Engaging Your Customers To Share Their Criticism

Engaging Your Customers To Share Their Criticism
It is always better to encourage your customers to share their opinions about your products and offers as opposed to ignoring them and then you find out later that they used YELP, or other social media tools to vent their frustration and criticize you openly on the web with thousands of people having access to a bad reviews on you

1- If you defend yourself to the customer, you are pushing the criticizer away because you're telling them they're wrong about their opinion. And they might indeed be wrong, but they may choose another route to express their frustration. That could be dangerous to your company.
2- If your front line people (customer service) restate the criticism in their own words and are grateful to the customer for sharing it, everyone will benefit. You can always choose to ignore the input later.
3- If there's no way for your staff to easily send the criticism up the hierarchy, it dies before it reaches someone who can do something about it.
4- If upper management follow up with the customer with specific acknowledgment and thanks, you multiply the benefits.