Retaining Flooring Customers Through Feedback

If you feel strongly about retaining your existing flooring customers, you will appreciate this article titled Keep your customers, grow your business by Dennis Furlan. It appeared in the March 2011 issue of Coverings, Canada's floorcovering magazine and features two friends, Matt Selbie and Cynthia Dean. [Oh, and I'm quoted, too :-).]

Matt Selbie is founder and president of Oberon3, a customer feedback firm located in Portland, Oregon. You may remember him from Meet Opiniator's Matt Selbie and The Opiniator 6 Laws of Customer Feedback.

Cynthia Dean is general manager of  from Canada Nufloors in Coquitlam, BC. She shared some of her wisdom in this post titled Connecting With Customers: Nufloors Advice.

The article makes several points worth paying attention to.

1. "Ignoring the customer after the fact is one of the most costly mistakes that a business can make."

2. Asking about a customer's experience in your store, with sales representatives and with installation helps you identify what problems she might have had, address them and make the customer feel that you are listening to her.

3. Be sure to "ask questions that will give you honest feedback from your customers" rather than "answers you want to hear".

4. "Companies have to be able to act on the results of the surveys." In other words, make sure you do something about what you hear from your customers.

By the way, if you interact with complaining customers, be sure to absorb Guy Winch's wisdom from this post titled How To Build WOM From Complaining Customers - MarketingProfs B2B Forum 2011!

Do you survey your customers? What have you learned? What have you implemented? How have you taken what your learned to transform your organization? I'd love to hear in the comments.

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