Be a great customer: give the gift of feedback

I can’t hear the expression ‘the gift of feedback’ without hearing a slightly sarcastic tone of voice probably because I have heard it used in that fashion to refer to feedback that’s un-diplomatic, too blunt or just plain rude. However, for any organisation committed to superior customer service, encouraging and dealing effectively with feedback is one of the most powerful things to drive improvement. I’m continuing to provide feedback to organisations that I deal with and will share the best examples on this blog. Here’s one that illustrates some good practice.

Following my holiday in France this summer I wanted to provide some feedback to Eurocamp, who we book our camping holidays through. The particular situation says something about how tenuous a customer’s emotional connection – and loyalty – can be. We’ve used Eurocamp since about 1991 and every time we have returned there has been a bottle of wine waiting in the fridge for us to thank us for returning. This time there wasn’t one: I immediately thought it was some form of cost-cutting measure and didn’t think much more about it. After a couple of days – with great weather and no particular reason to feel dissatisfied I realised I was feeling somewhat affronted that my 16 years of unswerving loyalty to Eurocamp had been treated in such a cavalier fashion. Of course I could have asked the Eurocamp couriers what had happened to the wine but didn’t – after all I didn’t want to appear mercenary (or too desperate for a drink).

I wrote to Eurocamp last month to find out if their policy had changed and, if so, why. After a couple of weeks they wrote back to say that the wine should have been provided and may have been either out of stock or an oversight. A wine voucher was enclosed to make up for the oversight.

  • So, to emphasise, it’s not my complaint/quibble or the small compensation that’s important here, it’s the underlying lesson, which we can summarise as:
  • Loyalty is volatile – even the slightest, most trivial things can threaten it.
  • We customers do respond to little tokens that recognise our loyalty – even if we might think we don’t.
  • Responding well to feedback is critical. In this case it wasn’t a complaint but I did appreciate the explanation (and I’d have been happy with the explanation without the wine token, although that’s much appreciated) and, although it involved old-fashioned snail mail, it wasn’t important that it didn’t happen quickly. (Contrast the slightly clumsy and involved response from BT Yahoo.)

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