As a business owner or manager, you know that your blood and sweat have gone into designing and building that perfect product or service. Keeping your business alive and running has been challenging and ever-demanding. Acquiring new customers has been expensive and so time-consuming that It becomes even more critical to maintain hawk-eyed attention to existing customers. It is so crucial to converting our buyers into loyal brand advocates.

So here are five proven strategies you should NOT do to keep your customers loyal to you and also be your flagbearers and refer you:

1.    Be COMPLACENT in customer service

A brand could just crash if the customers are not feeling valued and appreciated. Providing the consumer with just the product or service and not going above and beyond their expectations is an easy recipe for losing their trust and association with the brand.

As a business owner, what you can’t afford is to be complacent in issue handling, responding to inquiries, being empathetic, and offering personalized treatment.

2.    NEGLECT your loyal customers

Every relationship needs acknowledgment or appreciation for it to work. Not rewarding your customers, who are appreciative of your offerings and go the extra mile to refer you further, is a subtle way of pushing them away. Little encouragement goes a long way in making their return to your business and referring to their friends and families.

Don’t let your proactive, engaged customers’ effort go neglected, and find creative ways to thank them for their advocacy. Some of the most common ways are rewarding them with exclusive discounts, referral bonuses, or special perks.

3. DON’T SEEK just TELL your customer

Being reactive to your customer, defending your mistakes, always telling how your product or service is the best in the market, and not giving appropriate time and space to let your customer talk or tell their side of the story is undoubtedly the easiest way possible to make them feel unwanted and experience negative emotions in their interactions with your brand.

Customer centricity is a culture every business needs to adopt! All it takes is to make it easy and relevant for your customers to share their thoughts, experiences, and opinions on your brand. Use the insights from their inputs to make improvements in your business and loop it back with them to ascertain they are heard and that they matter!

4. NO HUMAN connection

The biggest myth in customer handling is to treat them like Gods or kings. This is a simple way to distance them and dehumanize your relationship. It becomes more of doing what they demand and being a yes man rather than being transparent and authentic in your communications.

When you connect with your target audience emotionally, at a deeper level, you create an environment of open communication and understand their emotional needs, expectations, or behaviors. Don’t shy away from sharing your company story, values, and culture and reflecting on your human side. 

4. Ghost your customers

Only focusing on the primary offering and making it look good enough at the surface to attract a buyer without any underlying work on post-sales engagement is a great beginning to a quick end of any enterprise. Not keeping in touch with your customers and missing out on opportunities to engage is only going to make it so easy for customers to forget the brand and in some cases make them share their frustrations or problems in public domains. This could be so detrimental to business growth and calls for efforts on rebranding.

It is so easy to stay top of mind with your customers by connecting with them on social media, emails, and calls and not ghosting.  Omni channel presence and offering them relevant content, promotions, or updates are key to making them engage with your brand effortlessly and keep coming back to you for more.

Building strong relationships with your customers is key to converting them into your advocates and having them spread the word about your business. Remember, it's not just about selling products or services – it's about creating meaningful experiences.

How feedback is an effective tool for Business Success 

Feedback is an essential tool to build a person's leadership, empathy, and communication skills by listening, identifying, and acting on thoughts, feeling, and experiences. Feedback is underrated both for the transformation of individual skills and importance in a business. It is a process to listen and understand ways, actionable to make things better. Feedback is instrumental for actionable insights in a business by capturing customers'’ feelings, thoughts, and expectations across the complete journey.

 If feedback is such an essential ingredient to becoming better both from an individual and business point of view, then why is it not that utilized? Why do organizations yet have to wake up to this underrated tool to organize, scale-up, innovate, and enhance customer engagement, including internal and external customers? Is it lethargy in collecting feedback or simply ignorance in the process and its importance? Most of the time, it is both, and we, through this blog, are trying to reason out an effective way to collect feedback and how it impacts business success.

One of the primary reasons for the lack of utilization of the feedback process is that feedback collected doesn't yield many actionable inputs for the business. We often discover that intensely critical feedback that is awkward and harsh can have a detrimental effect on the business plans for employees and suppliers. In the times of the digital age, when data and each interaction provide some input as feedback, this sleuth of data and the sheer thought of collecting and making sense of it usually overwhelms decision-makers and organizations. So ignorance for the feedback process or simply getting defensive in understanding the intent has become a common norm.

Feedback in today's time can give insights to a business to enhance customer satisfaction, product improvement through innovation and by designing new ways, features, approaches, and even enhancing customer support. For instance, think about creating a website and utilizing the feedback of a representative group to assess the flow, patterns, and ease in usage to enhance customer satisfaction through the website. Sounds exciting and needs focus and discipline by the business to invite and use feedback in improving its deliverables while also remaining vigilant to the feedback giver’s perspective and time. Usually, the absence of this crucial feedback diminishes the chances of customer engagement.

Feedback also collected to make performance better usually gets hindered due to its limited scope. Research proves that feedback if taken to improve performance doesn't help much as thoughts and feelings are limited by customers' knowledge, understanding, and unconscious biases. More data points and then averaging those improve the learnings from the feedback process. But most of the time, it is limited because more data points improve the random error in the data but not the systematic error. By definition, random error is one time, out-of-turn error due to chance; hence the statistical and thoughtful process can eliminate it.

In contrast, systematic error is a part of the process and can have far more ramifications to improve. Systematic errors are part of the process and not by chance. Thus, a feedback process through an objective viewpoint and process while considering the various biases and errors can provide a business with actionable inputs for action through their digital interactions and structured feedback collection process including cumulative and transactional ones.

We highlight three tenets through this blog to improve the feedback for actionable inputs. 

Use feedback with the Intent to listen and understand

Intent on why the feedback is being captured and analyzed makes all the difference. Customers, both internal and external, share experiences and feelings when describing an event, an occurrence, and a transaction while interacting with a business through a touchpoint. Hence along with scores, the open-ended questions are instrumental in analyzing what is working and why so? 

When captured with Intent to understand, improve and get better, feedback will always find takers and the candid view from employees, customers, and suppliers. There will be candid, harsh truths that can be detrimental to business motivation and plans. This doesn't mean at all that harsh feedback should be discouraged or should be constructively put aside. Instead, it will need an objective, outcome-based analysis to filter, analyze the feedback, and correlate with other indicators to utilize for actionable inputs.

Importance of feedback Process

 There are a lot of tools that are utilized by businesses, including "Voice of Customer," "Customer Satisfaction," "Live chat," "Social Media Interaction," "NPS," or simple "email" surveys with different modalities and Intent to capture. All are instrumental at different points of time to listen, analyze and act. For instance, NPS is used to analyze the pulse of customer feedback by first a score-based question and then an open-ended question to find the reason for the same.

 1. Seeking feedback in real-time or when the event is happening, or you just completed the execution can have different viewpoints due to time-lapse and various biases that come into action. Insights in real-time by different stakeholders are instrumental in gauging the friction during performances, interactions, and corresponding emotions.

2. Language, too, can make a lot of difference. So instead of just asking if there is any feedback for me, more thoughts can be assessed by the business by asking how they can improve the product/service deliverables.

- What was worked for the customers?

- What was that which needs more work?

Effective feedback is about Intent, context as it is about remaining open to listen and receive. Thus finding the reasons behind the scores is more important than dashboards to show where and how the organizational deliverables provide an impact.

Closing the feedback loop

 An essential part of a feedback process is about closing the feedback loop. 

Closing the feedback loop means the following –

1. It is to humbly and graciously accept the thoughts, feelings, and experiences shared by the customer, including internal and external, for their interaction through the entire customer journey. More quantity or more feedback pointers will slowly support in enhancing the quality of actionable inputs.

2. Creating a follow-up implementation and action plan after scrutinizing the relevant information in an unbiased manner without errors will support achieving the business objective.

3. Communicating the resultant action plans to the customers who gave feedback is the most crucial part to close the feedback loop and to keep the loop open for more candid feedback in the future. It is also true in complaints or regular interaction on social media or feedback for a relevant tool to business.

 Actionable input for business will improve deliverables, clarify objectives to employees, and identify touch-points where deliverables faltered for the customers. Feedback at the business ideation stage improves innovation as product/service can be tuned in as per customer needs, expectations, thus enhancing the chances of creating the right product-market fit. Feedback is instrumental for business success through more engaged employees, customers, decision-makers, and above all, deliverables to ensure the business remains agile to achieve its objectives. 

 Write to us to know more about feedback, and how it can support your business success at contact @pinkguava.org