Customer feedback is a very important aspect of business management. Every business should pay attention to what customers have to say about their services.However, simply getting the feedback isn’t enough; you need to act on it as well. Imagine this scenario: a customer contacts one of your service staff members and makes a complaint about something they thought was wrong in your product/service. The staff member listens to the complaint and makes a note of it as well.The person responsible for resolving the issue is notified, the issue is eventually resolved, and everything looks well and good to you.But then what? Do you check back on the customer to ask them if they still face the same problem?

Some companies have a no- care-in-the-world attitude. They believe that if the issue was recorded and resolved eventually, customers would realize this on their own and everything would be fine. However, getting back is important if you want to know whether the improvements matched the customer’s expectations or not. There are a lot of things that can go wrong between receiving feedback and acting on it. You won’t know if you’ve done the right thing or not if you don’t ask the customers themselves

What Could Go Wrong? After the customer provides you with the feedback, there can be several things that could go wrong before any possible action is taken.

• TheCustomer Service Staff Can Misunderstand the Issue – The person taking feedback might not understand what the customer is saying due to their inability to understand the latter’s communication language or accent. This issue is really common in our region due to the challenge of finding perfectly multilingual staff who master English, French and Kin- yarwanda.
• Lack of Internal Communication – The person recording the feedback might not communicate it to the person who should resolve it. This can be either be- cause they didn’t make notes and genuinely forgot about the issue or because they made a mistake and don’t want to tell on themselves, wishing that the customer would just go away without anyone discovering what they had done wrong.
• Lack of Resources, Time or Authority – The issue often doesn’t get resolved because the right people are short of time or re- sources. The responsible person might be busy or they might not have what they need to resolve the problem even though it was reported almost instantly.

Regardless, your company will start losing customers. This can be 1 customer, 10 customers or 100. You won’t know whether people came back or not to give your product/service another chance because you didn’t bother to ask or tell them that you’veprocessed their feedback and worked according to it. Always Respond to Feedback to Retain Customers

If you don’t want to lose clients, the simplest thing to do is to get back to them once you take action. This won’t only help you improve your customer satis- faction and retention rate, but can also tell your customers that you actually care and listen to what they say. One happy customer would mean a lot more potential customers for your business.

One way to ensure that this process is carried out methodically is by automating the feedback process. This process ensures fewer human errors and fewer issues caused by sometimes unreliable individuals. As a result, your customer retention rate will rise and so will your sales and profits. So consider this solution to keep feedback: a two-way street.

The author is the founder & CEO of VOVACARE, a customer feedback management solution company based in Rwan- da. Email him at: [email protected]