With customer-centricity fast becoming the heartbeat of forward looking companies and digital revolution permeating the consumption landscape, one can attest that the rise of the feedback economy has been imminent. Hubspot’s 2019 State of Customer Service report showed that now, more than ever, customers are likely to share their positive or negative experiences with brands. They do this online, through social media platforms, review sites, and blogs, and they draw the attention of potential customers who can form opinions on brands based on what they hear about them.
Now, as customers seek more connection with brands, better service delivery, value for money, and excellence in their experiences, they hold power in their opinions, feedback, perceptions and attitudes towards brands. This is why companies must position themselves right, to harness customer opinions and insights for good, and avoid paying the price of negative reviews. Companies must take feedback seriously, as it gives them room to directly understand their customers needs, complaints, and suggestions, and take action to improve their business processes.
Companies can harness uncensored customer feedback to reimagine CX through a customer-centric lens. – Business Reporter
Igniting your win in the feedback economy
PWC’s Future of Customer Experience Report 2018 revealed that 32 percent of global customers stop interacting with brands they love after one negative experience. This degree of churn can be addressed if a brand is proactive to obtain feedback and take action promptly. Voice of the Customer (VoC), a term that refers to the process of understanding customers’ expectations, dislikes and preferences through in-depth research, underlines the focus on customer feedback in the feedback economy.
To understand the Voice of their Customers, and make the most of customer feedback, companies can do the following:
Omni-channel feedback collection
Brands should be keen on asking customers what they want, how they want it, what they feel about their offerings, what impresses them, what they dislike and more. They ought to optimize physical and digital channels to ensure that they ask in a way that doesn’t distract, and for reasons that are relevant to the customer. Chatbots are great for web and social media feedback collection for brands such as e-commerce firms who have wide customer base at those digital touchpoints. Additionally, surveys are more general and applicable to many industries, and they allow for in-store and online feedback collection. They also give more room for quantitative feedback data to be collected, to be utilised for tracking performance under metrics such as Net Promoters’ Score and Customer Satisfaction Score.
Responsiveness and Action
Having obtained feedback from customers, it is important for brands to be responsive to customers, and act accordingly to improve their offerings based on customer preferences. Help desks and support systems should be run with passion and care for customers, not as boxes to check. Customers see through the support tickets, bot replies, calls, and responses to reviews and comments.
At points of response to customers, the humanity of brands is often brought to test, therefore brands must show how committed they are to the human experiences of their customers. At the end of the day, when brands act on feedback, they must ‘show not tell.’ Their brand promises and solution benefits must be proven, and their products and services improved to suit their customers.
Innovation
The role of customer feedback in business innovation is immense. Companies that channel customer feedback into the creation of products and delivery of services that customers want, need, love and can’t do without, are sure to have competitive edge in today’s business world. The top aim of innovation is to solve needs, and the best way to drive impactful innovation is to engage those whose needs are being solved. By placing customer interests at the centre of their business through consistent feedback collection, responsiveness and action management, companies can translate insights they obtain into innovative products, services, experiences. This positions customers as co-creators in the business cycle, and this form of co-creation is indeed the future of business and customer experience management.
At the end of the day, companies who ask and act on customer feedback are at a position to offer exactly what customers want. This is the foundation of some of the most successful businesses, those win customer loyalty, benefit from referrals, and thrive in the changing economy.
Featured Image Credits: Adam Jang on Unsplash
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