Can You Hear Your Customers Now?

According to a recent study, companies who are growing during this recession are focusing on customer feedback and making changes accordingly, while those who are ignoring feedback are losing ground fast.

"The ROI on Customer Feedback: Why it Pays to Listen to the Voice of the Customer," categorized organizations based on their use of customer feedback in relation customer problem resolution, customer satisfaction, customer retention and customer advocacy. Companies were then divided into “best-in-class,” “industry average” and “laggard” categories based on the analysis.  

Best-in-class companies, who are twice as likely as the other companies to have an established process to track customer feedback across all departments, were 18 times more likely to increase customer satisfaction and 44.5 times more likely to increase customer retention, according to a study of 150 companies by Empathica, a provider of customer experience management programs, and Aberdeen Group.

Another finding: Best-in-class companies were 2.3 times more likely than laggards to have improved their year-over-year performance in new product/service innovation with the deployment of a customer
feedback solution.

“By putting in place the right technologies, organizational resources, business processes and performance metrics, organizations can leverage customer satisfaction to grow and succeed during these difficult times," said Aberdeen Group's Jeff Zabin.

That may sound complicated and costly. But in the c-store environment listening and acting don't have to difficult or expensive. The c-store industry is extremely well-positioned to do all of the things those best-in-class companies do: proactively inform customers of how their complaints and suggestions have been or will be acted upon,  hire for positions that have "customer feedback" in the job description, analyze and segment customer feedback data to create actionable insights.

It doesn't take expensive technology to dedicate someone at headquarters to answer customer emails or encourage managers to get back to regular customers about a complaint or suggestion made to front-line employees and then passing those concerns up the line. The opportunities to gather customer feedback and act on it are endless in a retail store.

In his "Bird's Eye View" blog on the chain's Web site, Wawa's CEO Howard Stoeckel addresses everything from the stores' "same price, cash or credit" policy for gasoline purchases to COO David Johnston's performing the meringue. A one-store operator recently told me he empowers store employees to act on customer concerns or complaints with the ability to spend $15 on the spot to do that.

Large chain or independent, responding to customers' concerns and vigorous two-way communication can make a huge difference to customer loyalty and retention, as well as, I believe, employee satisfaction.

 -- Barb Grondin Francella

Comments

[eve isk]

hanks for mentioning our study. The Aberdeen report on the ROI of customer feedback is available on the Empathica Web site

[Lauren]

Thanks for mentioning our study. The Aberdeen report on the ROI of customer feedback is available on the Empathica Web site and can be downloaded at: http://www.empathica.com/download_aberdeen.html