Ep 185: Warning- Asking for feedback and ignoring it is a liability

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Asking for customer feedback and then ignoring it is not a neutral act; it tells the customer more about the business than any service failure could on its own. This episode opens with a real example of a high-profile restaurant that solicited specific criticism, replied with a templated response, and confirmed the original concern in the process. It is a pattern more common than most business owners realise, and the commercial cost is significant.

Stuart and Mena work through why business owners are structurally poor at seeing their own weaknesses, why silence from customers is not evidence of satisfaction, and why not all feedback deserves equal weight. The discussion challenges the widespread use of Net Promoter Score, arguing that behaviour-based questions, whether a customer has actually referred the business, not whether they intend to, produce more honest and more actionable information.

The episode then moves to system design: how short the survey should be, when to ask, who owns the responses, and what a genuine reply looks like versus a template that bears no relationship to what the customer actually said. The B2B context receives specific attention, where feedback conversations work better as structured check-ins than post-project forms.

The closing decision rule is direct: a feedback system is only worth building if the business is genuinely prepared to act on what it hears. Anything less is a liability, not an asset.

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