There is an NLP Belief of Excellence which says “There is no failure only feedback; there is only learning.” On a personal level I know I have struggled in the past to apply this equally to myself as I have to others. As a coach, I can be really supportive of others and proactively encourage them to look for the good in the situation and to embrace the learning that comes from making mistakes; and yet when it comes to me and making mistakes well I can really give myself a hard time!!

My reflections on feedback and how I and/or others embrace it has lead me to thinking about organisations and how they respond to feedback: Do they have a culture of actively seeking feedback from their customers and team members, thus enabling them to be responsive to their needs or…do they actively avoid it?

In this Information Age where our customers can interact and engage with us at the click of a button – doesn’t it make sense to tap into that wealth of information and use it to inform how we position our messaging and deliver our service and products? Surely by actively encouraging feedback via multi-media platforms we can, as a business, acquire customer intelligence that in the past we could only have dreamt about having?

I also believe it would be beneficial to pay attention to Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon) when he said:

“If you make customers unhappy in the real world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell 6,000 friends.”

How an organisation responds to customer complaints has been proven to be directly linked to customer retention and even customer recommendations.

Statistically 56% to 70% of the customers who complain to you will do business with you again if you resolve their problem. If they feel you acted quickly and to their satisfaction – up to 96% will do business with you again, and they will probably refer other people to you. (Source: the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, Washington, DC).

There are real implications and lessons that we can learn from how we engage with our customers on social media –  believe it or not, the transparency of our communication has the potential to win us business even if the interaction didn’t start too well.

My challenge to you is to go out and seek that feedback, you may be surprised how positive it is and even if it isn’t – as one of my mentors Gene Early says: “Feedback isn’t the absolute truth but it is the truth for the person who is delivering it.”

So…you can choose to NOT take it personally and use the feedback as management information and after all that – one small piece of feedback could help you take your business to the next level!