Many businesses consider it vital to listen to their customers, they spend time and effort listening to their demands. It is important to be a listening organisation and know the value of your customer base, understand likes and dislikes which is in part about managing the gap in the feedback, but it goes beyond that a Listening business must seek to understand the customer's perception on any issue.
The Customer's Perception is Significant
The customer's own perception is what counts the most, even when they are misunderstanding the supplier's intentions or it's product capabilities.
Put simply this reflects that old adage that the customer is normally right and it usually does highlight the significance of the customer towards developing any vendor's product or service. The customer's perception may be impacted long before they buy anything especially in the age of the Internet. Change something about the brand and its image, for example the storefront logo, the web site, the delivery trucks, etc. and you can impact how people see you in the marketplace, whether good or bad andis impacted by brand presence on social media, in that peoples responses will be instantaneous for any change announced whether or not they use the product.
It is a world of instant feedback, especially if the perception is bad.Every company must be monitoring for discussion about their brands and involve themselves with any relevant discussion.
To some extent this functions like a two pronged sword in that it's both a personal customer services related effort in addition to providing an advertising and marketing impact. Social intervention should act to both monitor and understand the important issues to your marketplace. It's not about serious selling, more about building a persistent professional presence.
As such a lot more thought should be used when entering into the general discussions that increase value within the overall industry or market.
Should We Be Listening?
From these ideas published here it is possible to see that people will find many ways to respond to their recent purchases both inside the business and consumer arena, leveraging tools like Twitter, Google Plus, Facebook, Pinterest and others can be great tools to tell everyone you know about the latest offers and we must recognise the world is more mobile than ever before with a buyer using their smart-phone and talking to their friends on Facebook about the things they are thinking of buying.
For a company being part of the feedback look can be advantageous, albeit complex to achieve.Although we do not desire it, we should keep in mind that it is possible to discover more from the most negative of feedback, especially instant feedback, which can be used to alter the marketing approach.
Ultimately we must also recognise that things do fail every once in a while which this gives us a chance to understand to improve things, but the challenge is seeing it from the client's own viewpoint.There is much thought developing in the realm of proactive customer feedback and the ability to leverage some form of feedback look in real-time to manage any customer interaction, lets face it your web-site should already be equipped to adjust itself to the customer choices, based on the data collected from their successive visits.
An Ongoing Discussion
The ongoing dialogue between any supplier and their customer, doesn't simply end when they have paid the bill. Knowing the way the customer feels is the first part of the solution. Managing any feedback the second and thirdly, the topic here, understanding the customer's perceptions of your business as a supplier is vital if you wish to adapt and become responsive. Change in relation to what we learn can be a tough proposition.
