feedback

Are you listening to your customers?

Dear CxO,

Looking for free market research and customer intelligence? Look no further than Twitter.

You may not care about social networking, you may think that Web 2.0 is not relevant to your business. But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t care what your customers are saying. You may choose to ignore it, but people are out there talking about you; praising you, foul-mouthing you. Go to Twitter Search, type in your company name and see what your customers really think of you.

A pat on the back

Listening to your customers is not just about understanding how you can improve, it should also be about recognising when you do good. Especially if you are a people business, do you have a mechanism for enabling your customers to thank a member of your staff for outstanding service?

In your IVR do you have an option at the end of the call to let the customer give positive feedback on the representative who handled the call?

How about on your website? Do you have a form like British Airways does to enable a customer to simply “thank a staff member“? And if you do, do you have the process to ensure that the staff member will learn of the feedback, that it will feature in their review process and will be recognised for being what your brand should be all about, delighting your customers?

Is this the most stupid question to ask?

Someone from the Barclaycard research centre rang me today doing some customer research. It is great to know they take the customer experience seriously – many of the questions were around my experience with the brand. But then they dropped this corker, not once, but twice.

To what extent do your other credit card providers offer innovative products

How important is it to you that your credit card provider offers innovative products

How on earth did those questions get through and on to the list? What is an “innovative product” when talking about credit cards or financial services? What is an “innovative product” to Joe Public? Maybe I can relate to an iPhone as such, but my credit card? Product innovation is hardly something that you or I consider when we pull a credit card out of the wallet.

“Innovative products” are something that marketeers talk about, they are not in the credit card users lexicon.

Chinese immigration – how did I do today?

Today is one of those days. A meeting in Zhuhai at 11am. Take the 08:40 ferry from Hong Kong, no problem. I’d researched the ferry times, got to the ferry port with loads of time to spare and went up to the ticket counter. “Ticket to Zhuhai please”. Suddenly there was an earlier 8am ferry leaving in five minutes, if I run I could catch it. “You’re sure this goes to Zhu…” I started to ask, but the man behind the counter cut me off. “Yes it goes to zhunzen, now hurry!” but I didn’t hear him correctly, I was focussed on a boat leaving earlier than expected, and that would definitely get me to my meeting on time. Communication Breakdown. It was only as the ferry left Hong Kong and turned right rather than left I realised my mistake. I was on the boat to Shenzen.

But that is not the purpose of this post. Arriving in China, when going through passport control, under the glass window there is a little box with three buttons on it, inviting you to rate your experience – green for perfect, yellow for satisfactory and red for unsatisfactory. Capturing customer feedback at the time of the experience. Howe much more valuable is that than asking customers to complete a lengthy questionnaire some time later, after the event. I think that websites could learn from this. Rather than a pop-up inviting customers to complete a questionnaire of a number of pages (often this appears just as you start your experience at the site), why not get customers to “rate this page” or “rate your experience” as a simple thumbs up or down (as you might Digg comments). This will provide instant feedback, maybe not qualitative, but quick and simple quantative data.

And if I had the ability to rate today? Right now, as I sit in a dingy cafe waiting the two hours for the next ferry back to Hong Kong, with a rapidly flattening laptop battery, I’d have to press the thumbs down, unsatisfactory red light on my current experience.