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Reconciling Customer Feedback With Your Original Business Vision

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Customer feedback is incredibly valuable to your business, but what happens when the feedback you receive contradicts the vision you have for your company and your brand?

Anyone who launches a business does so with a vision for what it should be. As the business grows, you will develop a strong sense of exactly what it is you are offering and how to best sell it. And almost as soon as customers begin to bite, they will start to offer their opinions.

It could be that you’ve directly solicited their opinions via a customer survey. Or, it could be that they’ve taken to social media or user review sites to share their insight. Either way, they are providing you with data that tells you how they perceive your brand. What you hear might surprise and even demoralize you, but you have to remind yourself that this data is a great resource that will help you iterate on through to an even better offering if you know how to interpret it.

Why feedback is essential

When you first come up with an idea for a business, you are usually going on a hunch for offering a product or service that you believe will be enthusiastically embraced by consumers. Most successful entrepreneurs will have taken their vision through a validation process, which will include consultation with consumers—ideally not just family and friends—to confirm whether or not there is a market for the idea.

So, chances are, most people starting a business will have sought feedback before even getting off the ground. This is great, but soliciting feedback is essential to helping you understand your customers’ needs, and must be something you do throughout the life of your business.

Reconciling feedback with your original vision

Yes, customer feedback is invaluable, but it’s crucial that you keep it in perspective. Spotting a problem is one thing, but knowing how to fix it is something else entirely. Any advice your customers offer is almost assuredly going to be somewhat simplistic, or entirely miss the point of your business’s agenda, which is to make a profit. If you pivot based on every piece of feedback you receive, you may end up losing your way—and no small amount of money in the process.

Ideally, your vision and original market validation process was not so off that you are dealing with a massive miscalculation at this stage, but it’s possible. Sometimes things change. The market may have shifted, you might be facing competition from another business, or perhaps you missed something in your original validation process. If this is the case, customer feedback might be able to provide you with the data you need to pivot before it’s too late.

But regardless of whether you’re dealing with a major shift or a minor tweak, you will need to reconcile it with your original vision and act on it. In short, you’re trying to balance the expertise you’ve developed in your chosen market with the customer’s innate expertise in knowing what it is they want and expect in a product or service. Here are a few things you can do:

Read between the lines

Most of the time customer feedback will clearly identify the problem that needs fixing. Occasionally though, customers might throw out a suggestion that could spark an idea for a way to innovate your company that hadn’t yet occurred to you. This sort of feedback may be rare, but when it happens the value can be incalculable.

You shouldn’t expect these opportunities to be lobbed to you. They could be buried in a complaint, or articulated poorly. Sometimes you have to read between the lines in order to spot the customer need you can fulfill.

Make sure customer feedback is seen by the right people

Simply taking in customer feedback and fixing problems when they occur isn’t enough. Make sure feedback gets to the right people in your organization so they can use it. This will give them the insight they need to fix the quality or usability issues as they come up. Likewise, if potentially great ideas are being tossed your way, you will want to make sure they’re seen by people who can recognize their value, and act on them accordingly.

Key takeaway

Henry Ford allegedly once said: “If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” This is a great quote to keep in mind when looking to balancing customer feedback with your own ideas. Look to customer feedback to identify problems, but don’t rely on them to tell you how to develop new products or services.

Read all of Nellie Akalp's articles on AllBusiness.com.

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