What is Your Customer’s #1 Complaint?
It’s been said that “necessity is the mother of invention.” While I tend to agree, I think that understanding your customers, especially their complaints, is the mother of invention. The problem is, most companies are not getting the right feedback to innovate their current products or services, or create new ones.
Many companies have processes in place to connect with customers post-sale. Typically this information is collected from the sales and customer service departments, where they try to help the customer understand the use of the product or the timeline of the service. Rarely, they outright ask customers if there’s anything that would improve their experience. And sometimes, but not often enough, this feedback is fed back to those who develop products and services. The system of sharing customer information is broken.
There’s a huge impact from this mishandling of information. Companies often lose revenue from unsolved issues or missed opportunities to add features and services to existing products to better delight their customers. Sometimes, they lose customers to competitors with better understanding of the customer complaints and needs. Most often, this lack of customer data in the right hands can cause and is the result of an internal culture lacking trust. Corporate culture issues oftentimes impact the customer, causing them to take their business and feedback elsewhere.
The thing is, culture and customer feedback processes can be fixed. By including clear innovative methods, like ideation, prototyping, and testing, companies can get customer feedback early and often, thus shifting their products and services quickly to serve customer needs as they are discovered. The strength of your business model will gain trust with your customers, and with your staff, creating a culture that everyone buys into – with time, effort, and revenue.
Can your company afford to continue to lose opportunities, customers, and revenue by not having a dedicated innovation team and strategy?
