Managing feedback

I am not a regular watcher of Today Tonight but was on Monday because Geraldine Cox, the founder of Sunrise Children’s Foundation, was scheduled to be on. But today I wanted to write about another story they aired. The story was about a restaurant that responded poorly to negative customer feedback that was delivered by email. It is a great example of the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

The feedback was an uninvited email citing a recent poor experience. The response by the restaurant owner used poor English and rejected the feedback. On receipt of the email the customer forwarded the email to a few friends and the forward kept going until it came to the attention of Today Tonight. The restaurant is now closed.

The lesson to be learned is how to deal with feedback whether it is positive or negative. Providing a channel for customers to provide feedback and then dealing with the feedback properly improves customer satisfaction and loyalty whether it is a formal or informal process.

If people who provide negative feedback are thanked for raising an issue, changes implemented, and then those who provided the feedback are made aware of the changes, these initial critics are more likely to feel valued, might try your product/service again, and tell their friends about the positive experience.

I’m not saying that you have to jump on every word of negative feedback and make changes exactly as suggested, sometimes the solution is to educate your customers on why you do things the way you do.Let me give you an example. Your business is based on high quality products. Your prices are high to reflect this. You receive feedback that your prices are too high. But, your prices aren’t the problem, the perception of value for money is the problem. So, your solution is to educate your customers on the value they receive from your products, not to reduce the prices.

Positive feedback creates great testimonials and collateral to guide your marketing.

So have a look at your feedback procedures. Do you ask your customers regularly about their views? If yes, do you then act on the information you receive, whether it is good or bad? If you answered no to one of these actions then you need to change this, so your business doesn’t fall victim to poor word-of-mouth and close like the restaurant in the Today Tonight segment.

Simple marketing working

We had a stand at the Australian Businesswomen’s Network Expo last weekend.

In the planning for it we talked about ways we could simply communicate with everyone there. We already had bright red bags with our logo on it (you can see them out and about at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/triberesearch/ ) and I remembered that at previous ABN Expos a bag wasn’t handed out until the end. So people walk around uncomfortably carrying lots of brochures, notebooks and samples.

We made a book filled with articles we have written and put it with other information into 100 bags. People were coming to our stand and asking for a bag so they could free up their arms and it gave us an opportunity to talk about what we do.

There were about 230 people at the Expo, so by the end of the day almost every second person was walking around with our bags. You can see the impact in our photos, a link is on our home page [click above]