Real-time customer feedback: how to efficiently deal with dissatisfactions

If, like more and more businesses, you have decided to set up a system designed for listening to your customers in real-time, you probably know that customer dissatisfaction is a great opportunity for business improvement.

Of course, ideally you would have no unhappy customers, but this is unfortunately not the reality in retail. According to a study by Bain & Co, businesses who succeed in reducing customer loss by just 5%, achieve a 25 to 80% increase in profits. Being able to identify these unhappy customers is a great first step towards improving business performance.

However, when leveraging real-time customer feedback, how should businesses react when faced with a significant volume of dissatisfactions? This is a fair question which deserves attention as the outcome is of utmost importance.

The short answer isn there is no one size fits all. It all depends on the organization, the equipment available, and the business policy of each network. However 3 types of winning combinations to deal with dissatisfactions stand out, and do not require recruiting a dedicated team:

1. Addressing issues “locally” : the store or point of sales manager is in charge of dealing with unhappy customers. If you have an average 10 or less negative or average reviews per week over 20 different networks, this should be perfectly manageable and will empower local staff to take direct action. This is the best choice when the profile and background of your store managers is compatible with this type of responsibilities. A sales manager who is able to correctly manage the basics of in-store service and customer relations will without a doubt be able to manage calling back unhappy customers or selecting the perfect email message to answer their concerns. Automatic reminders, standard replies and adequate training are all that is required to set up this type of support.
2. Addressing them at a “regional” level : The responsibility here lies with the Regional manager. Regional managers are often former store managers, with plenty of experience and used to answering complex customer issues. They are therefore the perfect choice for dealing with unhappy customers at a regional scale. This support system is to be preferred when dissatisfaction levels are low, or if the cost of training which would be required for local store managers turns out to be too expensive. If the number of complaints is too high to be managed by Regional managers, then a hyrbid solution may be considered.
3. Addressing them the hybrid way : This requires both local teams, head-office staff and the customer service team. The work is split out to guarantee the best answer for each customer. The division of tasks and assignment of dissatisfactions is established according to their nature. Local teams would for example deal with dissatisfactions surrounding the actual point of sales (friendliness of staff, waiting times, advice given…), where higher level staff would answer any questions related to a specific item, product assortment, and any other complaints requiring the intervention of a specifically trained person. This combination is best suited to companies with large numbers of customer reviews or specific issues which must be dealt with at a head-office level.

What WizVille recommends

WizVille, recommends organizing support according to existing roles and functions in the company, but above anything else, the main thing is to never leave a complaint without a personalized answer from the right person. For these three types of support to work, here are some important features your real-time customer feedback solution should include (WizVille does!) :

• A simple, intuitive online interface which can be used by any team member, including local staff.
• Automatically assigning dissatisfactions to better divide the workload (by user group, subject, average score…)
• Dissatisfaction alerts (instant or periodic reports) based on the score
• Reminder emails for dissatisfactions which have yet to be dealt with
• A “responsive” interface for following up on dissatisfactions
• Standard reply messages for various types of dissatisfactions, to make life easier for your team members
• The ability to add a descriptive account of a phone call for easier follow-up
• A multi-channel conversation box (via SMS and Email) with customers.

The more complex your organization and management policy, the more assignment rules you will need to set up and the more likely you are to need a powerful solution like WizVille to help you through this work.

Contact us to discuss your specific project