WHY EMBRACING CUSTOMER CONCERNS AND COMPLAINTS IS THE BEST WAY TO STRENGTHEN RELATIONSHIPS AND GROW YOUR BUSINESS
Understanding and satisfying the customer’s needs are the highest priority for any business. And getting input from your customers is critical to your success. It does not matter how long or how successful your dealership operations may be, you will never cease to better your business except by learning from your customers. Their opinions count, as they are your eyes, ears, mirrors and coach for whom you are striving to make things better. They’ll sense that you are pursuing a quest for improvement and their feedback is the best way to get in front of them without actually trying to sell them anything.
As the old adage goes, if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it! And if you can’t quantify it, you can’t measure it! The customer defines your service as a coach and nothing can replace customers telling you how they like to be treated, what you are doing right or wrong and what could be done better. It is a wonderful way to constantly improve your service. You’ll learn everything from how they perceive your attitudes of service to how they feel you keep them informed when they have problems. But you won’t learn anything at all if you don’t ask!
Feedback Channels
Increasingly, social media is becoming the first choice channel for most customers when it comes to communicating with your dealership. From a negative Facebook post to an in-person complaint, there is a proliferation of channels by which customers can complain to a dealership and it can prove overwhelming. On the flipside, a positive tweet or Facebook post mentioning good customer service can be a marketing boom for the dealership, while also providing everyday customers with near real-time feedback.
It’s important to look at customer feedback gathered through social media — both negative and positive — in aggregate, not just at the individual comment level. By collecting a larger pool of feedback data (and also combining and comparing it with other sources of feedback) dealerships can be proactive in mining insights from social media channels. In doing so, customer feedback provides an opportunity to uncover unexpected trends, both negative and positive.
Since customers may not share ideas and problems unless they are asked, the creativity of customers may go unnoticed. According to the Harvard Business Review a five per cent increase in customer retention yields anywhere from a 25 -125 per cent increase in profits. By measuring CSI, we deepen our relationship with customers, and we monitor customers’ level of satisfaction, expectations, and perceptions by creating an environment that encourages them to share their ideas and concerns. The seeking of feedback from customers can in itself result in positive customer retention.
Strengths and weaknesses
Sometimes the most effective method of evaluating customer satisfaction is to evaluate your own performance. If you examine the areas of your dealership that have the most concerns to resolve, you may identify strengths and weaknesses
without going to the customer.
Many customer concerns are not effectively addressed when they occur and the customer continues to feel anger or frustration over the situation. By taking the initiative to express customer concerns or satisfaction, a customer may feel closure in a given situation while also sharing critical information with the dealership.
A wonderful benefit of measuring effectiveness is that we can discover what we are doing well. Customers are often quite satisfied by our offerings but unless they are allowed to share their satisfaction, the offering may be changed or updated to a degree that the customer may become dissatisfied.
“One of the surest signs of a bad or declining relationship with a customer is the absence of complaints. Nobody is ever that satisfied, especially not over an extended period of time. The customer is either not being candid or not being contacted” — Theodore Levitt, economist and professor, Harvard Business School.
A while back I had an upset customer complaining about water leaking under their vehicle. I expressed regret and thanked the customer for bringing the issue to my attention. The customer in question was amazed at the response and asked what made it possible for me to embrace complaints with passion and patience instead of rebuffing such concerns. I used the analogy of being on a ship at sea and if water had been leaking on the lower deck, it could have resulted in disaster and the loss of many lives if the matter hadn’t been brought to the captain’s attention.
As a result, listening and respecting the voice of our customers is the most important task for us to improve customer care — their feedback serves as a valuable learning tool for us. As Bill Gates said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
Creating a positive and consistent customer experience is one of the biggest challenges facing dealerships today, and the customer’s voice is core to meeting this challenge in order to create a competitive advantage.
When it comes to customer relationships, silence is not a viable solution. “Encourage and welcome your customers to express their feedback (good or bad), and look at it as an opportunity to improve your business, not as a threat” — Chip R. Bell, author of Managing Knock Your Socks Off Service.
Customer care is paramount, for as we know, if handled properly, feedback leads to loyalty and lifetime retention.
