What To Do With Conflicting Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is awesome. It’s one of the best tools for figuring out how your company is really doing, and how you can get better. But honestly? Sometimes, it’s confusing. It’s all well and good if all of your customers agree, but when they don’t, you probably wonder what to do with customer feedback that’s so disparate. 

Maybe one customer tells your customer service rep they’ll only stay with your brand if you come up with a virtual offering. But then, the same rep speaks with a different customer and that person tells them they love your brand because it hasn’t gone virtual. What are you supposed to do? If you pride yourself on learning from your customers, I applaud you. That’s the only way to build and grow a solid business. Here’s how I recommend navigating difficult decisions when customers are giving you mixed feedback. 

Check-In With Your Core Values 

While your customers pay your bills, you ultimately have to make sure you’re following your own intuition as a business owner. Let’s say you’re a skincare provider who launched your company because you wanted to make products that are handmade and free from any form of animal testing or cruelty. Even if 100% of your customers clamor for you to offer a leather carrying case for your products, you have to be true to yourself. If leather isn’t in line with your values, it should be a no-go… no matter what your customers say. This applies whether it’s a relatively minor decision like this or an incredibly big one, because staying true to your principles should always take precedence over worrying about how to satisfy customers. 

Who Do You Trust? 

Of course, such decisions aren’t always so black and white. There are times when customers ask for something that’s in the gray areas, and that becomes trickier. When this happens, turn to those around you. You put your leadership team and advisers in place for a reason; so ask them for their advice. Here’s an example of how this could look. You run a hot yoga studio and, to date, you’ve specialized in yoga only. But, you recently conducted a survey of your members and discovered that half of them want more class options (e.g. Pilates, HIIT, etc.), while the other half is loyal to you because they’re 100% devoted to yoga and they don’t want the class schedule “diluted” with other class choices. 

Start by talking with your leadership team about your values and vision, and how either side of the coin may align (or not). Then, ask for their input and expertise. Your CFO may run the numbers and realize you don’t have the budget available to get Pilates reformer machines and weights for HIIT classes and could advise you to wait until your profitability improves before considering this. Or, your marketing manager might share that you’re losing digital conversions because your site ranks only for yoga but your key demographic is searching for other exercise forms too. 

Even if the team members you trust most have differing opinions about what to do, they’ll all bring their own perspectives to the conversation. From there, you’ll be able to make your decision with much more context and insight. 

Review Data 

At this point, everything will hopefully be a lot clearer. But if it’s not, you’re still not out of options. If you’re still struggling to decide what to do, see if you can gather any data to support the choice one way or another. For instance, think of a business that offers physical therapy exercises through an app. They may poll their subscribers to find out which features they like best and which are on their wish list for future updates. When they review the feedback, some users love the step by step tutorials that precede each workout, while others report that these tutorials are a waste of time and unnecessary. 

In this sort of scenario, look at what the data says. You might see that 90% of subscribers willingly click on the tutorials, contradicting what your survey showed. These types of discrepancies can happen for a variety of reasons; maybe only a small percentage of your subscribers filled out the survey or there was some bias in answering the questions that didn’t reflect reality. Regardless, sometimes the cold, hard data will show you what customers really want. 

Conflicting customer feedback doesn’t have to be a roadblock. It can instead be an opportunity to dig in further, think through your guiding principles, talk to those you trust and turn to the data. Once you’ve done all that, your decision should be a pretty easy one. How do you handle tough choices, especially when you’re getting pressure from customers? I’d love to hear.