subject: Room for Improvement – Business Advice to Encourage Feedback and Handle Complaints [print this page] Room for Improvement Business Advice to Encourage Feedback and Handle Complaints
When it comes to selling and customer service, do not believe the business advice about no news being good news. The fact is, most people who are not pleased with a product or service don't always complain. They simply just do not do any repeat business. In fact, they may even spread the word to friends about their unsatisfactory experience so you end up losing potential sales without even knowing it. Encouraging feedback and even complaints can be good business, if you handle it right.
It is important to remember that the customer is always right and they have the purchasing power. You must create an environment conducive to constructive criticism from the customers; otherwise, how can you turn their complaint into an eventual sale? Each complaint that is not issued from the customers' lips is a missed opportunity.
Missed Opportunities
Remembering that no news is not necessarily good news, one important piece of business advice is to create an environment which allows customers an easy way to provide feedback, both positive and negative. Why? It is a ready-made opportunity to evaluate how your business is doing. In addition, by listening to customer feedback, you can identify the weak points in your processes from goods manufacturing to customer service so that you can make positive changes to correct problems.
Being able to view your company's operations from a customer standpoint is important as well. Both positive and negative feedback can do this. Showing that you take the customers seriously often improves overall satisfaction. In addition, when you turn discontented customers into satisfied ones, you ultimately create customer loyalty.
Can't Afford Customer Loss
It costs a lot more to attract and retain new customers but it is much easier to keep current customers as long as you have a good product or service and take customer feedback seriously. A multiplying domino effect can occur if you do not welcome feedback or take complaints seriously. For example, say you are shopping for car insurance and you walk into an insurance office. If the person waiting on you is not personable or helpful, you are likely to walk out. Of course, when you walk out, the insurance office is not only losing your car insurance policy likely worth hundreds to thousands of pounds per year, they are also losing the potential to sell you other types of policies such as home, life and even health insurance. To add insult to injury, the company would lose out on business from those potential clients' friends as well because of course they are going to spread the word about the insurance office.
It is important to never become complacent about your current customers as well as those new ones that come your way. Take this piece of business advice: create an environment that is conducive to customers feeling comfortable lodging complaints and other feedback. You cannot grow as a company and succeed without it.
