Businesses must understand that the occasional customers are as valuable as regular customers because their transactional experiences and views about the business are no less important than the views expressed by the regular customers in building a reputation. Remember that customers who might visit your business only once might never come back again but can post a review on Yelp or post a public comment on Facebook or share the experience with a friend. Indeed, the experience of such customers might not go as planned chiefly because of reasons beyond your control. But Saivian Eric Dalius believes that you can very well control your business’s response to the reviews and learn from them.
Welcome feedback says Saivian Eric Dalius
Learn to look upon negative feedback as gifts because it allows you to make amends, improve and win back dissatisfied customers. Always encourage customers to provide feedback even when they are unhappy, sad, and angry because something to learn from their experience can be valuable for businesses improvement. Not always do customers make the effort of providing feedback, but when they do, it means that they care about you and expect some positive response from you. Or else they would not have taken the efforts to tell you about the shortcomings. Negative feedback can often pave the way for new opportunities, provided companies accept it with an open mind.
Criticism can sow the seeds of opportunity.
While customer feedback flows in from various directions, companies need to have the proper channels for capturing and sharing it. Put a system in place so that all employees of the organization can record and share customer feedback with others, and even temporary and hourly employees should be given access to the system.
In responding to the feedback of various customers to address their concerns and regain their confidence, a pattern might emerge within the feedback that provides valuable insights about the general feeling of most customers about any particular aspect of the business. For example, it might emerge that most feedback was about customers’ disappointment about the short supply of the most desired product.
The company can soon arrange to fill the gap and increase sales.
The silver lining of negative criticism
Besides having a system for gathering criticism, there must also be a system to analyze the feedback to understand the kind of response that would be right for it. Many negative criticisms could be just about venting emotions and without any substance that you can discard outright. You weed out only such defamatory and abusive criticism and do not provide any meaningful feedback that can help businesses improve. Filtering out the different kinds of feedback according to its worth and then responding to some selected ones appropriately should help identify the opportunities hidden within the feedback. Therefore, a lot depends on the filtering process.
Only when businesses can properly segregate negative feedback and identify the most appropriate ones can they help improve the business operations and performance.