We’re Listening Blog Series: Making Lemonade – Turning Negative Customer Feedback into a Positive

Our hyper-connected world allows for an open market and on-demand access to products and services 24/7. This puts customers in the driver’s seat and when competing products are equal, customer experience becomes a deciding factor.

Listening to the voice of our customers is key to understanding what’s working, what’s not, and what’s missing from the experience. We all like positive customer comments because it’s validation we’re doing something right, but we shouldn’t fear the negative! It’s the negative feedback that provides the real insights to customer pain points and challenges, putting a spotlight on areas needing special attention or change.

For example, several years ago customers were aggravated about our packaging and shipping standards for some of our spare parts, cables, and adapters. Complaints were mainly about over and under packing. We were stuffing boxes too full with multiple parts making it difficult to determine content and quantity, or shipping some items individually resulting in excess packaging, environmental waste, and increased cost.

We listened to this negative feedback and our sustainability team looked at options for a more consistent global fulfillment model with decreased packaging waste and lowered operational costs. They gathered input from customers, partners, and distributors via surveys and interviews. We found a better way and now have an eco-friendly, multi-pack fulfillment and packaging strategy. Customers can order set quantities of parts and we ship with minimal packaging and clear labeling on the carton that includes product name, serial numbers, and quantity.

We know that if you, as our customer, take the time to communicate with Cisco about a bad experience, you’re probably angry, frustrated, and definitely have something to say. So, please give it to us straight. If there’s a breakdown, tell us so we can dig in, uncover the root cause behind your complaint, and identify what needs fixing or changing.

Your negative feedback is extremely valuable to Cisco. While we still have work to do to make sure all of your customer issues have been resolved, it’s our promise to stay on it until they are and then use the learnings to make internal improvements, much like we did with our packaging and shipping. We continue our commitment to give you the best customer experience in the industry.

Lemons, meet lemonade.