Customer feedback. Do you love it or hate it? Are you someone who only gives good feedback and never gives bad feedback? Well, there’s a role for all of this in your business. Now, what I’m going to say is that customer feedback is essential for every business, The Good, the Bad, and the ugly. But most importantly, it’s what you do with the bad and the ugly that matters.
Good customer feedback is great. We all love to get recommendations. We all love testimonials and Google reviews and stuff that we can spread out to the world that are great marketing. But when you get a bad review, it’s how you take action on that makes the most difference to your business. It’s something that happens to all of us from time to time, there are customers that just don’t like your service or your product or don’t gel or may have been upset because you increased your prices, and they didn’t see the value and that’s fine. Because guess what, there’s enough work to go around for everybody.
You’ve got to make sure that if you do get some bad customer reviews, whether it be social or whether it be on a survey that you send out there you take note of it. You need to look at what the problem is, you’ve got to take the time, look at what they’re complaining about or what the bad review was about and see what caused it. Is it really an ongoing problem? Or is it a perceived problem from that person? And if it is an ongoing problem, take steps to change it so it doesn’t happen again.
I mean, if we’ve got a client who complains about, : I can’t get into to see Victoria” we need to work out why – is it that she is booked up or is it an issue with our automatic calendar system. It may be a combination of both and we need to take action to get it rectified so that the problem doesn’t happn again.
If it’s someone who’s complaining because Victoria is too expensive, that’s not a problem, they can talk to one of the other accountants instead, it’s up to them.
What you’ve got to do is take ownership of that bad review or that complaint, find out what it is, find out if it’s fixable, and take the steps to fix it. It’s also advisable to reply to the review asap and advise what you have done to fix it – where possible, talk to the person involved offline to sort out the issue.
As mentioned before, a bad review is not an issue, it’s a learning experience, it’s how you deal with it and also how you respond online that will assist you to turn the negative into a positive experience.