The Subtleties Of Customer Feedback
July 1, 2007 I’m pushing the deadline for this column again, but things must happen for a reason. This column had been sitting half finished for more than a month. It needed something to complete it, and finally, I got not one, but two great examples of the extremely different forms of customer feedback.
Last night I spent the evening with a group of very excited product development reps from one of the major agrichemical companies. They hosted a number of growers and their local distributors, along with me and a couple of my co-workers to introduce a new product. They must be pinching themselves to be sure they’re not in a dream, having discovered a new chemical with a novel mode of action that is very toxic to a couple of families of serious pests while otherwise having very low toxicity to non-target pests and little environmental impact.
The whole event last night was to garner customer feedback, albeit on a grand scale. They know this almost too- good-to-be-true product works great in the lab and in small research plots, but if they’re spending a couple hundred million dollars a year on research, and they’ve already spent $80 to $90 million and it’s been almost eight years since discovering this new compound, they had better spend several thousand more getting the product out to potential customers to make sure the development team got it right. With that kind of money at stake, it’s essential that a few potentially big customers let them know they didn’t miss anything back in the lab.
Listen To Your Customers
I also spent a day and a half cleaning piles of accumulated “resources” from my desks, chairs, and floors so carpet in my office could be replaced. I heard there was an office pool betting whether or not I could make the 4 p.m. deadline. I did, and though the last pile didn’t get sorted, most of the rest did, and in one I found this other tidbit. Did you know the “Name That Topic for Dummies” and “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to XXX” series both include editions on customer service? Me neither, but in a November 2005 article from the Suffolk County Agricultural News, Cornell Cooperative Turf and Land Management Specialist Tamson Yeh mentioned those guides as useful references.
Her recommendation is to listen to your customers and, maybe most importantly, those who have decided not to use your products or services anymore. They may provide a critical “part of the puzzle.” In what might be considered to be going out of the way for customer feedback, Yeh discussed how one Oregon landscaping firm takes these “failed” contracts out to lunch for a “focus session,” claiming that it brings many disgruntled customers back to the company within a few months, and certainly provides useful information to help correct any potential problems.
Not So Subtle Feedback
It was Ken Harris’s story, however, that started me thinking about the subtleties of customer feedback and the importance of good observation skills. Ken decided when he was a young boy that, despite having no background in farming, he was going to have a farm and a roadside market. For nearly 20 years now, Marlboro Farm Market has been a fixture in southwestern New Jersey. When Ken puts his mind to something, he accomplishes it.
So it was, we all thought, when he asked our state vegetable specialist to visit the farm for a look at his newest enterprise, old-fashioned Jersey Yellow and other heirloom sweetpotato varieties. He had learned all he could from a couple of retiring farmers who had supplied him in the past but were now too old to keep farming. He produced a couple of great crops but hadn’t expected the reaction from his customers. It appears they are literally dying off, and he hasn’t asked a single question to discover this. His market staff let him in on what they were smiling about one day. They kidded him about how they knew every time he advertised the Jersey sweets or Georgia Bell white peaches. The customers started showing up in walkers and wheelchairs.