The customer is not always right, but the customer should always be heard by you.
The trick now available is to be able to listen in on every interaction in a marketplace with your product, and judge what the response should be.
You learn a lot from customers, in particular the ones who leave, or are dissatisfied and complain.
Sometimes those complaints have nothing to do with your product, but everything to do with the complainer wanting an audience. Even then you must respond, as there will be a lesson in better understanding the customer context.
Not responding is in fact a response, and the response is “I do not care about you”. This is rarely a smart way to deal with even an annoyed customer about to bolt.
As a marketer I have always advocated the notion that the good stuff happens on the fringes. As the saying goes, ‘every good idea starts as a heresy’. Therefore, hearing the heresy is a core part of being able to respond to new stuff.
There are now a multitude of tools the hear what is being said by those who engage in any way, no matter how far out on the fringe they may be. Tools that track every interaction with your brands irrespective of the medium. Every one of those interactions should be responded to, in some way. The obvious caveat is that the interaction to which you are responding should be associated in some way with your brand, and sometimes one interaction is enough when the catalyst is negative.
The ‘PS’ to the headline is that the right customer is always right.
When a customer fits the ideal customer avatar like a glove, they will always be right. The challenge in these days of hyper-personalisation is to adequately define the ideal customer in such a way that you are confident about who they are, and what you want them to do next.
