Responding to Customer Feedback
Consumers have both right and responsibility to provide feedback on goods and services that they consume and, when a consumer leaves a feedback, it is a gift to the producer or service provider, whether the feedback is positive or negative. Businesses should see feedback as opportunity to speak to customers as well as prospective customers making buying decisions and should be at their best in responding. You may choose to respond to all feedback or to respond to selected ones but whenever you respond, do it with skill so that your response can bring you more customers.
Tips for responding to positive feedback
Simply thank the consumer publicly and let them know how much you appreciate and care for them. Do not offer any form of reward (gifts, discounts, invitation to an event, etc) for the positive feedback as this may be misinterpreted as payment or bribe. In addition, do not request the user to do anything else such as give feedback on other products or tell others about the products.
Tips for responding to negative feedback
Sometimes feedback are negative. This is because no product or service can satisfy all users all the time. It’s just natural to have the mix and most people know it. You need to develop capacity to roll with negative feedback, minimize their negative effects and maximize their positive effects on your brand. The tips below can help you.
- Give some time. When you encounter a negative feedback, remain calm and do not write a response immediately. If you respond immediately, you may do so with emotions and your response may not be what you would want on public view. Take time to think about the feedback to discover any legitimate concerns that you need to address but respond within 24 hours.
- Be polite and constructive. Do not be defensive in your response in any circumstance. We recommend that you should always be constructive and polite even if the user was not. If you attack the customer, you will present your business in bad light and repel future customers. Always bear in mind that customers are always right, even when they are wrong.
- Be solution-oriented. If the feedback have valid complaints, you may admit that you made a mistake, tender an apology and promise to change the way you do things. If you feel that the way you currently do things is the best way for you and the consumer and you cannot change it, explain to the customer why you do things that way and other benefits they get when you do it that way. The customer may eventually update the feedback or remove it.
- Have someone else look at your response. If you are confident about the response you have prepared, post it. Otherwise, ask a colleague to help look at it through the eyes of the customer. A neutral person who can put him or herself in the shoes of the customer will be more helpful.
- Keep it simple, short and sweet. Don’t write responses that are too lengthy. Use simple and nice language to present a concise but powerful response.
- Create new and unique response: Ensure that your responses are new and unique by creating a response to each feedback. Do not copy and paste a response you gave to a customer in an earlier situation for another customer.
- Don’t take it totally offline. Sometimes, you may want to take the issue out of FbH and settle it off line but remember that some interested customers and prospective customers may be interested in seeing how you resolved the issue. So, make sure you always come back to write a response on how the issue was resolved.
- Be grateful for the feedback. Remember to thank customers for their feedback.
Soliciting for feedback
- You can ask customers to write feedback on FbH however, we do not encourage you to mandate or force customers to write feedback on FbH. We want the platform to be a reliable source of balanced and natural user experiences and we can only achieve that when users are inspired to share their experiences and they do so without any form of coercion from the business owners.
- We have a number of tools and procedures to identify fake submissions. If we discover that you have offered compensation or incentives to consumer(s) to give feedback, we will not feature them.
- Do not mandate your staff to collect feedback from happy customers.
- Please do not post negative feedback on competitor products/services. This act is completely unacceptable on FbH and we have developed a number of tools and procedures for recognizing these kinds of feedback. If we have evidence that a business manipulated or is manipulating its ratings or those of its competitors, we shall disallow further feedback on the product/service of that business.
- We advise business owners to sincerely put customers first and focus on providing excellent experience for them. These will result in naturally high quality and unbiased feedback.
- In the same vein, you should not yield to consumers demand for payment in order to remove a negative feedback or not to post any. If you have sufficient evidence that a consumer is threatening your business with negative feedback, please contact us, we will take action against the user. However, we will not take any action against a consumer asking a business to make a refund to remedy a bad experience.
Using your ratings and feedback on marketing materials
You can use your ratings and feedback on FbH in your marketing materials. In doing so we require you to use our visual assets correctly. Our logo is a cube with three visible sides showing the most popular expressive reactions that accompany user experiences – happy, indifference and sad. Use the logo in a way that it can be recognized.
The logo is a cube and we ask to always leave it a cube. Do not alter the shape by stretching or condensing it. In addition, please don’t attempt to recreate it by changing the colour, separating the logo elements, placing a strange image within the logo or covering part of it with another image.
We prefer you to always use our logo in its full colour – the icon and name on candy red background - as in the image below. However, if you have need to use it on a different background, it’s fine provided the background is dark.
In event your choice of background is not dark or if you want to use the logo on a white background, please use the plane shown below.
You can use only the icon in situations where using the full logo does not work well. For instance in social media where space and style requirements will not allow for using the full logo.
Download files First image, Second image and third image