eROI Days Email Agency

Customer feedback is quite powerful and the ways in which it can positively shape your business are countless. Feedback gives you valuable insight to your customers’ attitudes, desires, and frustrations. Feedback lets you make smarter, more informed business decisions – from the direction to take your marketing campaigns, to the angles you use in sales/new business discussions, to where you place the focus in product development, to your approach to customer support, and so on. By listening to your customers, and making decisions based on what you hear, you quickly become much more relevant to them.

When giving the option to make business decisions around assumed customer profiles or actual ones, the choice should be a no-brainer.  Don’t just assume you know what value your customers place on your service or product, actually know. Don’t just assume you know what you customers are happy with and what they are frustrated with, actually know. And then, once you actually know, maximize the value of that information. If you haven’t already, it’s time to embrace customer feedback and here are 5 tips to get you started…

1) Have a strategy and be committed to it. There are three main pieces to any good feedback program:

• Asking for feedback. First and foremost your strategy should NOT start with, “If we get customer feedback we will …”. Waiting around for customers to contact you with feedback is not a strategy; you need to go after it and do so on an on-going basis.
• Planning how you will use the feedback. This not only helps you generate the type of feedback you seek, but helps ensure that it doesn’t just disappear into a black hole. You need to know what you are going to do with the feedback once you receive it. Who will it be shared with? What business decisions will it influence?  Knowing these things are critical for any feedback program, no matter how big or small.
• Using it (and letting you customers know that you did). The entire point of generating feedback is to aid in the ongoing success of your business. Make sure that you not only have a plan for how to use it, but actually use it. And don’t forget to let your customers know that they do have a voice, that they are influencers of your brand – the more they realize that the more loyal to your brand they will become and the more open they will be to sharing with you in the future.

2) Be timely with your requests. Use key points of interaction to solicit feedback from your customers. This ensures that you receive it while their experience is still fresh and/or most relevant and results in more specific feedback. The less timely you are, the more general the feedback will be.

3) Be relevant with your requests. Don’t ask your customers to provide feedback on every part of your business all at once. Collecting feedback is an ongoing process and should be requested at many points of interaction (see #2), so keep each request short and relevant to the corresponding interaction. Want to know how you can improve your newsletter, link to a survey within your newsletter. Want to know if customers are happy with their in-store experience, use point-of-purchase cards or place a request on their receipt. Want to know how they like your new product, contact them shortly after, but give them enough time to have used it. Be selective in what you ask and when you ask it.

4) Keep it simple. The easier it is for your customers to give feedback, the more likely they will be to give it. Provide various ways for them to answer- online, by email, by phone, in-person, etc. And keep it brief with simple, direct questions.

Your customers are your businesses’ most valuable asset and listening to what they have to say is a win-win for you both. With the information in hand to make better informed business decisions that will improve your business in the ways that are most important to your customers, the results will be happier, more loyal customers and, ultimately, a happier thriving business.

So on that note… for all of you who have linked to this post from our newsletter, we want to know what you think! Didn’t link from the newsletter? We’d love to know what you think too. In the coming months you will see some significant changes to our newsletter and we want your input on the types of articles and features we should include. Please take our short survey and help us make our newsletter the best it can be. Thanks in advance.

TAKE THE SURVEY

If you are up and about and wandering the streets of Portland contemplating the businesses you watch come and go you may want to peek at the August 2010 Oregon Business Magazines article titled “The New Deal” written by Ben Jacklet. Yes! There are people working behind the scenes of Portland’s start up ventures and they are working hard to secure Portland’s economy in more ways than one.

These guys know small businesses drive the economy and in Portland that is just what we need now, being known as a pretty slow start up scene when compared with fast runners Seattle and San Francisco. They may not seem so glamorous to the naked eye but these small start ups need investors to get them off the ground and angel investors in Portland have not been so quick to spread their wings.

Oregon Business Magazine has just published the article to explain who is out there and what they are doing to get these small businesses and startups funded and on a steady growth pattern. The young business leaders featured here bring with them a wealth of new ideas to “ignite the startup scene”. These are the guys who are investing in Portland’s small startups not only financially but with new ideas and dynamic views on how to succeed.

Find out who they are and what they have been doing.

It is hard these days not to notice the amount of people on the streets, in their cars, riding buses and even enjoying a meal while navigating through a mobile device.  What does this mean for marketing? The amount of time consumers are spending on mobile devices is increasing day by day. What have marketers done to tap into the new, dynamic phase of mobile marketing and how does social media fit in?

eROI decided to find out by conducting a study of over 500 marketers to see what their current attitudes were towards mobile marketing and social media trends.

Get a brief on our study from ClickZ

Our study was geared towards learning:

• The interest in mobile marketing to marketers, if any.
• The importance of mobile marketing and social media to the marketer.
• How the marketer is integrating the media and how much research is being done to optimize it.

The study was successful and informative if not a bit surprising. If 91% of the US population uses a mobile device, what are the marketers really doing to access those consumers? Get the full study here…

Slowly fading are the days where consumers only learned about brands and products through one-to-one word of mouth and advertising. Social networking has done away with one-way conversations and created an ecosystem of open, candid dialogue. To be truly successful, brand managers and marketers must embrace this; they must do more than speak – they must listen, they must engage, they must adapt. They must stop pushing their brands to consumers and start pulling consumers to their brands. They need to be open to letting their consumers co-create their brands with them.

This notation can be a hard one to embrace. For many, it is the complete opposite of how they are used to managing their brands – a well orchestrated set of controlled messages that consumers experience where, when and how the brand chooses. For many, it feels like giving up all control, and that can be an uneasy feeling. But it need not be.

Sure, this new landscape of consumer empowerment means that there are things a brand can no longer control, but that doesn’t mean a brand can’t have an influence on those things. By fostering dialogue and building strong relationships with your consumers, you  empower them to do more than just complain. By giving them forums in which their voices can be heard, and showing them that their opinions do matter, not only will they be less likely to post unconstructive criticism all over the web, but they will be more likely to share positive feedback and advocate for your brand.

Making this shift isn’t hard, but it’s not something you should dive into blindly. Taking some time to understand the dynamics of this strategy, plan your approach and align resources will be key to success.

Here are a few things for you to consider as you being down this new road…

• Extend beyond market research. Simply trying to predict what consumers want isn’t as effective as having them tell you first hand. And they will tell you. Listen attentively. Ask their opinions. Engage with them.

• Form REAL relationships. Remember that “fake” girl in high school who was really nice to everyone’s face – don’t be her. Everyone saw through her and they will see though you too. You need to have real, meaningful dialogue with your consumers. If they trust that you really care, they will openly share their thoughts and opinions with you, they will want to deepen their personal relationship with your brand and many will become your brand ambassadors.
• Prepare for a long-term commitment. You must develop your marketing and communication strategies around an ongoing effort to listen and engage. This is not a short term initiative; there is no “project completion” date for it. Your consumer’s lives, needs and wants are ever changing and the most successful brands will be those that pick up on those changes as they happen and adapt as need to support them.
• Know what you want to acquire and what you will do once you get it. Before you being creating your new relationships, make sure you have a plan for the information and insights you will receive. Determine the ways in which your consumers can a help to mold your brand. What information and feedback is most valuable to you? What will be your process for aggregating and passing along the information internally? How will your company actually use the information? These are just a few things you should consider in your strategic plan.
• Determine what you want to relay. You can’t control all of messaging around your brand, but you can certainly control some of it. Solidify the main messages you want to put out there. Make sure they are precise, easy to understand, easy to remember and easy to share.
• Create a custom execution strategy. There is not a one-size-fits-all strategy that you can follow. What works best for one brand, may not work at all for another. There are countless channels you can use to build and foster your relationships with your consumers, you just need to determine which of them to use. From LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, to industry blogs, custom online communities, feedback tools, live online support, profile based content delivery, sharable content, polling and surveying and so on, you have many options for customizing an execution strategy. In deciding which channels to use, consider the plan you’ve created for the type of information you want to acquire. Consider the resources (time and budget) you are able to allocate. Consider your primary and alternative target audiences – What are their current online habits? Where are they spending their time online? In what ways do you anticipate they will interact with you most? Are they already talking about your brand? If so, where? And consider what other marketing and communication tactics you will use to support these relationship building efforts.

If this is a completely new approach for you and your company, there is no doubt that it may take  time to make the shift. You will need to start with some discovery and planning before diving in, and as you begin the cycle of listening, discussing, learning and changing, your strategy will likely shift and improve along the way.

There are a lot of great reads out there on adapting your brand to this new landscape, a favorite of mine is “The Open Brand” by Kelly Mooney and Nita Rollins, Ph.D. (http://theopenbrand.resource.com/). I encourage you to do your own research, have your own conversations and do all you can to fully understand this new landscape. Don’t be overwhelmed by it. Embrace it, commit to what you can for now and grow from there.