Five Ways to Use Your Most Common Customer Feedback
You don’t need customer feedback to tell you that your customers want to be treated with respect.
You don’t need customer feedback to tell you that a smile translates across a telephone line—and even a computer screen.
Yet, not surprisingly, that’s the story most frequently told in customer comments. From the thousands of customer reviews that Mindshare sees daily, the bulk of customer insights contain the same common sense recipe for success: “Be nice. Be happy. Keep products in stock. Treat customers like people, not transactions.”
Of course, completely unexpected insights pop up, too—but the fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of customer comments amount to this:
“I’m happy because I was served a quality product quickly, politely, and conveniently.” OR “I’m unhappy because I was served a poor quality product slowly, rudely, and inconveniently.”
And that’s not a bad thing. There are valuable ways to put those customer comments to work. These recurring customer statements of common sense can make a big difference in your daily operations if properly put to use:
5 Ways to Use Your Common Customer Feedback
1. Focus on individual employees
Find out who is and who isn’t listening to common sense in your company to provide good service, then reward or retrain accordingly.
2. Connect
Respond to customers who leave feedback. Whether you learned something groundbreaking or not from their comment, you can show your customers you care—and help them connect with your brand on a personal level—by showing that you listened. Tell them how you’ve resolved their concern or thank them for their time. Heck, offer them an inside deal if you want them to feel really special.
3. Measure company profits in relation to customer satisfaction
If you keep a reliable record of customer satisfaction scores, then you can track it alongside company progress to provide an unbeatable bellwether for your business. You’ll soon be predicting the dollar signs on your bottom line through your customer satisfaction scores.
4. Market it
Customers who say nice things about your company are providing credible, and invaluable, word-of-mouth marketing. Share their words with the world, or, better yet, help them share their own words with the world through social media.
5. Motivate frontline employees
Even employees who are “just working for the money” will take pride in knowing a customer singled them out for their service. They will work better knowing how much they can influence the customers they interact with.
And that’s just for the most frequent comments. There’s another list out there for using the customer comments that contain surprise insights.
Remember that customer feedback isn’t always about learning what customers want; it’s about finding more ways to deliver it.
