How to manage negative feedback in a positive way?

Negative Feedback In Organisation

Negative feedback is better than no feedback. Most of the times, a dissatisfied customer shifts to a competitor’s product, not giving the company a chance to earn their loyalty back. Therefore, a negative feedback is an invaluable way for a company to take up their game and improve their customer experience.

Why a negative feedback is important for organisation?

Here are some ways to leverage criticism and turn a negative into a positive:

Negative Feedback As a Guide

When customers share their stories, they’re not just sharing pain points. They’re actually teaching you how to make your product, service, and business better. A business cannot learn and grow from their mistakes if those mistakes aren’t pointed out by the very customers they serve. Customer complaints can open a company’s eyes to issues or pain points that they otherwise would have ignored.

Trust Building

An unhappy customer who encountered a problem with your service but you got it fixed immediately demonstrates bigger devotion to your brand than a customer who has never been disappointed with your service. If a company seems ‘too perfect’ in their ratings and testimonials, it can lead to distrust from the consumer.

Deepen Relationship With Customer

The approach mostly followed by companies on receiving negative feedback is to become defensive. However, a customer’s criticism is not towards a business as a whole but to the overall customer experience. By avoiding emotional responses and actively listening to the customer, a business can use this opportunity to build trust and loyalty. Owning up to fault is the first step in rebuilding a relationship. Accountability is very important in building trust with customers and setting a standard for excellence. Obviously you shouldn’t admit to something you didn’t do, but if your company is to blame, there’s no reason to try to come up with excuses.

How to respond to a negative customer experience?

Below are few approaches to deal with a customer who has left a negative feedback for your business.

Apologize Sincerely

A simple apology can go a long way in repairing a broken customer relationship as it shows ownership of a flaw. A written message that expresses the customer’s complaint besides providing a solution will always trump a template response. The words such as ‘if’ in an apology can further frustrate the user. For example, “We’re sorry if you felt our customer experience was inadequate.” This can fury a customer for questioning their feelings in a certain way. A sincere apology is a way of the company acknowledging the customer’s pain or inconvenience.

Respond Quickly

The longer you take to respond to customer complaint, the longer they have to construct a narrative about what might have happened or what may happen and same they will share with their fellows over social media platforms. Silence makes the customer feel as though you don’t care mentality. Since a customer giving negative feedback is so rare in the first place, so addressing it should be a number one priority when it arrives.

Provide A Solution

After a swift apology, the next step is to provide the solution to their complaint. For example, a business can offer a free replacement if the product was broken or incorrect or a free or discounted service if a monthly fee is involved. If a customer’s complaint has to do with a poor customer experience or interruption in service telling the customer that their feedback is valuable and that it will improve the process for their next interaction can be enough to keep them around.

How employees can deal with negative feedback?

Marketing teams often face rejection and negativity; an angry reader badmouth about your company in a comment or a prospect customer chooses a competitor’s product. The team personnels feel bad when their hard work is not recognised, but how to stay strong and steadfast in commitment to succeeding in content marketing efforts? Below are four approaches to overcome unfortunate real-life and internet negativity.

Learn From Negative Feedback

The most common way is to learn from the negative feedback. The first step is to identify whether the feedback is useful or if it’s garbage, there are people out there who will always see the negative, and only the negative.

There are two ways to look at the feedback:

1. Confirmation that you are culprit
2. An opportunity to ask yourself how you can improve.

Your focus should not be about being approved, but being improved! True winners are always looking for ways to get better. Seeking to be approved involves a lot of unstable emotion. Seeking to be improved involves a lot of stable evaluation. If your mindset and your desire is to be improved, then you will remain open to all forms of constructive critique because you will always be welcoming and processing for information to grow or to better yourself, your product, or your service. Criticism can be invaluable to your personal and professional growth. The trick is to be able to assess where that feedback is coming from, reflect, and then react, rather than jump the gun and get defensive immediately.

Ignore 

Feedback can come from sources that do not have the same level of experience as you do. Most hateful banter comes from online trolls. Forums like Reddit or social networks like Twitter and Facebook bring large and diverse audiences, but that also means they’re places where you are more likely to fall victim to the social identity model of deindividuation effects.  Your rivals can team up against you and get their hatred out in form of trolling. If you recognise such trollers, the best approach is to ignore them.

Hear It

Just because someone has something bad to say doesn’t mean you need to accept it as truth. You can choose to listen and acknowledge people who share their thoughts without agreeing with them; People just want to know that they have been heard. After you’ve tried so many things and experienced failure to some degree, you get to a place where you appreciate the fact that someone has taken the time out of their life to actually say anything about what you’re doing. They could have just ignored it completely, but it was interesting enough to evoke some form of an opinion. 

Whether you’re a content creator or a vice president of marketing, sometimes the best thing to do when people send angry messages your way is to hear them out and respond. In many circumstances, particularly with external audiences, your critics will be surprised you even acknowledged them.

Own It

As human beings, we often have a tendency to immediately reject all forms of criticism. We become defensive and take it personally. Although “not taking it personally” is easier said than done, sometimes owning that feedback and accepting it is the first step to growth. Negative criticism helps you to realize that your work is not bland. In fact, you have the opportunity to showcase your reasoning and win the critics with your logics.