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How Did We Do??!! How (Not) to Ruin the Customer Experience When Asking for Feedback

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For most of corporate history, most companies haven’t really wanted to hear from their customers.

Not that the opinions of buyers didn’t matter; of course, private enterprises have always thrived (or not) based on satisfying consumer desires. Companies for decades ran focus groups and test markets, and of course monitored sales success.

How to wreck customer experienceBut—as long as things were going reasonably well, they didn’t go out of their way to solicit feedback. Actually, they made it quite difficult. Prior to widespread Internet adoption, it often took the investigative skills of Sherlock Holmes combined with the determination of Oprah Winfrey to even find an address or phone number for a corporate “customer opinion” department.

Actually reaching a human being was even more challenging. Some consumer products companies would send out generous free product vouchers to anyone whose letter (positive or negative) reached them, just because it was so unusual.

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Price Matching Pros and Cons for Online Retailers

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Guest post by Alex Walker.

Every business or product needs a unique value proposition, something that sets their brand or product apart from the rest and attracts a particular segment of the market. Very often though, businesses rely almost entirely on “lowest prices” as their unique proposition (though it can be argued that at that point it is no longer exclusive at all) rather than trying to differentiate themselves in a truly effective way.

Price matching considerations for etailers and B2BThat’s not to say that price matching and racing to the bottom doesn’t provide some advantages, and there are certainly companies (Walmart, Aldi, any of the dollar stores) that have turned it into a winning strategy. But you need to evaluate your brand and market position carefully before deciding this is the marketing strategy for you.

This isn’t only a consideration for etailers. As a growing portion of B2B purchases move online, business marketers will confront more of the same issues (such as price matching) of their B2C counterparts.

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Social Media for Sales

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One of the challenges in measuring the ROI of social media marketing is that the use of social networking and social sharing tools isn’t confined to the marketing group. Social media is being used in multiple functions across the enterprise, from product development (e.g. through co-creation and crowdsourcing) and customer service (Best Buy and Comcast for example) to human resources (outstanding HR tweeps: Sharlyn Lauby and Alicia Arenas) and sales groups. Although the efforts may be separate, success (or failure) in one area can certainly impact the effectiveness of social media efforts in other areas; for example, developing a reputation for delivering reliable customer service through social media channels will almost certainly help make social media marketing and sales efforts more rewarding.

In terms of revenue generation, the effective use of social media by both sales and marketing teams is critical. It may be even more important in sales, as sales professionals deal with prospects as individuals (the level where social media can be most impactful) while marketers still for the most part deal with prospects in groups. The opportunities to use social media in the sales process are limited only by the creativity of sales pros, but three critical areas stand out.

The first is for the sales team to understand what their own company is doing with social media, and how customers and key influencers are responding. This means working closely with marketing to understand both what messages are being communicated and how the market is reacting. If customers are praising the company’s service through social media channels, that is a strength the sales person can play to. If they are pointing out quality issues with a specific product, that’s an issue that members of the sales team need to be prepared to address. Sales professionals will be more productive with a solid understanding of the social media monitoring, interaction and promotion activities being conducted by the marketing group.

For more information on essential tactics for social media use by sales pros, see my recent guest post on the Your Sales Management Guru blog.

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