We have all become so focused on Tweets, blogs, and other social media that we have lost sight of where the core focus should be first: quality products and service. A company can post all sorts of interesting or humorous tidbits to create a following, but it won't generate nor maintain customers unless you have good products and good customer service. Scratch that - in order to stay competitive you need GREAT customer service.
With long-standing retailers falling by the wayside, I think it's important to note that the companies who still have a focus on customer service and quality products are doing just fine. Customer reviews on products and services not only hold more weight, but the companies being reviewed really look at this feedback to correct problems, add new services and make improvements.
Forget Twitter; Your Best Marketing Tool Is the Humble Product Review
Feedback Has Influenced Design, Supplier Relations for Samsung, Walmart
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Last fall, executives from Oriental Trading Co. read a product review from a woman planning her autumn wedding complaining that her order of fall leaves didn't look anything like the picture on the website. The execs went straight to the warehouse, pulled the product and compared for themselves. She was right -- it didn't look the same. The explanation: The company had recently switched vendors for that particular product, and the new vendor's version wasn't up to snuff. So the company pulled it.
While the first lesson of the story is that you never want to disappoint a bride, the more important one is that marketers are learning to listen. And for all the ink spilled on the importance of Twitter and Facebook as feedback and customer-service channels, there's another social-media tool marketers are increasingly finding useful, not just as an online-shopping tool but as an internal, culturally changing consumer-criticism channel: the humble product review.
The feedback is altering not just how the marketing department works but also how companies design their products and work with suppliers. And it's not limited to small, nimble players; companies using product reviews range from niche retailers such as Oriental Trading Co. to big, broad-based behemoths such as Walmart.
Samsung used consumer reviews and insights to modify the speaker placement on its flat-panel TVs. After hearing complaints that the speakers on the side of the TV, which add a few inches, rendered them too wide for many customers' entertainment cabinets, it redesigned the product to hide the speakers underneath.
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