SMART CANNABIS COMPANIES REALIZE THAT CUSTOMER INPUT IS ONE OF THEIR MOST VALUABLE RESOURCES FOR FUTURE SALES.
Nearly two-thirds (58%) of people never use a company again after just a single bad experience, according to a study from NewVoiceMedia.1
But how do you know why you lost that customer if they never tell you?
And if you don’t know what the issue is, how can you fix it?
Worse, for every actual customer complaint, 26 other unhappy customers remain silent.2 That can spell significant trouble for future success if the business just keeps moving forward with no changes.
Yes, customer complaints are unpleasant to confront and tedious to resolve, and most companies that produce or sell CBD- and THC-related products (oils, gummies, candies, capsules, etc.) have had the frustrating experience of dealing with customers or clients who were seemingly bound and determined to be unhappy, no matter what.
But every piece of customer feedback offers a potentially useful tool that can be used in service of more sales.
In fact, customer feedback works on multiple levels and from multiple directions. For example, sometimes you actually want a small number of negative reviews (see Section 3 for an explanation).
And it’s not just negative feedback. Positive comments can obviously drive new sales directly and also help shape future business decisions.
Altogether, customer feedback – good, bad, and in-between – can lead to service and process improvements that result in a better experience for all clients and more successful business as a result.
Indeed, here are 15 separate ways that customer feedback can drive improvements for medicinal and recreational cannabis product companies and grow future sales.
Here’s how.
In This Paper...
How to turn customer feedback and reviews into:
1: Better customer service
2: Improved customer communication
3: More effective internal info sharing
4: Improved products
5: Marketing messaging
6: Testimonials
7: Case studies
8: Repeat customers
9: New, qualified leads
10: New customers
11: Create informational content
12: Research and development ideas
13: Personnel improvements
14: Retained customers
15: (More) new customers
First, cannabis-related businesses can use any kind of feedback and reviews to…
1. FACILITATE BETTER CUSTOMER SERVICE
Most dissatisfied customers will never voice their complaints. Fully 91% of unhappy customers simply leave and never return. The feedback and reviews that indicate complaints are thus incredibly valuable for identifying customer service issues that can and should be addressed. They give cannabis producers and retailers a chance to salvage potentially lost relationships and put into place practices that can prevent customer churn.
2. IMPROVE CUSTOMER COMMUNICATION
Poor communication can cost even small companies with just 100 employees as much as $420,000 per year, according to The Society for Human Resource Management. It makes sense:if you don’t know customers are unhappy, you don’t know that you need to be asking questions or resolving issues. Getting feedback from them is a tremendous opportunity to get on the same page with the customer. Internal communication (see #3 below) matters too.
3. SHARE INFORMATION INTERNALLY MORE EFFECTIVELY
Discrepancies and inconsistencies can easily creep into the customer experience if internal information sharing is poor. For example, if front-line workers don’t pass on customer comments, leaders may not be able to make the best organizational decisions. Systematically capturing, collating, and reviewing customer feedback and reviews can ensure critical information never gets missed because a single person or team kept the information siloed.
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How can you get feedback? |
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Informal |
Formal |
Third-Party |
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Most companies have an untapped trove of unofficial customer input: normal customer communications. Clients often share a wealth of potentially helpful feedback in emails, as offhand comments in calls, and so on.
Tip: Train staff to automatically pass along compliments, complaints, and suggestions as a matter of course. |
Firms can also formally solicit input on specific questions via surveys and questionnaires, through focus groups, and by using Quality Assurance procedures that involve regularly contacting customers about their experience.
Tip: Work backwards from the end result you desire. What kind of information do you want? Design your request with that in mind. |
Monitor third-party review sites – including both the big ones like Google and Facebook, as well as sector-specific review sites like ours – to capture customer comments. These sources can provide honest, unfiltered feedback ripe for future action.
Tip: Make sure your business shows up in the right review categories, e.g., “best CBD oil” and “best CBD gummies” if you offer both products. |
4. IMPROVE THE PRODUCT OR SERVICE
Complaints can signal that the product – its formulation, its packaging, and/ or related messaging – needs work. Positive reviews can also help: by knowing what customers really like about your product, you can strengthen your sales and marketing materials, and future product development can make sure to incorporate and emphasize the aspects of the product that customers favor. The end result is both a stronger product and a more effective sales process.
5. IMPROVE MARKETING MESSAGING
Similar to #4, comments – both positive and negative – can help companies operating in the cannabis sector to figure out how to improve their branding and messaging. This is an industry that sometimes faces a lot of uncertainty, skepticism, and misinformation. Constraints on advertising don’t help. Look to user feedback to know if you’re messaging is getting through or if it needs tweaking.
Second, cannabis-related businesses can use good feedback by turning them into…
6. TESTIMONIALS
Think of testimonials as highly distilled and curated customer reviews. They are also very powerful, with the potential to increase conversions on sales pages by 34%.4 Whenever you come across strong, positive customer input – whether through an informal source like email or published reviews on third- party review sites – consider reaching out to those clients and asking if you can use their words as a formal testimonial.
7. CASE STUDIES
Any time a client is satisfied with the work you’ve done, and you think there’s an interesting story there, you might consider turning the feedback into a full-on case study to illustrate what you can achieve for customers by highlighting successes. This is not always possible, especially with medicinal CBD/THC products. But wherever it makes sense, case studies are powerful sales machines: 62.6% of marketers believe case studies are effective at generating leads.
8. REPEAT CUSTOMERS
When someone leaves positive reviews about your business, don’t ignore them! Use that communication point as an opportunity to build that relationship further and establish greater customer loyalty. There’s a reason why businesses that respond to even just a single review see 4% more earnings than average.6 It’s such a simple step to thank customers for good feedback, but the goodwill it generates is enormous.
9. NEW, HIGHLY QUALIFIED LEADS
93% of consumers say online reviews impact buying decisions.7 Thus, positive reviews from existing and previous clients can help prospective customers perusing review sites decide to investigate your business further. One word of caution: make sure your business listing and its reviews are visible across review sites. If you haven’t yet floated to the top of the list organically, consider promoting the listing in the meantime. Otherwise, invisibility will erase this benefit.
10. NEW CUSTOMERS
This item follows directly from the previous item. Reviews are a “trust factor,” a signal to prospective customers that they can trust your products’ ability to generate successful health and wellness outcomes for them. Customer reviews are incredibly useful for driving conversions, according to Google’s retail industry director John McAteer.8 They instill confidence in customers who may be wary of a product type they’ve never tried before.
Third, cannabis-related businesses can use negative feedback to generate…
11. HOW-TO AND OTHER HELPFUL INFORMATIONAL CONTENT
Sometimes, negative reviews result from misunderstandings. As mentioned earlier, the cannabis sector must contend with a lot of myths and misconceptions. There’s a real opportunity to educate your customers, and their feedback and comments can help reveal where they need more information.Consider this kind of feedback an opportunity to create knowledge content like papers, product data sheets, webinars, articles and more.
12. RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT IDEAS
Less-than-glowing reviews can shed insight into the problems customers have that are not currently being solved, or not being solved in a way that customers like. For example, maybe they don’t like the flavor or texture of your gummies or candies. Negative feedback can fuel R&D brainstorming that can result in more customer-pleasing products or other offerings that can satisfy their needs more directly and more effectively.
13. PERSONNEL IMPROVEMENTS
If customer complaints tend to focus on personnel rather than service issues, it may point to a need to shore up or shake up staffing. Perhaps your people need more training and skills development to be maximally effective, e.g. communication skills development in addition to their technical expertise. In extreme cases, negative comments can help you identify workers who may not be a good fit for your target customers or work environment.
14. A RETAINED CUSTOMER
Not all negative reviews represent lost customers! A non-defensive response to a negative review might even completely turn the review around: one out of every three customers who receive a response to a negative review will then change it to be more positive. Another 34% will delete the negative review entirely.9 Negative reviews are a blessing here; they give you a chance to save a customer, unlike the silently unhappy customers who just slip away.
15. (MORE) NEW CUSTOMERS.
This one is shocking: negative reviews can actually result in new business. If your review rating is higher than 4.7, your sales will start to fall off.10 That’s because most customers are skeptical of firms with too high a review rating. That means an ideal portfolio of reviews is going to include at least a small number of negative reviews! It just goes to show, customer feedback – even negative complaints – genuinely hold the power to drive future sales.
AN IDEAL PORTFOLIO OF REVIEWS IS GOING TO INCLUDE AT LEAST A SMALL NUMBER OF NEGATIVE REVIEWS!
References
1 https://www.vonage.com/business/perspectives/the-multibillion-dollar-cost-of-poor-customer-service- infographic/
2 https://www.vonage.com/business/perspectives/the-multibillion-dollar-cost-of-poor-customer-service- infographic/
3 https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20130604134550-284615-15-statistics-that-should-change-the-business- world-but-haven-t/
4 https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/behavioral-competencies/communication/pages/the-cost- of-poor-communications.aspx
5 https://www.impactbnd.com/blog/whats-changed-with-social-proof-in-2019
6 https://neilpatel.com/blog/why-you-need-to-create-case-studies-and-how-to-generate-leads-from-them/
7 https://www.womply.com/impact-of-online-reviews-on-small-business-revenue/
8 http://learn.podium.com/rs/841-BRM-380/images/2017-SOOR-Infographic.jpg
9 https://www.veeqo.com/us/blog/turn-your-customer-reviews-into-ecommerce-sales
10 https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/332549
11 http://spiegel.medill.northwestern.edu/online-reviews/
