Need feedback? Make your service department all ears

As a business owner, negative customer feedback can be a tough pill to swallow. But since there’s no way of pleasing everyone, it’s almost inevitable.

The key is to be wide open to such comments, then to handle them carefully, making customers feel heard, resolving as many of their complaints as possible and viewing all feedback (both positive and negative) as invaluable to your future strategy. After all, research shows excellent customer service not only promotes revenues, but it’s the No. 1 factor influencing the degree to which customers trust your company.

Of course, the intelligence you gain along the way can do double duty if you convert it to action.

“Every day companies solicit feedback from customers, yet only a few translate that feedback into meaning,” notes customer relations consultant Whitney Wood on Inc.com. “If you handle it right, the dialog between you and your customers can become the lifeline of your business.”

Some suggestions for optimizing negative feedback at your business:

– Staff your customer service department with specialists trained to defuse conflict and handle most any customer issue. Consider those staffers at least as crucial as your sales team, since they’re critical to customer retention and guarding the integrity of your brand.

– Consider securing a vanity phone number that makes reaching your customer service department immediate and ridiculously easy. Keep that number highly visible on your website and perhaps even within your advertising. With transparency comes trust, and showing you’re wide open to feedback boosts your credibility and encourages naysayers to contact you instead of bashing you on social media and other forums.

– Give customer service staffers the power and resources to solve problems themselves without having to involve other employees. In one survey, 72 percent of people blamed previous poor customer service experiences on having to explain their problem to multiple people.

– Plan how to actively use your feedback so customer service isn’t the only department to digest it. “Appoint someone within your company to be the champion of customer feedback, and have them consider both formal and informal methods of gathering information, and acting upon it,” advises Wood. “The best-laid customer feedback programs and initiatives are intuitive, and are most effective when the entire company listens and responds.”
– Consider company changes that might address the negative feedback; however, test them for cost and viability before adopting them permanently.

– Let customers know their feedback was appreciated, and build even more trust by informing them how it was addressed within the company.

– Consider hiring a third-party consultant to continuously gather and analyze customer feedback through focus groups, surveys and other means. An unbiased outsider could help you identify negative patterns and what you can do about them.

– Remain transparent about negative product or service reviews posted about you online.

– Continuously monitor customer feedback received on your social media outlets, establishing policies as to how (or whether) to respond to negative comments.

– Consider soliciting additional feedback through surveys sent via email or posted on your website or social media.

Criticism can be difficult to hear, but the way you listen and respond to customers is bound to have a significant effect on your business’s bottom line.

“The advantage doesn’t come from merely collecting the data,” notes Wood. “It’s how you act on feedback that really makes the difference.”

Talk to Custom Toll Free about ideas for a toll-free vanity number to use as your customer service hotline.