, consumers are going to see you as one paying lip service and can become unwilling to share valuable feedback with you.
Feedbacks request centres around the key indicators within your ecosystem, such products, People, Processes, communication strategies, support and more. Brands can also automate some of the processes using enterprise feedback management tools and software. There is much software available based on the level of automation you may want to employ. We will discuss some of them in our next article on Feedback Management.
While seeking to employ technology in managing feedback, brands should consider the traditional methods of collating feedback, as they are still popular among consumers and stakeholders in many industries. Popular among these methods include the Opinion box, Email, Telephone Calls, Voice of the customer, Mystery Shopping, social media handles, emoji device and many other custom methods employed by many companies.
Opinion Box:
The box carries different nomenclature with different companies. It could be called an opinion box, suggestion box or compliant box depending on what the company’s focus is on. Generally, it refers to a system that allows the customer to submit their opinions to the organization through a written note or small feedback form provided by the firm. The responsible officer collates the information at intervals and sends it for review, analysis and response.
Email:
Companies can conduct surveys, and solicit feedback of any kind via mail. You can also receive and respond to complaints, enquiries and suggestions from customers and stakeholders. It is efficient and cost-effective.
Voice of Customer (VOC):
It is a feedback collection process that seeks to measure customer experience against expectation. Often, the process is automated to adopt any of the other methods to get feedback. The main thing here is to get to the customer within the same time he or she is engaging with your products, process, services or support when the experience (good or bad) is still fresh with the customers.
Mystery Shopping:
Here the feedback process is either outsourced or handled by a unit within the company, that is instead of waiting for the customer to supply you the information at their own time, experts carry out service audit on the company. These experts engage with your critical impression points as customers and come up with their findings as feedback for your brand.
Social Media Handle:
In today’s world, your presence online is just as vital as the business. What is even more critical is who and what your customers and leads are saying. Brands must make strategic moves to engage her audience online and receive and provide feedback for her online audience.
In conclusion, feedback management is as vital as the business itself since no business thrives in isolation. Brands must continue to seek efficient and effective ways and tools to engage and manage feedback within its ecosystem.
Stakeholders must understand how feedback management affect the brand’s bottom line and be intentional about improving relationship management through effective feedback management.
Originally published at https://esosa.substack.com.
