Braintrust Query: ‘Do you hear what I hear?’ – Listening to Best Customers
By Mark Price, Managing
Partner of M Squared Group
BJ Bueno, in a post on MediaPost Blogs on Dec
22 entitled "Attract
Loyal Customers by Creating a Magnetic Brand" provides
10 key strategies for building relationships with best customers. The second
one is "Listen to what your best customers are telling you. Don’t be a transaction-making
machine. Be a real person."
But it is much harder
to tell companies about what I think as a best customer than it should be.
I can go to the website and see if I can find a "contact us" form, I can see
if I can find a written feedback form and fill it out and remember to hand
it in and then find someone who will take it, or I can tweet or blog about
it and hope someone reads it. All in all, I have to go way out of my way to
share feedback — not just the bad, but the good as well.
We know we need feedback
from our best customers, the 15 percent who drive 40-60 percent of revenue
and more than that of profit. We don’t just need feedback, but we need conversations
that help create and reinforce relationships. Customers who share their feedback,
listen to us and then share again are committing to more than just transactions.
Then we can get feedback and, as importantly, we begin to earn commitment,
the Holy Grail of relationship marketing.
But how do we do this? How do we create
places where people can safely communicate with us and with other customers
and respond to them without spending a bunch of money we just don’t have?
Here
are three “no excuses” marketing ideas about getting feedback and having
conversations with best customers:
- Open a Facebook fan page and set up a
part where you can get feedback. Let your best customers know about these
pages through a special, dedicated email. Check the page daily. Let customers
know which ideas have been acted upon and which are still under review. Check
out the Starbucks Idea section for an excellent implementation of this strategy.
Their approach cost more than a fan page on FB, but you will get the idea. - Call your best customers. That’s right, call them. Have the marketing team
each call a half-dozen best customers every week and ask them about their
last experience and what you could do better. Send an email from that employee
to thank the customer afterwards. - Ask for feedback after every e-commerce delivery. Send a link to a form for feedback and then offer a small discount for the
insight.
None of these are huge ideas, individually, but together they set the
starting point for more engagement in the future.
Discussion
Questions: What are the challenges of getting feedback from your best customers?
What do you think of the three suggestions offered in the article? What
other ideas do you have to engage with your best customers?
I truly understand the desire to turn a customer into an advocate and then to generate two-way communication with them. While the “discussions” might not always be as pleasant as you would like, they should provide meaningful insight.
Two of the ideas on there are opt-in (Facebook and email survey after delivery of e-commerce purchase) – the customer gets to decide if they want to participate. This is likely to generate a response from the two extremes – those who are very happy with the process and those who are very unhappy. The middle is less likely to respond.
I saw nothing in the third method regarding how the customer’s phone number was secured. More importantly, I didn’t see anything that indicated they had been given permission to call. This might be okay in a B2B situation but in this “Don’t Call List” world, I don’t advocate retailers start calling their best customers without their permission.
Great article. I like the 3 ideas. I would also include twitter in that as well. Now the real trick is to get feedback from the clients who don’t have a lot of good things to say.
1 and 3 make the most sense but I don’t believe number 2 is helpful in harvesting feedback. I really like the ‘Fill out our survey to win a prize’ campaign. With today’s cash registers, it’s easy to customize any kind of message you want to print up. And setting up an online survey takes about 1 nanosecond and costs nothing.
Social media tools can be used to connect with your customer outside the store. Yesterday’s consensus would suggest that allowing customers to post feedback on your website is a good thing as long as there is action behind the comments. Use your store to deliver the message: “Hey, we care about what you think!”
Effective feedback can be garnered via these forms of “Qualitative” research. Those data points need to be blended with with the listening that takes the form of “Quantitative” research, thus assuring statistical reliability, as well as eliminating “Interviewer bias” that occurs in telephone conversations.
Importantly, taking the steps to both listen to and make the “Best Customers” a part of a retailer’s marketing discussion, is a MUST.
All three are on target. But the point (which reinforces these three issues) is to really focus on using the store as the perfect media to visually communicate interesting, informative reasons to buy. Cross-selling done well dramatically increases basket size of higher margin items. When retailers do this, they have new reasons to communicate with their shoppers.
These are all good suggestions, if for no other reason than that you demonstrate to your core customers that you are interested in them. The larger challenge, however, is to “walk the talk” and actually act on what you hear from the customer. This is where most of these programs break down as retailers gather suggestions and then don’t act on them. This can actually produce a negative result.
One powerful approach that is consistently overlooked in 4-wall is to make use of an obvious resource–the people who spend the most face time with your core customer–your store organization. They already know who the best customers are, they see them all the time. They probably are already hearing from them about what they like, don’t like, etc, on a regular basis. Just as importantly, this provides the ability to pleasantly surprise these customers by acting on what they’ve said without building expectations that are unmet.
This does, however, require managers in the home office to actually listen to the associates in the stores. Unfortunately, this is all too rare.
I agree with the article; it contains many good points on building customer engagement and dialogue. I don’t agree that it is difficult for consumers to have their voices heard. In fact, it is very easy to leave feedback for companies in multiple venues these days. The burden is not on the consumer, it’s on the companies to listen.
I would broaden the suggestion to open a FB fan page to include more comprehensive use of social media to engage customers, listen and gather preferences, solve customer service issues, and build trusting relationships.
Calling best customers is “old school” and it works. A handwritten note from a senior exec never hurts and will be the biggest surprise of the client’s day.
As usual, the technology and tools that are in the market outpace our comfort in using them. We are all catching up as quickly as possible.
One issue with customer surveys is that they are always automated and it is extremely rare for retailers to close the loop with consumers by indicating that they are listening to and acting upon these surveys and comments. My sense is that many retailers are conducting surveys just to check that box on their “to do” list.
Always looking for the silver bullet! Shortcuts for doing the real work? I would advise the following: 1. Get on the floor with the customers and talk to them. 2. Consider anyone who might spend money with you a “best customer.” 3. Never treat anyone like family, treat them like a visitor. 4. Visit the competition and see what they are doing. 5. Steal every “good” idea you see. 6. Teach your employees that a customer is the key to their prosperity. 7. Visit a good restaurant and find out how management there motivates its employees and see what you can apply to your business. 8. Get to work early and talk to everyone with whom you come into contact. Learn from them!
Forget your best customers. What really counts are someone else’s best customers. I’d be more interested in what people who don’t shop with me think and why.
Getting valuable, actionable feedback from customers is key to any business. Any business can gather data and feedback, but knowing what to do with it all to make a difference to the customer is not as easy to come by. You can be guaranteed that if you are not listening to your customers, someone else is–whether it’s on Facebook, Twitter, or old fashioned word of mouth (wom). Although, it may seem counterintuitive to listen to your current customers instead of vying for new ones, it is a well-known adage that it costs almost 10x more to get a new customer in the door than to keep a current one. Moreover, once you get a new customer in the door, they must be highly motivated to attach themselves to your brand instead of coming in to cash in on the temporary promotion and run back to their beloved brand of yore. There is no chance to build loyalty based on this model unless there happens to be an outstanding customer experience within your business that is enough to ‘wow!’ the customer out of his/her existing brand allegiance.
Any method that deepens the connections to your customers is a plus. Today’s main methods are customer surveys and engaging in social media. Customer surveys can be a great asset. But to think that anyone can craft an effective customer survey is dangerous. It’s akin to people thinking that because they can drive, they should enter the next NASCAR race. Leave the survey design to the experts. I know I am biased because of my work, but truly, it takes more than a nanosecond to craft an insightful survey with questions specifically geared to elicit customers’ truest attitudes, beliefs, and experiences. This is probably why so many can become disillusioned with customer surveys. If you don’t ask great questions, you are not going to get great answers. And by great, I do not mean all positive answers. I mean answers that will underscore where you are excelling, failing, and everything in between.
Finally, I will conclude by saying that you can collect and engage as much you want, but if you do not take action on these gifts of insight that you have been given by your customers, there is no point to any of it. In order to create a truly customer-centric business model, you must turn data into actionable items upon which your executive and location-level teams can execute. Engagement with customers is but one part of the equation. Taking the data (quantitative), suggestions, ideas and anecdotes (qualitative), and translating them into changes that not only improve the customer experience at every turn but consciously demonstrate a commitment to continuous improvement will show your customers that not only are you listening, but you are really hearing them–loud and clear.
This article does a great job of pointing out the challenge retailers have always faced in terms of getting their most valuable customers to voice their opinions. Traditionally, customers have been used to getting in touch with companies when they have a problem. People know that if they are treated poorly in a store or if there is a problem with a product, there is a number they can call or a manager they can request to speak to in hopes of fixing the situation. When they are happy with their experience, however, they might not feel like there is an appropriate outlet to make their opinions known.
It’s safe to say that nearly every company would be thrilled to get glowing feedback from their loyal customers in any form, particularly in a way visible to other existing and potential customers. The problem may be that many customers simply don’t think anyone is truly listening, or that it matters, when they leave positive feedback, and therefore tend to keep quiet.
Fortunately, the age of social media is changing this. Companies are finding innovative ways to have their customers act as brand advocates online. At Empathica, for example, we recently launched a tool called GoRecommend that allows Facebook users to virally recommend brands to their friends and family. This provides customers with a fun way to spread the word about the brands they love and has been very successful. Companies have also had great success using Twitter, which allows them to monitor what people are saying about their brand and respond to comments and queries on a very personal level. When customers are engaged in this way, they are much more likely to feel that their comments are actually having an impact and will be more likely to proactively support the brand. As more and more retailers leverage these tools, we’re bound to see positive customer feedback continue to grow and evolve in exciting ways.