Let Your Customers Speak Out

"Always Remember: If customer don't have effective way to voice complaint, they just quit doing biz w/ the co."
This sentence is a quote from @tedcoine I found out on Twitter. I believe it is a very interesting one in term of customer relationship management. Indeed, social media have changed the way companies interract with customers.


They can not anylonger avoid listening to angry customers, and they must now deal with it. This is the job of community managers, a new trade which is blossoming.


It is not a natural behavior for a company to let its customers to speak out its complaints and issues. A company sells products, and is seeking for efficiency, which implies standard processes in order to save time and costs.


But ultimately, customer satisfaction is the key factor which will bring success or not to one company.


A lot of companies have looked for ways to silence unhappy customers. They believed that by doing so, they will be able to keep the happy ones happy, and that eventually, unhappy ones would come back.


But it is no longer possible. And this is the reason why they must deal with it now.




This is the reason why it is important to have a strong feedback management system. A one which is able to deal with the large number of media one customer may use to get in contact with the company:

• A call center if it is via telephone.
• A customer service if it is by mail or email
• A community manager if it is by a social media
• A sales person if it is in a store
• An after sales service if it is because of a broken product.

Those media are expensive to manage, and to keep active. But they are vital, because it will minimize the lost of clientele in case of problems.


Also, something very important to think about is how to manage and leverage the large amount of information you may get from all those different sources.


The infromation will come from various ways, but it is important to have a tool which will allow the analyse of all the dysfunction customers may experience.

Social Media To Manage Customer Complains

Social Media gives a great powers to users, allowing them to broadcast any kind of problems they experienced with a brand. Before the arrival of social media, it was difficult for customers to be listened by companies as they had to form customer associations to have a chance to be read by a company and taken into considerations. Now with social media, any individual has the chance to make noises.

Therefore, you may expect an increase into customer complains via this new medium. There are two main ways to react about it:
You don’t want to interact with it. This is what most companies would do. As they are afraid of what they don’t know, meaning having a clear interaction with customers, they would rather ignore it to focus on the same old mass media to hide the growing word of mouth on line.
You could decide to monitor this feedback, and try to analyze it for better use. You should take this new trend as an opportunity to improve your products, your customer relationship management. Facing customer complains is the best way to avoid major problems that could cause you much problems.

I like the concept of enterprise feedback management, solutions that aims to get feedback from people whenever they get in touch with the brand, either by phone, in store or on the web. These comprehensive solutions are very interesting, and they should also focus on social media, because as a matter of fact it might be the best way to interact with customers.

Enterprise Feedback Management And Community Management

Enterprise Feedback Management is an integrated approach to the management of all forms of feedback available to an organization. Therefore, wether you reached the customer service through the website, a visit at the store or on the phone, enterprise feedback management will be able to qualify the quality of the interaction.

Media are becoming more and more complex. Therefore enterprise feedback management is a great component of a crm strategy since it analyses the interraction the company has with customers upon the media. A great feedback could drive changes in the multichannel strategy.

I believe that the new social media are becoming an actual medium, where customers can interact with the company. Therefore, it would be interesting for enterprise feedback management to analyse the interaction through this medium.

Hence, after an interaction with a community manager, the customer could be satisfied or experienced problems. I believe that enterprise feedback management companies could leverage this new medium to provide a greater service, analysing interraction within social media.

It would be pretty simple to implement such an initiative. That would imply creating a form where customers could share their experience and thoughts.

What do you think about it? Do you believe enterprise feedback management could become a part of community management?