You’ve probably heard some version of Benjamin Franklin’s famous words, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” I propose an addendum to this list: negative customer feedback.

As much as we’d like to please every customer all of the time, it’s just not a realistic expectation. Negative feedback is inevitable. And that’s a good thing.

Every time a customer leaves negative feedback, they’re providing your brand with an opportunity to improve the customer experience and potentially earn their business for life. Brands that adopt this positive outlook on customer feedback will find success. Brands that do not will likely find themselves in a costly uphill battle with customer loyalty.

Cultivating lasting relationships with your customers can be a daunting proposition, but it’s a practice that your brand would be remiss not to do. Here are four tips for converting brand detractors into brand advocates:

1. Listen & Respond Publicly

Take time to listen to and understand negative customer reviews. Once you have a grasp of the issue at hand, respond publicly so the customer—and other customers—know that you are taking the issue seriously and making an effort to right the wrong. Customers value transparency.

2. Address Negative Comments Quickly

Time really is money when it comes to customer retention. Don’t let a customer issue fester. Resolve the problem as quickly as possible, “wow” the customer, and create a potential brand advocate for life.

3. Rectify the Situation (Even if It’s Not Your Fault)

Identify the type of customer you’re dealing with and interact with them accordingly. The customer is not always right, but by offering a sincere apology and reaching an amicable solution to the problem, your brand can win back at-risk customers.

4. Follow Up

See the resolution of the customer’s negative experience all the way to completion. Thank the customer for their feedback and ensure that they leave—and return—completely satisfied with your brand.

As much as it can feel like negative feedback is all your customers leave, the situation is not that bleak. In reality, customers are mostly positive in their brand sentiment. One study found that customers share positive brand experiences eight times more often than they do negative experiences.

Negative feedback can be a valuable resource for brands working toward delivering a greater customer experience. It’s less fatal than death, and it’s generally cheaper than taxes.

Developing and launching a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program is no small feat. In fact, it’s a massive undertaking requiring a lot of thought. To do it, you and your team will have to figure out how to help your entire organization adopt and execute fundamental changes to improve the customer experience at every touchpoint, increase return visits, and create active brand advocates. This means investing serious time, money, and people in the right places.

Launching a program doesn’t guarantee much. To ensure you and your program see success, I recommend following the four key elements below:

1. Get full executive sponsorship
2. Go beyond surveys to build an ongoing customer connection
3. Make customer feedback data actionable at the location level
4. Use research and analysis to adapt to evolving program needs

I’ll cover the first key in this article, and the next three will follow in upcoming blog posts. So stay tuned.

Key to Success #1: Get Full Executive Sponsorship

With any organization-wide VoC program rollout, the most important aspect to its success is having committed executive sponsorship behind it. The rollout typically happens at the employee level, and ground-level employee engagement is much more likely when staff can see the excitement and benefit reinforced at the top of the organization.

What Executives Must Do to Effectively Sponsor and Support Your VoC Program

Create the VoC Program Vision

VoC programs have a lot of moving parts, and as the pace of the project speeds up, it’s easy for things to go astray. To keep people and departments synchronized in their efforts, the executive sponsor must clearly and regularly articulate (1) the reasons your organization is implementing the program, (2) what the end state will look like, and (3) the ways success will be defined.
If everyone has the same answers to these three questions, you will be able to more easily resolve inter-team conflicts, enable project activities prioritization, and ensure that everyone is working toward the same objective. If the executive sponsor doesn’t create a shared vision, each person will create their own—leading to program inconsistency and potential for failure.

Be a Vocal and Visible Champion

An executive VoC program sponsor who isn’t regularly seen or heard from is not really a sponsor at all. Sending the occasional email from the office or on the road is simply not enough; your program’s executive sponsor needs to be present for all levels of the organization and be seen as the number one supporter of the initiative.
On top of explaining benefits of the program to employees, your key executive must continuously reminding fellow executives why it is important to dedicate budget and people to the VoC program’s rollout and continued maintenance.

Remove Roadblocks

No matter how well-planned the project or how dedicated the team members, roadblocks will arise. It’s the sponsor’s job to spot and remove the roadblocks the team can’t remove for themselves. This can include freeing up time from an essential subject matter expert, working to resolve issues with a vendor, or helping to ensure the project team has the resources it needs. By removing roadblocks, the sponsor allows the project team to stay focused on their day-to-day project activities and deliver a successful VoC program.

Empower Decision Making

When launching and maintaining your VoC program, every team member should be empowered to make the decisions they regularly face. Enabling frontline decisions to be made at the appropriate employee level frees up time for ascending levels of the organization to focus on their strategic activities. Filtering every decision through the executive sponsor will quickly consume his or her day, cause distraction from supporting the project’s success, and will ultimately create a backlog and slow down the program rollout.

In the end, if your VoC program is supported from the top down and employees can see it, they will embrace it, which is the best insurance against program failure.

Watch for Part 2 in this four-part blog series where I discuss the second key to success: Go beyond surveys to build an ongoing customer connection.

Now that customers have the ability to shop when and where they want online, the need to ever enter a store is rapidly declining. Brick-and-mortar retailers are all working to figure out their strategies for the fairly new phenomenon of “showrooming,” where consumers browse in-store and buy their products online, often from a competitor.

This new shopping landscape gives consumers access to more merchandise choices than ever before and presents brick-and-mortar retailers with a series of new challenges. In the Age of the Connected Consumer, people are now being provided with an end-to-end shopping experience that includes the traditional brick-and-mortar store as well as an immersive online or digital experience.

Even in this new landscape, the physical store can continue to be a strong asset for retailers, delivering valuable things e-commerce services can’t:

1. Immediate Gratification

Our society enjoys and desires instant gratification. We want what we want and we typically want it now. The beauty of a brick-and-mortar store is that we purchase the items we want—from the latest in fashion to the newest gadget—and have the luxury of taking them home at that moment in time for immediate enjoyment.

2. The Sensory Experience

Unlike online retailers, brick-and-mortar stores have the ability to engage all of the customer’s five senses. They can fully express how the brand looks, sounds, smells, feels, and even tastes. The online world only appeals to the visual, and sometimes auditory, senses. As evidence continues to reflect that a multi-sensory experience leads to increased in-store spending, more and more retailers are beginning to embrace a sensory engagement process that triggers a “shopper’s high” and creates an emotional and memorable interaction. In turn, customers stay in the store longer, have positive emotions about their time spent in the store, and walk away with increased brand value perceptions.

3. The Human Connection

Another advantage brick-and-mortar retailers have over those that operate online is the ability to forge the in-person (or human) connection. Despite the average person’s desire to email, text and shop online, we are still very human and enjoy contact with others. Being able to discuss product differences with knowledgeable sales staff or receive guidance to find merchandise is no longer an expected service of retailers but a valuable differentiator and touchpoint in the customer experience. Just remember that you can only capitalize on and promote the value of the human connection if you have the appropriate staff levels and have provided them with the necessary training for success.

4. Personal Service

With the Internet, smartphones, and tablets in tow, consumers are more empowered than ever to do research on the products they are looking to buy, pre-empting what a salesperson can tell them. This rise in consumer self-sufficiency, as well as in-store self-service, has sparked a lot of discussion around the value that in-store sales associates offer. Some retailers have taken this trend as an opportunity to downsize their staffing requirements, while others have innovated with the introduction of personal service to create a new, heightened, and differentiated brand experience. One example is Wegman’s, who has introduced produce experts in their stores who chop fresh vegetables and fruits in the aisle so shoppers can take home customized mixes for salads and stir-fry dishes.

Brick-and-mortar retailers need not dismay. Focusing on these four natural advantages over online retailers is the path to maintaining in-store traffic.

I’ve written a few blog posts recently surrounding open review sites and their well-known pitfalls published in the media and verified by some of Mindshare’s own independent research. This is a topic that I am very passionate about.

Why? Because I believe that brands deserve to get credit for their customer service efforts. I believe they deserve to get the word out about the great experiences they provide to thousands of customers, through honest, authentic, timely and accurate ratings and reviews. I believe that consumers have the right to access this information in order to make an informed purchase decision about the brands, products, and services they research and select.

Open review sites today simply don’t allow this to happen and it’s because they are missing the following three essential elements that a review site requires in order to be reliable and effective:

1. Accurate, quality feedback

Typically, people only go to an open review site when they are extremely satisfied or dissatisfied with their brand experience. However, open review sites have no mechanism to validate that reviews came from actual customers, which makes fraudulent reviews a heavily scrutinized topic in the media today.

Brands have no true way of identifying who is really leaving a review for their locations – it could be a competitor looking to sabotage with negative reviews or the brand itself could be posting positive fake reviews to reinforce a weak reputation. Either way, brands or the customer experiences they deliver are not being accurately portrayed, making it difficult for anyone to truly trust what is said on an open review site today.

Putting the proper mechanism in place to ensure that reviews are authentic and validated will eliminate the nagging question of whether the review is fake or real.

2. High review volume

When it comes to customer reviews, the “less is more” approach just doesn’t jive. Why? Because they are the lifeblood of review sites and having a substantial volume of reviews is the foundation to a relevant and representative destination.The trouble is, consumers need to be enticed to voluntarily leave a review. With people typically compelled to visit a review site when they have either a horrible or a great experience, the average experience is often not reflected, which is what consumers are looking for in a review because it is likely what they can expect.

Offering an incentive to leave a review will entice consumers to offer their feedback, whether positive, negative or neutral.

3. Review recency

Review recency is as important as review quality and quantity. The timing of when feedback is submitted on a review site is extremely important as consumers need to understand what a hotel, restaurant, or store is like now. With review sites not getting enough new reviews, old reviews are kept on these sites for long periods of time, often several years. In return, there is a veritable plague of stale data circulating. The more recent the review data, the more accurately it will reflect what the current state of the customer experience is really like.

How do companies expanding into international markets maintain their focus on putting the customer at the heart of the business across widely different markets?  In the second part of my blog, I share some of the key lessons I have learned from over a decade spent working with leading global brands. Below are some critical tips for implementing a successful global Customer Experience Management (CEM) programme in any geography that will help your brand to ensure global consistency while addressing local customer needs.

1. Engage staff

In some markets the opportunity for learning from customer feedback is a new (and perhaps not entirely trusted) experience. Employees need to understand from the beginning what the CEM programme represents and how it can help to improve the customer experience and drive customer loyalty and advocacy.  It is essential that the business is transparent about its expectations for the programme, how it will be used and the benefits it will deliver. In turn, you will have highly engaged employees, which have been proven to dramatically improve the customer experience.

2. Interpret feedback in the relevant context

Insights must be locally grounded in order to be meaningful. Far too often, global CEM programmes are set up centrally and key local components are missed, leading to inaccurate assumptions. For example, programmes are often designed to look at feedback in relation to weekends versus weekdays; however, in many places in the world, the ‘weekend’ is actually Friday/Saturday – or, in some places, Thursday/Friday. If your programme auto-defines ‘weekends’ and does not adjust for different market definitions, the insights generated will be deeply flawed.

Markets – at regional or even city level – can also vary dramatically within countries. This focus on market relevancy is core to Empathica’s (A Mindshare Technologies Company) engagement in global CEM, forming a key part of what we deliver to our clients’ global programmes.

3. Target opportunities that most impact on your customers

An effective CEM programme will incorporate a local action-planning tool that focuses effort on the areas that mean the most to your local customers. Empathica works to assure these focus areas are analytically derived, experience honed and strategically relevant. And once local managers know how they are currently performing on those key focus areas, they will want to know how to improve. Social sharing of best practices that work within your business – within your market – is a huge benefit to rapidly improving performance. Offering a tool that assists managers to see how others have effectively overcome challenges and removed barriers to improve performance is an invaluable component to driving customer experience consistency across locations.

4. Engage with customers

Typically, 80% of your customers are actually having pretty good experiences – and often your staff are making a positive difference. The problem is that staff rarely hear about those great experiences.  Customer WOWs are an important part of an effective CEM programme. It is critical to make it easy for your customers to share those great moments – and share those comments directly with your store/restaurant teams. That recognition of great work supports your teams’ continued positive engagement with customers, your brand and the CEM programme.

When your customers say they had a great experience and are highly likely to recommend your brand, Empathica makes it easy for them to do exactly that with Social Sharing, a unique, patented social media advocacy platform allows your customers to broadcast their good experience to their social media networks. And the good news travels fast!  Social Sharing has delivered over 1.5 million brand recommendations to over 180 million potential customers in the past three years.

5. Celebrate success

Employees will do what gets measured, but they will repeat what gets rewarded. Including opportunities to recognise and reward engagement and establishing a positive cycle of engagement early on brings huge benefits, including building trust within the business.  Celebrating performance lets teams know that their efforts are recognised and encourages repeating that good behaviour.

Well-designed global CEM programmes can add enormous value to businesses that seek to develop their international profile and can deliver strong rewards in customer loyalty and advocacy. And those two outcomes drive measurably improved business performance in sales, increased average spend and more frequent return. The combination of improved business performance and enhanced customer experience helps businesses thrive in a highly competitive global market.

With stories of Black Friday UK shopper mayhem all over the news closely followed by Cyber Monday, it’s clear the Christmas shopping season is well and truly upon us. Scores of customers are headed to your brick-and-mortar stores in search of great deals.

But value isn’t all festive shoppers are looking for. Across the board, consumers are also hoping to find exceptional customer experiences that allow them to shop on their terms, using the newest technologies to drive their choices.

For many retailers, this is the “make or break” time of year, accounting for 30 to 70 percent of their annual sales. The point often missed is that while a 30-day shopping window determines survival, the ability to deliver first-rate customer experiences is what brings customers back and determines longer term success.

Improving customer experiences

There is clearly an imperative for exceptional customer experiences at this time of year. Since the festive season represents many consumers’ first interaction with your brand, your ability to bring seasonal buyers back after Christmas hinges on the quality of your customers’ experiences this month. This may be your only time to create a positive impression.

But relatively few brands emphasise the delivery of high quality customer experiences in the Christmas rush. Far too often, customer service takes a backseat to moving as much product as possible with little regard to the experience surrounding it. Although it may be necessary to staff up stores with inexperienced, seasonal workers, temporary staffing without adequate training and a clear sense of company mission to deliver a great retail experience presents a serious threat to the brand.

Alongside an investment in experience training, it’s critical to provide near real time customer feedback in order to stay on track and keep serving up great experiences as a top of mind activity for all staff. Here are a few simple ways to do so:

Empower Local Managers

The worst thing you can to do to local store managers is to funnel massive amounts of unanalysed data and undifferentiated feedback to them and expect them to convert it into meaningful insights, especially during the year’s busiest shopping season. Rather than overwhelming managers with information that really isn’t useful, respect that they need to spend the vast majority of their time on the shop floor. Empower them with real-time customer feedback insights that make clear in just a few minutes what their local store issues are and what they should work on to provide great experiences.

Provide Actionable “Right Now” Strategies

Complex retail reporting tools are in abundance but they don’t always make clear today’s winning moves. Providing actionable, data-based strategies that can be acted upon “right now” is essential. Store managers need to be freed up as local leaders to focus on the rapid implementation and execution of plans to improve the quality of the customer experience throughout the Christmas shopping season.

Leverage Social Learning

It takes time for store managers to learn how to intuitively respond to customers’ concerns. But collectively, your brands’ store managers have a vast base of knowledge about specific strategies and actions that can improve the customer experience during the Christmas season. Consider leveraging virtual knowledge sharing and other technologies that enable social learning across the brand.

In many ways, Voice of the Customer (VoC) tools are your brands’ best resources for improving local customer experiences during the festive season. By implementing the right technologies, you can significantly increase your ability to provide location managers with the real-time, actionable insights they need to truly delight Christmas shoppers and keep them coming back throughout 2014 – and that should add up to a Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year!