In an increasingly digital world, customer feedback is vital to businesses now more than ever.
Most potential customers have reviews at their fingertips, heavily influencing whether they choose to shop with you or your competitors.
Earlier this year, full fibre broadband provider 4th Utility embarked on its biggest ever project to connect thousands of homes in an historically underserved part of London, to turn it into one of the UK’s most digitally connected regions.
In this article, Jimmy Acton, the firm’s Chief Digital Officer, discusses how they achieved this through a strong customer-focused, innovative strategy, as well as the importance of dealing with complaints and disputes correctly – and the steps you can take to prevent them.
Why customer feedback is vital
For our team at 4th Utility, providing world-class customer service is a top priority. We’re big believers in doing what’s right, for the right reasons, and I’d like to think this is obvious to our customers. It’s about communication, transparency and honesty – if you treat customers in any other way, they’ll see right through it.
Let’s be real. Just like every business, you are going to receive negative feedback from time to time, but it’s how you deal with it that really counts. Handling complaints incorrectly can quickly take a nasty turn, especially online.
Complaints and disputes can have many disadvantages for businesses, including:
- Decreased customer satisfaction
- Lack of return custom
- Negative financial impact
- It’s time consuming
On the other hand, there are benefits to receiving negative feedback, as businesses can see what they’re doing wrong. Needless to say, this only becomes a useful exercise if you course correct accordingly!
The secret is a strong strategy and prevention. There are so many benefits to a strong customer-focused strategy and at 4th Utility, ours is clearly working. We’re proud to have been nominated for various customer service awards and the team regularly receive glowing reviews.
So, where do you start with your strategy? I like to think of it as being in three steps…
1. Research and communicate
As I’ve already said, the best complaints and dispute strategies begin with prevention. And to achieve that, I cannot overstate the importance of doing your research and getting to know your customer base inside and out. A good place to start is to:
- Organise surveys and focus groups
- Go out into the community and communicate face-to-face with your target audience
- Ask questions, learn about their pain points
- Most importantly, listen
Then, if you want success with your customers, the next step is to come up with a solution to an issue or need they may have.
I’m going to use our major recent project in Woolwich as a case study. It’s here that we are turning what was a historically underserved part of London into one of the UK’s most digitally connected areas.
At 4th Utility, the UK’s only full-fibre provider 100% focused on MDUs, we see fast, reliable broadband as an essential part of everyday life. And although the internet seems easily accessible to most, it may come as a surprise that there’s still a significant digital divide in the UK. Needless to say, residents in Woolwich had been caught on the wrong side of this divide, worsened by a cost-of-living crisis that’s seen the price of essentials soar.
Prior to the commencement of our latest project, our team met with local authorities and community centres and really listened to what they needed in their area.
We made sure we developed an excellent understanding of underserved urban customers’ specific needs.
In-depth quantitative and qualitative research by 4th Utility into urban areas like Greenwich uncovered that awareness of full fibre was very low. For many homes in the area, English was not a first language and it was also found that many homes may be eligible for 4th Utility’s Social Tariff, which offers full fibre broadband for just £13.99 per month – one of the lowest-priced tariffs in the UK.
Which brings me to my next point…
2. Educate and provide a solution
Upon discovering that many residents didn’t really understand full fibre technology and were unaware of our social tariff offering, we organised several solutions. We…
- Partnered with the local community centre to ensure multilingual information was available and installed free digital noticeboards to help keep residents informed
- Maintained a physical presence in the area, facilitated free broadband drop-in clinics on-site to assist residents with broadband issues
- Held a strong focus on education and recruited ‘Customer Champions’ locally to help educate and build trust
- Provided 24/7 customer service with easy translation, ensuring any issues raised are solved by the same team member who took the initial query
3. Always seek out feedback
Finally, never settle. The biggest mistake you can make is to think that you’ve finished the job and that’s that. Continue to seek feedback once each job is complete, there’s always room for improvement.
Be sure to:
- Send out customer satisfaction questionnaires
- Figure out the most common customer pain points
- Find solutions
- Get better every time
In conclusion, every solution we put in place in Woolwich has made our customers’ lives easier.
Since the start of the year, we have successfully overcome numerous challenges. In fact, the firm is now fast becoming the area’s go-to broadband provider, enabling members of the community to do things many take for granted, like book doctor’s appointments, contact their families, or leave reviews.
We‘re on our way to installing fast, reliable, full-fibre broadband to 157 buildings in the Woolwich area, and we’ve since had fantastic feedback directly from customers. We’re also often nominated for customer satisfaction awards and are proud of our 4.5 (500+ reviews) Trustpilot score.
But we won’t stop there, we’ll take on any feedback, whether it’s positive or negative and we’ll build on it. Not just because it’s good for business, but because it’s the right thing to do – for us and for our customers.
About 4th Utility
4th Utility is a fast growing, independent full fibre broadband Internet Service Provider (ISP), supplying ultrafast connectivity to homes across the UK via its own fibre optic network.
It does this by partnering with residential and commercial landlords as well as developers to install and upgrade their properties with state-of-the-art fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP or full fibre) technology. For users, that means symmetrical upload and download speeds of up to 1 Gbps.
Established in 2017 and headquartered in Hale, Greater Manchester, the company employs over 60 people. 4th Utility also offers an affordable digital inclusion tariff, 30-day rolling contracts across all packages, and 10-minute, hassle-free installation, with new customers online within 60 seconds of signing up to the service.
For more information, visit https://the4thutility.co.uk/
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