Everybody likes to hear praise - from customers, from colleagues, from your boss or your spouse. It makes us feel good and confirms us in the actions we are doing. Nevertheless just listening to praise can be charming to your ego but it might not be enough.

The challenge is that in search for constant improvement, praise doesn’t lead to improvements because it doesn’t help you identify areas where improvement could lead to even better results. In your quest (or how Tom Peters calls it your “search of excellence”) to deliver an remarkable experience to your customers, listening to the customers’ praise won’t be of much help.

Even McDonalds has realized this - in order to improve their customer’s experience the company is closely tracking customer complaints and is identifying restaurants with a low number of complaints (their “brand builders”) and restaurants with high numbers of complaints (the “brand destroyers”).

In their report “Loud And Clear, The
Voice Of The Customer” they identified that their franchises in Hawaii enjoyed highest customer satisfaction rates while the lowest satisfaction rate was in Philadelphia. Through listening to their customers and their complaints they are now in a situation to pro-actively manage the customer experience in order to increase customer satisfaction in their “brand-destroyer” restaurants.

So it’s time to stop ignoring your customers and provide them means how they can communicate their complaints and you can be sure to find areas for improvement that will in the end lead to satisfied customers and increased sales for your business.

The full article in the Startup Journal of the Wall Street Journal can be found here.

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