Why your feedback is so important

We had an unfortunate incident at the store this last week. Our softbites were a little hard, ok, very hard. The end result was a very unsatisfied customer -and this makes us cringe.

Everyone has seen them - customer response cards, fill out our survey for a chance to win $10,000, "how are we doing" questionnaires. Often I don't participate in these because, well, do they really do any good? is there anyone out there listening? There was a great article from Seth Godin on "Direct from the consumer marketing". Basically the gist from most customer service groups at companies is that"We want you to be happy, but if you aren't, please go away".

Lots of companies say the differentiate themselves with great customer service. But do they? Do they listen? Do they feel empathy for your situation? I think no.

We had an instance were our business CC was stolen in Dec from a website we buy product from, and our bank was great in ensuring we didn't lose a cent to those bastards, but they stole our CC from someone we do business with. Erin tried calling a few of these companies to let them know there was a possibility their shopping cart system had been compromised. We were really astounded by the results we got. Not one actually listened to what she was saying. She got "Oh, that's great, that couldn't be us, but we can remove your CC number from your account if you would like". Whoopee! Our CC number had already been changed. Our phone call was almost 2 months before the news story broke that one of the largest merchant service accounts in the eastern US was hacked and had all of their customer info stolen. Wonder how much damage that amounted to.

Anyway - point being, who really listens? Back to our softbites.

We take out customer feedback very seriously. We run our business like we like to be dealt with. Erin actually went back to the recipe for our softbites, and realized the recipe had evolved over the last few years, tweaks here and there for the "ultimate cookie" so to speak, but we never went back and captured any of those learnings in the recipe, and the instructions were not as clear as they should be, which means when Erin was not making the soft bites herself, the product was not the same.

Recipe has been updated, so anyone at Bigwag can now make the same great cookies each time. Thank you to our mysterious customer who let us know. I only wish she had stopped long enough to let us know who she was. This kind of info usually nets you some free treats!

Hopefully we embody the point of Seth's article. So, if you see something amiss, idea or suggestion for improving something in our store (or not in our store that should be there) please let us know. We do value it. I know it's not what you are used to, but we are slowly showing people how we think things should work. Call us at 479-631-2WAG or email us at sales@bigwag.com and let us know. If it's a real problem or a great suggestion - I bet you get some free treats out of the deal.