Carly Buxton, PhD

I am an ultra discerning user. I have opinions, and I am ready and willing to share them. 

When I fill out surveys, speak to a customer service agent, or–for example–receive an email that hits the wrong way, I almost always offer up my email and time to help a company by sharing my 2-cents as a customer.

It’s incredibly rare for a company to take me up on it. In fact, I’ve probably done this 200+ times and then actually gotten invited to a call twice. BUT another one just did! Kudos, Allara.

Background: 

I joined Allara Health when I was diagnosed with PCOS earlier this summer. They targeted me on Instagram, interestingly enough, after somehow finding out that I’d been googling about symptoms and treatment. The company offers tailored nutrition and health advice for individuals who face unique hormonal challenges. So far, I’ve been really pleased with the patient experience and have connected with a friendly and knowledgeable MD who specializes in my condition, as well as a RDN who came to the call having already fully mentally downloaded the decades-long history of dieting woes I’d taken the time to type up in my patient dashboard. Phew.

The Feedback Experience:

But their “concierge” (automated internal messaging system) leaves A LOT to be desired. It messages me too often and requires that I sign in to see the message… which is usually a reminder to do something that I’ve already done. So the other day, frustrated, I responded as follows:

What an absolute delight! The concierge actually forwarded my message to the higher-ups, and I got this response:

We scheduled a time to talk and spoke by phone earlier today. She left it pretty open-ended (like “ok, start in with your feedback!”), which is not ideal–that’s actually the focus of tomorrow’s post–but I do think that my input was helpful, and mostly I gained a huge halo of respect for this company for actually trying to take customers up on their offer to share feedback.

Lessons for Companies:

Does your company have an organized way to collect feedback when random users offer it? Not just via support requests and customer service tickets… but other ways? Like when somebody messages you that they’d be willing to share feedback, do you have a path forward to take them up on it?

Maybe most companies think they know better. Or they think they have feedback loops in place (such as post-service surveys), and that there’s no reason to go outside of established feedback systems. Or they think anyone passionate enough to offer their time must be either an irate customer seeking service recovery or a pompous windbag eager to usersplain.

Even if it is the former–or the latter!–it behooves you to build systems to collect this outside-of-the-feedback-system feedback at your own company. It helps users to feel heard, and it can really help you grow and improve in unexpected ways, if you know how to shape the conversation.