I once had a boss who told me the secret to being more
productive was to sleep faster. And while I’m sure he was only joking, I have
learned that the secret to staying ahead of the competition is to “listen
faster” by monitoring and responding to Voice of the Customer (VoC) feedback in
near real time.
So what does listening faster mean and how can solo-preneurs
and local business owners implement a real time process for collecting and
responding to VoC feedback? The following article provides practical tips you
can use to collect, analyze, and take action on the feedback (solicited or
unsolicited, positive or negative) your customers are only too happy to provide
your business in today’s always on, 24x7, social media connected world.
Practical Tips for Monitoring
What’s Being Said Online
Tip #1) Place links to highly visible feedback forms everywhere
on your website. New technologies such as Speakpipe.com
allow your customers to leave a voice mail directly from their computers without
having to pick up their phone - you can see an example on my website at JohnWeisenberger.com. The listening
faster competitive advantage here is to make yourself so easily accessible (and
responsive) that your customer is never tempted to lash out using other
channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Yelp, etc.
Tip #2) Set up Google Alerts (google.com/alerts) to monitor any
mention of your company (and your competitors). Monitor your company name,
product/service name and the names of any prominent people at your company. Be
sure to include any conceivable misspellings, abbreviations and slang names for
your product or company name too.
Also be sure to set your Google Alerts frequency to “as-it-happens”
to make sure you are getting them in real time. This is your listening faster competitive
advantage as many solo-preneurs and local businesses owners set their Google
Alerts frequency to once-a-day in order to avoid interruptions during the day.
Tip #3) Set up your TweetDeck (tweetdeck.twitter.com) or Hootsuite (hootsuite.com) accounts to automatically monitor
for your @name, hashtags about your company name, product name, conference name,
etc. For example, you can monitor for hashtags such as #yourcompanyfail or
#yourbigevent.
You can also use Twitter’s manual search engine (twitter.com/search-advanced) to
look for past instances of Tweets about your brand or manually search it
regularly to see what’s being said about your brand.
Regardless of the tools
you use, you need to be aware of what’s being said/tweeted about your business
and be ready to respond to any negative comments as quickly as possible before
the retweets escalate what could have been a small issue into a major public
relations fiasco. Listening faster can help assure you’re never caught off-guard
by an upset customer who could have been communicated with directly, one-on-one,
outside of a public forum without thousands of others knowing.
Taking Action
My final tip for beating the competition by listening faster
is to use a Virtual Assistant (VA) that has the responsibility of monitoring and
analyzing your collected feedback and identifying those issues that require
immediate attention from you or your designated Customer Experience Manager (CEM).
Using a VA service that provides 24x7, follow the sun, phone and email coverage
can be a very cost effective way to implement a faster customer service and VoC
feedback monitoring process.
Remember, in today’s business environment, a small mistake
combined with a slow response can quickly become a huge public relations problem
for even the best run business. Don’t let a delayed response itself become more
of a problem than the initial customer complaint. Listening faster can be your competitive
advantage.
