Skip to main content

Should You Listen?

David Freedman writes an excellent article in Inc Magazine about listening to customer feedback. He talks about several companies who have various feedback methods, but choose to ignore some of the complaints. In light of certain companies "firing" customers lately, this article doesn't necessarily suggest going that far, but it does say take the feedback with a grain of salt. Is this person just the squeaky wheel? Would fixing their complaint change your core product or service?

This can be true for membership organizations. I remember getting blasted by a member because we sent out a CD with an auto-run feature that apparently isn't liked by Macs. It can still work though. This avid Mac user went ballistic in an email. Turns out he wasn't even a good fit for our association. I looked at our market research and found that only a few percent even used Macs. He didn't renew the next year, but that wasn't a surprise. One complaint in 5,000 shipped discs.

On the surface, it is easy to say that you wouldn't have changed your process for 1 complaint in 5,000. But, how many times do we knee jerk into fixing things that maybe aren't really broken? Maybe one person sees it as broken, but they really just need glasses.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

10 Thoughts on #ASAE10

Ok, so I could have spelled out the title, but chose the hashtag - #asae10. Supposedly there were over 8,000 tweets with the hashtag, but probably countless more direct messages of messages that left out the hashtag but were conference related. Two years ago, we were using twitter as a backchannel to talk about speakers. Now, over 800 people sent conference related tweets. If you aren't on Twitter, you are already late to the party. Anyway, on with the post... In no particular order, my thoughts on this years ASAE Annual Conference: 1. LA was a good venue. Lots to do. Hotels close by. Only downside was the rooms were a bit of a hike. 2. I missed Sunday because of family obligations. That really put me behind the 8 ball. Since I led a session, that meant I only got to go to 3 true sessions. Sorry, I don't count Joy Behar and the closing session. Although Marshall Goldsmith was good, I probably wouldn't have gone to see that speech as a Learning Lab. 3. Based on #...
11 comments
Read more

The Whole Cook Source Flap

I am going to give my 2 cents on this whole Cook Source thing. If you don't know what I am talking about, you can read more here and here . I am sure a few folks are going to take umbrage with my stance, but that is bound to happen. So a magazine found a blog post, liked it, printed it while giving credit to the author. The author hears about it, and gets pissed? She wants printed apologies and a donation made, because she got published? What am I missing here? Who wouldn't want their stuff to be published while being credited? Isn't that one of the main tenants of blogging, to be linked to? Sure, the response from the editor was one of the dumbest things ever written and she handled it tremendously bad. However, I am just floored that this person is pissed off. True, the internet is not public domain. However, every college paper in the world has citations. And all those students didn't contact the author to make sure they can use it. And every blog post ...
8 comments
Read more

Generational Issues

The latest Acronym post about Generational Issues got me thinking. I thought about writing a comment, but figured this deserved its own post. I am going to take the contrarian route, maybe spark some discussion. Feel free to tell me I am wrong, or maybe agree with me (as everyone should). Aren't we making too big a deal about the generational differences? Don't things evolve with the times? As staff turns over and new ideas are introduced, don't they inherently reflect the attitudes and ideas of their particular group? I know that you want to be proactive and you have to have a plan for the future to make sure you are still viable, but will you really need to change your entire business model? I know that there will be some extreme cases where that will be true as certain products become obsolete, but in most cases it won't. It is nice to generalize and stereotypes exist for a reason. But not every group is going to change how they do business just because Gen X differ...
6 comments
Read more