Both negative and positive customer feedback can build profitability. Don’t ignore either. Acknowledge and in some way reward positive comments; respond and attempt to remediate negative ones. This includes everything from online reviews and forums to emails, snail mail letters and phone calls.

Feedback in any form, whether complimentary or critical, should be considered by any company willing to take it to heart and improve because of it. While the relative ease of posting a negative comment online is changing the landscape, the overwhelming number of unhappy customers don’t register their concerns. They either minimize their purchases or look for a competitor that will treat them better. People registering opinions of any kind offer a dynamic look into overall company performance and can verify where a company is on track or derailed.

An infographic published in Inc. Magazine (developed by Vision Critical, which offers a cloud-based customer intelligence platform), provides some clues about the importance of both positive and negative intelligence. Among key findings are:

Customers are three times more likely to report negative experiences than positive ones;

Totally satisfied customers contribute 14 times more revenue than somewhat dissatisfied ones and 2.6 times more than somewhat satisfied ones;

Google reports that businesses with three or more stars get 87% of the clicks;

Customers achieving issue resolution tell 4-6 people about their positive experience;

59% of customers would be willing to try a new brand to get better customer service.

These are powerful influencers on a company’s bottom line. How can you help turn happy customers into even happier ones and resolve issues leading to reputation-damaging negative feedback?

1. Do a feedback audit. Scour the Internet for online reviews, forum discussions and anything else you can find. Try different keyword combinations addressing both positive and negative experiences. Gather together pertinent emails, letters and phone call transcripts/recordings. Then synthesize everything into a report showing who’s happy, who’s not happy, and why.

2. Develop and implement a customer satisfaction gameplan. For satisfied customers, create some type of acknowledgement and reward system. Keep it classy, not cheesy, and make rewards meaningful. Consider a reward for previous patronage, along with incentives for future loyalty.

3. Develop and implement a customer dissatisfaction gameplan. For dissatisfied customers, reach out and do everything reasonably possible to remediate the problem. (This does not mean giving away the store.) Most of the time, unhappy people have reasonable concerns and are willing (often enthusiastic) to accept reasonable compensatory actions.

4. Use your feedback findings to improve the customer service infrastructure as a whole. If there are numerous complaints about attempts to turn customer service calls into sales opportunities, then change the dialog. If there are systemic problems with timely follow-through on order fulfillment, delivery, or any other issues, look into the causes and change them whenever and wherever possible. Few irritants are as costly to reputation as making – then not keeping – commitments.

5. Allow this feedback also to serve a valuable role in overall evaluation of operations and marketing strategies. Operations-wise, it won’t take a rocket scientist to assess where you’re doing well, where there’s room for improvement, and where you may need to make some drastic changes in personnel, policies and the like. From a marketing perspective, positive feedback is always good fodder for reinforcing credibility and competency. Interspersing endorsements and testimonials on websites and in other marketing efforts can be a powerful positive influence. Negative commentary can prove even more valuable, serving as the basis of a major operations and marketing shift.

Five years ago, Domino’s Pizza used negative feedback about product taste to completely redo its pizza recipes and then launch a major mea culpa ad campaign. A 2010 Washington Post article recounts the titanic marketing shift: “Domino’s says its ad strategy wasn’t prompted by crisis or underperformance…‘We’re proving to our customers that we are listening to them by brutally accepting the criticism that’s out there,’ says Patrick Doyle, the company’s incoming chief executive, in an interview.  He adds, ‘We think that going out there and being this honest really breaks through to people in a way that most advertising does not’.” As consumers become more accustomed to expressing their opinions about customer service and other areas in public forums, companies need to rev up their abilities to reward, remediate and where necessary, remake themselves.

Tammie MacLachlan contributed to this report.


Mark Lusky is a marketing communications professional who has worked with Lightning Labels since 2008. Tammie MacLachlan is the customer service manager of Lightning Labels, an all-digital custom label printer in Denver, CO, USA. She has been in the printing industry for 21 years and with Lightning Labels for more than nine years. Find Lightning Labels on Facebook for special offers and label printing news.