🔒Portland marketing company launches new ways to generate customer feedback

Imagine: You're at a restaurant and the meal disappoints. Do you say anything?

Bruce Wildes, CEO of marketing company LMC Group, bets the answer most often is "no." For a customer, the experience is just one more eatery ticked off the list. But for a business owner, the cost can be much higher, Wildes says.

"You could go on Trip Advisor or Yelp and the whole world knows what a bad experience you've had," he says. "The merchant would rather address that."

That's because a negative perception, especially in small local markets, can hurt a business' bottom line.

A detractor who spreads the bad word can cost "multiples more in lost revenue than what they generate" through purchases, Wildes says. On the other hand, he says converting a satisfied customer to a loyal customer can make that person six times more valuable to the business in the long run.

To enhance that conversion, Wildes is piloting a new marketing method that uses the advantages of Internet communication to drive specific customer feedback. The platform allows the merchant to capture and spread the good reviews while sidelining the negative ones for redress. It is the work of LMC Group — an acronym for "local marketing community" — which licenses a web-based marketing platform to deliver businesses new ways to capture customer feedback.

It is also floating pilot projects to encourage "buy local" connections in Portland and Sanford, which has so far drawn about 30 clients, who share good reviews with other LMC Group clients within those communities to strengthen their brands.

"The world of retail has become so competitive over the past few years that word-of-mouth has become incredibly important, much more so than it ever has been," says Day's Jewelers President Jeff Corey, one of the longest-running clients of LMC Group. "Oftentimes, if you disappoint a customer, they often won't come out and tell you but they will tell all of their friends and co-workers," Corey says. "What this program does is give you at least an opportunity to intercept or to catch that negative experience and try to rectify it."

The program works like this: Store customers receive a card asking them to take a short, four-question online survey. When they're finished, the survey generates a code that the customer can use for a discount on their next purchase.

"If you're a loyal or satisfied customer, the system automatically asks you to share [survey results]," Wildes says. "If you're dissatisfied, we have a closed-loop rapid response system to contact the merchant and put the merchant and customer together to address the issue before the customer goes viral."

That immediate intervention between a dissatisfied customer and his opportunity to spread his complaint virally is the key to LMC Group's methodology.

The marketing model appeals to Portland-based moving company Local Muscle, which started three years ago and now has two moving trucks and a cargo van in its fleet.

"Normal advertising didn't seem to be reaching out as much," says Jacob Holz, Local Muscle's owner and manager. The company recently signed on with LMC Group.

In a smaller city like Portland, Holz says fostering quality customer feedback and soliciting direct referrals from happy customers seems the better bet.

"Word of mouth is really what drives the business for us," Holz says. "If we do a good job and someone feels good about our work, when someone asks on Facebook for a referral for a moving business, we're pretty confident that they'll recommend us."

Corey says referrals are also critical for the jewelry business.

"When a person is looking to buy a piece of jewelry, they often will ask friends or co-workers, 'Where do you think I should shop?'" Corey says. "In order for a customer to recommend you, you would have to exceed their expectations."

Spreading its market

Until a year ago, LMC Group deployed its customer service system only to individual clients in Maine and New Hampshire. But Wildes' Sanford and Portland pilots have launched to fill what he sees as a new and growing market.

"We saw a need to take the 'shop local, buy local' movement to another level," Wildes says, "and we had a system that we could adapt to be able to do that."

Wildes argues that, for local businesses, marketing through online deals like Groupon and Living Social are unsustainable because the deals offered don't focus on or foster regular, repeat customers.

"Most of our competitors are concentrating on drawing in that new customer for the first time," Wildes says. Additionally, the customer interactions generated by competing marketing outfits focus on interactions that begin online, while LMC looks to engage customers that have already walked through the door. The LMC system, he says, "starts with the merchant and the customer, but then we try to build the relationship through all channels."

So far, Wildes has brought on around 30 businesses between the new local marketing ventures in Sanford and Portland, both areas where the platform extends beyond individual retailers to create what he calls "an online ecosystem" where customers may see cross-promotion for other businesses that are in the local LMC network.

"All boats rise with the tide, so to speak," Wildes says.

The near-term goals for the company include deploying LMCs in every major community in the state and to more than double the size of the company and revenue in the next two years. By year's end, he's projecting revenues of $250,000.

A new approach

The feedback has been used to enhance internal customer service practices and improve a company's reputation externally.

Corey acknowledges there were challenges at first in making sure dissatisfied customers had a chance to participate. He worried staff might not give a survey card to a customer who they thought might be disappointed or have some kind of negative experience in the store. Toward that end, Corey says Day's offers employees a monthly bonus based on the number of survey cards the employee hands out.

"It's very common within an organization to become defensive when we get negative comments from a customer," Corey says. "What we've tried to do over the years is remove that negative feeling about those comments and embrace them as being a critical element to our company's mission."

Corey says that soliciting feedback through the surveys has resulted in more customer information that the company is using in its planning decisions and to foster his business' long-term success.

"To build a company that stands the test of time, you need to get good, honest solid customer feedback," Corey says. "What you do with that is the next challenge."

He says that good feedback gives company management a springboard for positive reinforcement with employees and a chance to build customer relationships. In the same way, negative feedback has given him actionable information — not just for reaching out to the aggrieved customer — but for internal operations as well.

In the rarest of cases, Corey says, the problem can be traced back to an employee who does not care about the service they're providing. But more often, negative customer feedback signals a system error, where Corey says he looks to change company process or procedure, or a need for more or better training.

"Or, thirdly, it's human error, and there's nothing you're going to do to change that," Corey says.

Looking ahead

Including the relatively new LMC clients in Sanford and Portland, Wildes says the company has around 80 clients who use its licensed Promoterz marketing platform. Wildes says that the company has hired a developer to upgrade LMC's online interface in the next two years.

Those investments should help LMC Group grow. Wildes says the technology has been used in other industries but has remained out of reach for smaller merchants.

"The airlines and hotels have been doing this for years," Wildes says. "We're bringing it down to the Main Street merchant."