The customer is always ‘right’ and now they are letting you know how they feel.
Going online has changed commerce exponentially. It has improved supply chain management, viral marketing is now an option, and almost anyone can leap out of the blue, into the limelight, and discover how quickly how success can cause its own problems. Buttressing this blissful new opportunity is one of its own – Feedback.
Any goob with Marketing in their degree or under their belt (you bet your sweet ass I’m calling myself out) knows that brand communities are a double edged sword – they will drive your business right out of your hands as much as into the ground but if you work with them, they will carry you into a new era of success and rampant sales.
Feedback Culture allows business to be more of an even conversation – it hobbles the once hackneyed superior force approach many businesses leveraged (though it is clearly still kicking around, eh Apple?) because customer has a voice now; one that can be broadcast as easily as any viral marketing post as quick as one can knock out a meme.
With the presence of this new commercial phenomenon, it’s really easy to let the voice of many sway you in any direction – towards buying something or to flat avoid something – based on what you research or find on the internet when making a purchase. That’s normal; often you ask around when considering a purchase, this is just another version of that.
Based on my experiences of surfing the review waves, I have a few thoughts and suggestions on how to cut through the madness. It’s easy to get overwhelmed, turned off, turned on, obsessed, and craving things you may or may not need or discover you need later and passed on unfortunately.
1. Verified Purchase Reviews – It’s important when you read up on an establishment/company/service that you make sure the reviews are from actual customers. Frequently you will run into knock off vendors who are selling knockoffs away from the original product/service and flood the review channel with fake reviews to bolster the product into legitimacy.
Also, you are going to run into people who haven’t purchased the product at all and for whatever reason, downvote/throw shade on it. I just bought some hand towels that a potential customer (didn’t buy) bitched about it being polyester… Only the trim was polyester, the towel was 100% cotton otherwise – they gave this towel they saw only and gave it a single star because what they thought they read.
2. Discern whether or not the feedback is relevant (to you) – I’m notorious for purchasing products/materials not for their original intended purpose (i.e. a specific Rubbermaid container for Sous Vide use and not at all for restaurant use as it’s intended) so one of the tricks I’ve learned is to read the top reviews and the bottom reviews of anything I’m looking at.
Not all the information given is valuable – frequently customers get confused with how to leave a shipment review and leave it on the product, other times it’s an outdated issue from 3 years ago that the company addressed. Maybe you are buying a spice rack that does an awful job of holding spices, but you are using it for a figurine display, etc.
3. Leave Feedback for goods and services, for all the reasons – Often times, we only leave feedback when we’re really upset and sometimes when we are really impressed. Which is great! Businesses need to know what the customer is feeling; especially when a business is doing something right and when they are doing something very wrong. But we need to leave it all the time if possible, at least when it’s just okay.
Mediocre service/product enjoyment is just as important as it rounds out the perspective on the purchase. Maybe it was good/okay but could use some tweaks. Maybe the service was good, but the food wasn’t – maybe it was the other way around. Maybe you were impressed with the service, but karaoke isn’t quite your scene when you are getting sushi. Say these things, it helps, and it’s valued.
4. Check multiple sites for feedback on major purchases – One of the important actions I learned the semi hard way (I made it work after all) is making sure to check all the reviews on various sites to make sure it’s a good aggregate choice. Customers tend to stick to one site over another and tend to review accordingly to just that site – seeing multiple sites for a major purchase is a good call for legitimacy.
An example was that I just brought a Samsung Tab A; all the reviews were good for the most part, checked a few sites, and completely missed that Samsung didn’t make it a true HD device with Google Widevine testing – meaning a lot of streaming services will not give you HD for security purposes. I would have caught this (and still bought it, I’m on a budget! :D) if I just checked one more site.
Hopefully this points are valuable to you and help encourage people to get into the Feedback culture and continue to use it to help companies shape what their products and services are like. They do listen to the customer, if the points are well stated, and enough information is given. Thanks for reading folks!
D.
Gilded Gibberish. 