Small business storytelling leaves your company vulnerable. Especially, if you depend on customer feedback as a resource for stories.
First, not all customers post their feedback, either on your own website or on review sites. As a result, stories can be biased. Then, what information do customers convey to the world? Because you rely on them as your unofficial brand ambassadors.
Often, customer feedback focuses on good, bad and downright ugly customer experiences, with varying levels of detail.
In addition, the stories they report deal with their transactional, tactical experiences with your small business. Customer feedback reflects customer life cycle experiences. And these experiences are a function of number of services performed annually. Consequently, customer feedback tells an incomplete story.
Can you afford to leave your small business future up to reacting to customer feedback? Could you set the stage for exceptional customer experience, proactively?
Also, customer feedback becomes the only story you are known for in the minds of prospective and existing customers.
Instead, why not learn to tell your own small business stories, by creating and leveraging a storytelling culture in your business?
A small business storytelling culture unites employees, in story, on behalf of better serving each other, and your customers. As a result, gaps in internal processes and communication patterns are uncovered, resulting in more consistent service delivery quality. Also, when employees become part of your small business story, their engagement with customers is enhanced.
Instead of providing tactical service delivery, employees understand the strategic implications of that service on customer retention.
Do you have a small business storytelling culture in your organization? Simple stories, told well, retain not only customers, but employees, as well.
Take your next steps to moving beyond customer feedback as the source of compelling small business storytelling. Contact me here.
Babette Ten Haken’s One Millimeter Mindset® Storytelling for STEM Professionals and Left Brain Thinkers speaking programs leverage purpose-driven value differentiation through storytelling, to create and retain successful employees and clients.
Find out more about Babette’s professional story here. Babette is a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association. Her playbook of communication hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. Babette’s speaker profile is on the espeakers platform.
Image source: Adobe Stock
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