Business owners all love to encourage their customers to say how wonderful they are. Star ratings, points, percentages, etc all make great advertising, and good testimonials are quite simply good for business.
But customer service isn’t all about being great at what you do, it’s also about turning good or average into great.
No business is 100% perfect and in order to improve, your business needs one vital bit of feedback – It needs to know what it’s NOT doing right. And to find out, the bold step of encouraging negative feedback should be considered.
Asking customers to say bad things about your business is difficult. Nobody really wants to hear criticism about their business. Everyone loves to hear compliments, and while any business that is constantly commended is obviously doing something right, they’ve got nothing to improve on, and any efforts to better their customer experience can only be guesswork.
So by asking that one question, ‘what could we do better?’, you are opening up a world of opportunities to make tiny things more enjoyable for your customers. And often, it’s those small things that make so much difference.
The advent of social media has allowed businesses to openly deal with criticism in a way that gives its customers confidence.
When potential customers see how you are dealing with real people, they are assured that if they do have a problem, there is someone there that cares.
But you can also use the privacy of an email or survey to actually ask those all-important questions that gives new insights into what people think of our processes.
We’ve done it at Canary Dwarf and we’re building a good picture of one specific area we need to improve on. We don’t have to make it public, but we know that there are things we can do to make our customers’ experience better.
When we’ve fixed that, we’ll move on and find something else to improve on. It’s basically just an aspect of customer service, and having the best customer service separates your business from the rest.
So next time you ask your customers to rate your service, think of how you’re going to use the information they give you – to rest on your laurels or to make your business better?
