Feedback Is A Gift

`Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning' -Bill Gates

I simply love this quote because no matter how much you strive to give excellent service to your customers, unhappy customers are inevitable. While there will be some who are just unhappy people looking to complain about pity issues, most people have legitimate points worth considering. You can never see your business the way people on the other end can & listening to them is the only way to learn and impress.

We are grateful when someone speaks up because not speaking up and spreading negative words can spoil your years of goodwill.

 We are MEP consultants in the field of construction industry working with many real estate developers in the city. I came across negative feedback about our services from a client recently. I immediately scheduled for a quick meeting with the customer to understand the issue. After brief discussions, I realised that he was not happy with the site administration and communications he was receiving from our office.

After going through the whole communications and site administrations reports I realised that our engineer handling the project had missed keeping the owner of the project in all mail communications thinking of owners busy schedule.

This simple mistake led to a disconnect in clients mind about our services.

Customers 2nd complain of site administration was again communication gap from clients representatives end to our team. Clients engineers were not intimating us for site administration at stages which got miscommunicated to the customer.

We discussed this amongst our leadership team and concluded that we should reduce the dependency of clients representatives to call us and proactively should visit on monthly basis. On an immediate basis, we divided all sites amongst site engineers and gave them monthly site visit schedule of all sites.

This step based on negative feedback gave us good results in a few months. We went one step ahead as a service provider and at our end, man-hours due to revisions in drawings got saved.

Feedback of any kind is a gift, so use it to your best advantage. We have always found that negative feedback handled in a caring manner can often make a lifelong customer.