Customer feedback is a weapon in your sales armory. Encourage it and cultivate it in the right way and people will be more likely to buy; cut corners and they will avoid your products like the plague.

By Chris Barling of SellerDeck

Here’s a question. Do you think customers are stupid? If you do it’s a very dangerous assumption.

My first rule is make sure that customer feedback is genuine, real and unedited.

Take online customer feedback. What is your reaction if you see that someone has 100% good feedback, and when you look through the posts, they are all beautifully written? If you are as cynical as me you will discard them, knowing they are marketing BS, worth less than the electrons that have transmitted them down my broadband connection.

Moving on to my second rule, it’s that poor practice will catch up with you via customer feedback, so make sure your service is good.

I guess the suppliers injecting horse meat into the food chain also assumed that every customer down-stream from them was a sandwich short of a picnic. Otherwise, what would possess them to do something that has now destroyed their business, and in some cases wrecked the reputation of whole countries?

They made a dangerous assumption. The internet and social media are powerful media, and even if you don’t embrace it, people will find places to post the truth about suppliers’ failures.

My third rule is this: accept negative feedback, it contains the information you don’t know, and exerts pressure that you actually need.

I think that negative feedback is helpful. Capturing negative feedback at your site means you can address the issues and explain how you have done so. This is much better than seeing feedback about your site sprayed randomly around the web where you will always learn about it second-hand. If feedback is true you need to act on it urgently.

So my final rule is: capture feedback to display on your own site and use it as a selling tool.

In fact, if you run an ecommerce store, then feedback published directly on your own site is essential. That’s not just because every single one of the top ecommerce sites publishes feedback, which should tell us something, but because positive feedback will increase your sales, typically by 10%. One service that can handle the whole process is Feefo, which is a company that we have partnered with at SellerDeck.

If you don’t yet use feedback, you are discarding a goldmine. Want are you waiting for?

For more information visit SellerDeck

Read this article in full here: The essential rules of customer feedback. Read more from Dan Matthews at eSellerMedia.com - For eCommerce entrepreneurs and executives who want to sell more.