Why aren’t your customers completing their surveys?

These non-responders tend to spend less, and are more likely to abandon your brand.  When they’re unhappy with your services and products, they don’t give you the chance to close the loop.

Have you considered that they’re not engaging with your organization because they don’t believe their opinions matter to you?  Since their comments would just be a drop in the massive ocean of feedback, how do they know that you’ll make any lasting changes to your organization based on what they say?

You have to actively demonstrate that your customers’ comments are valuable to you, and that business decisions are being made based on their feedback.  Your company’s customer-centricity must be made explicit with concrete evidence.  If closing the loop and getting back to each individual customer is difficult or impossible due to organizational constraints or privacy laws, then publicizing what you actually do with customer feedback becomes all the more important.

Citi Cards is a great example of a company that does just this.  Every few months, Jud Linville, the CEO of Citi Cards, writes a “You Spoke, We Listened” post for Citigroup’s company blog. In the blog series, Jud emphasises that the company hears and understands each of the customer pain points addressed in the post, and explains the actions that Citi has taken to remedy those issues. Jud demonstrates to his customers that the CEO himself is listening and is putting his weight behind making their suggestions heard and acted upon by the company.

A quick glance through the rest of the blog shows that most posts have either one to two comments or none at all. The “You Spoke, We Listened” posts, however, each have hundreds of comments from concerned and happy customers alike, and the number of comments increases with each new post. Whenever Jud speaks about how Citi is taking action on customer feedback, the Citi customer community roars to life.

You might think that you just need to provide a frictionless feedback process, and that your job is done once you’ve acted on that feedback.  But showing your non-responding customers that you’re taking real action on customer feedback will encourage them to engage with your company, and increase their loyalty to your brand.
Photo credit: Sakeeb Sabakka