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The power of customer feedback

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21st Oct 2010
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Independent customer feedback is invaluable for attracting new business. Chris Barling outlines how to use it to its best advantage to grow sales.

I would like to start by asking a couple of questions. In your personal life, do you take your lead from TV advertising or prefer recommendations from friends? When you look at a website, do you discount the testimonials section, knowing that only the happy guys get their opinions aired, or do you prefer something a little more real?
It’s in the answers to these questions that the genius of independent customer feedback lies.
The pressing argument for feedback
Nowadays, every significant online business gets feedback on its performance sprayed across the web, wanted or not. Before the internet, dissatisfied customers could talk to a few mates and complain to Trading Standards, but none of this seriously bothered real businesses. That’s all changed now. Setting up a blog and publishing complaints is simple, it’s even easier to visit an online review site and make accusations. Blasting out a contentious point of view is a piece of cake on Twitter. Employees, suppliers, customers and prospective investors are all likely to read these comments. One upset customer can cause ten times as much havoc as in the past.
Managed or prompted feedback is the antidote to this problem.
The straight forward case 
Collecting customer feedback on your website draws negative comments, but also ensures that there’s plenty of good opinion to balance out any bad. It provides great management information and brings problems quickly to the fore, enabling prompt action to be taken before things get out of hand. Implemented carefully, feedback can add significant depth and integrity to product pages. It’s hard for competitors to copy, and the varied and current key-word heavy text is attractive to search engines. Google now has specific feedback tags for feedback, putting the information straight into its results page.
So it’s difficult to understand why a serious web retailer would not solicit and publish user written feedback on their products and services.
Hard sales results
Assuming that you are confident in the quality of your service, comments from previous buyers will make it easier for prospects to make the decision to buy. And according to various studies, it’s likely that you will see a 10% rise in sales from a well implemented feedback system. In addition, there are likely to be additional benefits from improved search engine positions.
No editing
It seems obvious that feedback should be under your control, but this turns out to be a complex argument. You can either deal with customer comments by managing them yourself or turn the job over to an independent third party. This latter option may seem strange – why lose the ability to edit venomous comments?
There are actually strong arguments in favour of independent management. If you tamper with feedback, you risk an even stronger negative reaction by the contributor. With their comments off their chest and displayed on your site, they will at least be partially placated.
Clearly independently managed feedback, when identified as such, has much more credibility. However, you must have the right of reply to negative feedback. You can then talk about how your business dealt with the issue.
I suspect I’m not alone in always searching for some negative feedback when I’m looking online. Anything 100% positive is pretty much invalid in my mind. Every business makes mistakes so lack of criticism identifies the feedback as merely marketing copy. The critical stuff proves the validity of the positive, and the way the business deals with problems enhances its image. Making the management of feedback independent prevents over-zealous staff destroying a major benefit with the delete key.
A closed shop for feedback
Counter-intuitively, it’s best to solicit, and only allow feedback for each order placed and paid for. This approach will produce much more positive feedback as you are prompting people at their point of maximum interest in your brand. It also deals with most of the issues around feedback from competitors, ex employees with grievances and repeated feedback from disgruntled customers. These are real problems with an unrestricted feedback system, so the approach saves a lot of hassle.
Who to use?
I must declare an interest here as my business Actinic has a strategic partnership with independent feedback manager Feefo, which stands for Feedback Forum. Obviously I feel this is a great company but there are many other businesses providing feedback capabilities such as Bazaarvoice and Reevoo. Some ecommerce systems also have built in feedback systems, although these are never independent.
Feedback as normal
The last couple of years has seen the rocket-propelled rise of Twitter and Facebook, resulting in huge business interest in social networking. Although there has been plenty of talk, there seems to have been relatively few hard and scalable business success stories. It’s possible to argue that customer feedback is the exception, a social networking phenomenon with proven benefits to business.
Indeed, now that social networking is the norm, buyers expect an interactive experience, and one-way marketing copy is regarded with even more cynicism. We all know that listening to customers is critical, but it was a virtue that in the past could be ignored with some impunity.
So providing customer feedback capabilities has both positive and negative arguments in favour. You can help customers provide positive reviews in order to contribute to growing your sales. You can ignore the point and lose all control of negative feedback. It’s an important issue and one that every web store needs to consider carefully.
Chris Barling is CEO of Actinic which specialises in helping start-ups and SMEs sell online with its ecommerce software and in-store EPOS systems. 
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By chrisjoynes
28th Oct 2010 12:20

Great article

Chris - just wanted to say that I think this is a great article. We've been looking into UsersVoice recently and will be rolling out a feedback service in the new year, thanks for the useful points.

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