Holiday Buzz

Holiday buzz…

The orange and black lines of kicking off the holiday craze in October have quickly blurred with the red and white stripes of December as businesses are trying to figure out how to maximize the holiday shopping bonanza . However, with continued woes of our economic times, businesses are struggling. The focus should not be so much on new customers but on current customer bases. It is more expensive to acquire a new customer than to cater to and embrace the ones you already have. Even though this concept is well-known, it is often poorly executed against.

An article in December 2009 Harvard Business Review was published on Customer Feedback. It highlights Fred Reichheld’s Net Promoter Score and the success of implementing this at a number of firms. However, an important point that the article focuses on is organizational structure and systems to support the customer feedback effort. Companies know they are being talked about—just Google your company and the Internets are buzzing with good, bad, and noisy mentions. Yet, many companies do not know where their influencers are (let alone performing influence marketing), are not listening to them, are not engaging them,and are typically not setup to support these efforts.

The following are key elements that, at least, need to happen to be positioned for success:

• Listen: Rather than developing a “centralized system”, decentralize the effort and empower the front lines (those who actually engage directly with the customers). This will yield better success.
• Act: Once you get the feedback, do something with it! Most companies aggregate the feedback but do not have mechanisms in place to prioritize the feedback, turn the items into initiatives , and develop the operational support to act upon them.
• Enforce: The management rhythm needs to come from the mid level managers that create the processes and oversee the implementation . These will be based around the company strategies and goals.
• Commit: The management team and whole organization must be focused and aligned with customer feedback. Goals related to customer feedback must come from the top as part of the overall-top level strategy.
• Measure: Once you know what your goals are , you need to measure them, benchmark them, track them, set goals against them, publish them, and manage to them…

There are many more ingredients to ensure success, but if the organization does not incorporate these topics into their approach, the results may fall short.