Customer Feedback Culture

Bad or no customer service costs more than a sustainable customer experience.

But a lot of large companies don’t prioritise customer experience and not improving it is their main problem.

So these companies should collect and understand customer feedback, then address issues in the feedback.

Instead, companies keep customer feedback a secret or not important enough for attention, leaving it to waste.

So in this blog post we will learn guidelines around collecting customer feedback.

Let’s dive right in.

Making Customer Feedback Part of Company Culture

Don’t hide or delete customer comments

Don’t delete or hide negative customer feedback in:

• Web portals
• Social media
• From work colleagues

Constructive customer feedback helps build a transparent, customer-centric work culture.

Always address and apologise negative customer comments online in public by:

• Being sympathetic
• Friendly
• Helpful in solving issues

With private feedback left for you or your company, find out if the person wants to be contacted.

If they do, be helpful, friendly and apologetic if needed.

But don’t ignore the comment, instead discuss with your team or management about responding and benefiting from feedback.

For comments related to your individual work, find out what could be done better and ask team members for advice.

Share and analyse customer feedback regularly

Discuss customer problems that are happening and make customer-centric discussions a regular part of company culture.

This helps address issues faster and make sure problems don’t occur again.

Customers also expect swift replies and solutions, not waiting to hear from you.

So addressing customer feedback immediately sets a high standard for customers, building your online and word-of-mouth reputation.

Align customer support and sales

Customer support and sales don’t often communicate when their collaboration is important to businesses.

And doing so helps:

• Customers get value from products
• Sales team create effective sales process
• Brings sustainable customer-centric practices and growth
• Make customers happy
• Higher customer retention rates
• Increased revenues

Also customer sales and support are better rewarded for closing and retaining customers.

Make customer feedback available to learn from

Customer feedback should be shared on one shared platform, followed by your whole team.

That helps your team follow and address feedback in real time and brings customer feedback to employees who don’t deal with customers directly.

Everybody in your company is responsible for creating a great customer experience.

So if sales reps are rude or your social media team is unresponsive, customer experience suffers.

And customer feedback helps you identify problems and act on them as one team.

You can also bring customer feedback from online into the physical space of your office.

Also you can build a physical wall to share positive customer comments in your office.

Find mistakes and teach better performance

For negative customer outcomes, find out what went wrong and how to fix the problem

If someone’s making mistakes leading to negative feedback, it’s possible other employees are, too.

So connect low and high-performing employees so they learn best practices and pitfalls from each other.

Open discussions help bring new ideas with high-performing employees sharing strategies with the whole company.

This helps understand how incidents happened to better prevent them reoccuring in the future.

So look to solutions and learn from past mistakes to elevate team morale, transparency and an eagerness to collaborate and develop together.

Celebrate big and small wins

Remember to celebrate even the small acknowledgment because it can boost team morale and satisfaction.

Share employee wins and praises from customers to help the rest of the team understand the direction you’re going and goals to follow.

Creating a customer-centric environment is  a long-term project that needs dedication and  commitment from everyone, including the management of the company.

So celebrate all team wins so they know the importance of customers and their feedback.

And this will help your company eventually fulfil its customer-centric transformation.