Feedback v. Complaints

How do you deal with customer feedback? It’s a missed opportunity that many companies fail to grasp. 

The crucial thing is differentiating between feedback and complaints. 

Because complaints are problems to be solved. They occur when something obvious has gone wrong. A late delivery, a faulty item - things that your customer services team are trained to fix as quickly as possible. It’s important to monitor complaints but they are not the whole story. 

Feedback is different, and it’s like gold dust. It’s nuanced and full of insight. It does not need to be resolved in the moment, it needs to be considered, monitored and fed back into your strategy. 

When a customer tells you what they think, you have to be be listening. After all, you probably pay a substantial amount to acquire this kind of data via surveys and third party reports.

But feedback is usually mistaken for a complaint from the very start, so it goes down the wrong funnel and doesn’t end up in the right hands. 

How much insight is lost in your business because of this issue? Do your frontline staff know how to (simply) report feedback so that it makes it to the right people?

Train your teams to actively listen to your customers, and make it easy for them to report their findings. The rewards will be great.