Management begins with good Customer and Market Feedback
To stay ahead, constant improvement is not optional... We find how to develop, by consulting the source.

Feedback by definition is to receive information back on how we are doing, and it is a live interactive tool that allows us and our Allies to gain insight into our customer’s heart and minds, and develop more effective business practices, and create additional services that appeal to the customer base in a powerful way. Feedback is not about our though process, our beliefs, and assumptions, but the customers', and the customer takes the buying decision, not us.

Feedback has a central role in our activity, partly because we choose to live in reality. Our success depends on the choices our customers make, and we will seek the best, most honest information we can find about what is in our customer's minds and hearts. If we built the most amazing website, full of features we love and feel are great for the customers, and we were confident that our business proposition is meaningful, but the customer base doesn’t like it, it is time for drastic changes.

We take the collection of customer feedback as the single highest priority in what we do, and are committed to listening to our customers, and sharing new feedback information with our allied partner, in order to ensure the insight is captured as a potential benefit to the business. Whether it is already known by the partner, or is good, bad, or indifferent, each small piece adds to the big picture, and initiates topics of conversation that often lead to new potential.

There are several types of feedback that we find very useful. Surveys are great to understand customer preferences. We use survey forms on our websites to generate information, but they are not widely used, so the volume of information is not enough to be conclusive in any way. However, valuable insights come up, and sometimes great ideas are provided in the comments section. As business people we feel a special appreciation for those customers who take the time to help us by providing us their constructive ideas, because over the years, we see their influence in the shape of the business we love.

Customer testimonial statements are another important source of feedback. Ironically enough, the bulk of referral statements will say ‘I loved the service, and everything went great! 100%! And that makes the feedback great to hear, but useless as a building tool. The feedback that is useful is the kind that says ‘Pleasant service, on time, clean, professional, and good quality, 80%’. This golden nugget of a testimonial enables us to contact an unbiased customer (neither elated, nor angry), and politely ask them ‘As a company we want to perform at 100%, and your rating was 80%, and we were wondering, what would we need to do to earn the final 20% on your next visit?’ Customers usually like the bold interest in them and in excellence, and open up to our line of questions. Great information usually comes up from these customers, and it is some of the best feedback we can get.

Perhaps the most important source of feedback is our Ally. Allies are in front of the customer all the time, and understand the needs and wants of the target market, better than anyone else, simply because they speak of it all the time with them. We ask our allies to review every last line on the website to ensure that it is in line with what the customer is looking for, and during the course of business we ask if the customers that are coming in have the right expectations and idea of the service, as well as if they are leaving with a sense of satisfaction. We also ask that our Allies help deliver the feedback form to their customers as they provide services. These forms that come back become the online reviews of the website, and we have found that customers do indeed read them and use the information as a resource in taking their decision to purchase services from our websites.

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