The most important lesson I have learned from
being in business for 35 years is that your customers will tell you everything
you need to know to succeed.
Every day our customers are giving us feedback
that can help us improve. We just don't hear it. We don't capture it. We don’t
learn from it and therefore we can’t use it to lift our game. Now, this is
unfortunate because every year customer expectations are rising and therefore
we must all be on a constant journey to find ways to do things better.
Customers give us feedback by paying us
compliments, making complaints, offering suggestions and asking questions.
Compliments are very useful feedback because
they not only tell us what we are doing well, they tell us what matters to our
customers. After all, we don't compliment people about things that are not
important to us. So, compliments tell us what we should keep doing.
If we are lucky, customers will make complaints.
I know that sounds strange but complaints really are gifts. First of all they
give us a chance to put things right and turn an unhappy customer into a raving
fan. But more importantly, complaints tell us where we have problems: systems
that don't work, processes not being followed, policies that are not customer
friendly.
We should encourage complaints because they tell
us where we can improve. Now, I can hear you groan when I say that because
nobody likes to deal with an unhappy customer. Perhaps they remind us of an
angry parent or perhaps we take their disapproval personally. Or it just might
be their aggressive behavior causes us to feel threatened. But if we learned
how to handle complaining customers we might feel more comfortable being around
them. As a result, we might make it easier for them to tell us what has gone
wrong. This would allow us to learn from the mistake and to fix the root cause
of the problem. Remember, we do want unhappy customers to tell us about their
bad experience otherwise they will go out and tell everybody else.
Suggestions are even better than complaints
because customers are not just telling us where we can improve, they have an
idea about how we can do something better. But to take advantage of
suggestions, we need to put our egos aside and accept the fact that someone who
does not work in our company or department could actually have an idea worth
listening to.
Even the questions customers ask are worth
studying because questions tell us customers have a need that is not being met.
Perhaps we hadn't even thought about customers having that need or perhaps we
think we are meeting it but in either case questions tell us where we can
do something better.
To take advantage of customer feedback, you need
a system to capture what your customers are telling you. It could be a very
simple system such as a notebook where you write down every compliment,
complaint, suggestion or question you receive so that later on you can review
the feedback and look for trends and recurring issues. Or it could be a more
sophisticated web based system such as Tell Simon, which you can see if you go
to tellsimon.co.nz or tellsimon.com.au.
But having a system to capture feedback is not
enough. To benefit from what customers
are telling us, we need to have the right attitude. Let me give you an example.
Because I am chairman of a small company, two hard fast talking Aussies from
Melbourne came to sell me something. I had 2 two-hour meetings with them and
presented their offer to my board. We decided not to buy and I sent them an
email saying thanks but no thanks.
Since they were hard fast talking Aussies from
Melbourne I expected they would put up a fight and sure enough, within 20
minutes I received an email back. This is what it said: “Thank you for telling
us your decision. Obviously we are disappointed but we understand your
situation. Was there anything about our offer that put you off? Was there
anything we said or did that we could have said or done differently?”
And the last time you asked your customers these
questions was? Exactly!
But the email went on to say, “I was raised in a
Greek family and taught to respect my elders and to learn from them so I assure
you that any feedback you give us will be taken seriously.”
Now, I couldn’t figure out who the elder was but
otherwise I thought it was a great email. So I replied saying that, in my
opinion, they were very good at talking but not so great at listening. This
meant we spent time on things I was not so interested in and not as much time
as I would have liked on other things. I said this was not the reason we
decided not to buy, but since he had asked for feedback I was telling him this.
I thought he might find this feedback difficult
to handle so I expected he would launch a counter attack. Sure enough, in less
than a minute, he sent back an email. It said, “Thank you for your honest
appraisal, our words will ring in our ears like church bells on a Sunday
morning!”
When you get compliments, complaints,
suggestions and questions from your paying or internal customers do their words
ring in your ears like church bells on a Sunday morning?
They should because your customers will tell you
everything you know to succeed!
