Emily Writes is a blogger – living in Wellington. Her blog posts often appear in my social media feeds. Her writing always has an impact on me as she is a very skilled and accomplished writer. She writes in a way that makes me laugh and empathise and relate to her. Today one of her posts popped up in my Facebook feed. It was an open letter she had written to The Warehouse.
You can read her letter and The Warehouse’ response here:
She has clearly had a very disappointing experience but, she does not write in anger or with an expectation that should be compensated. She writes a compelling and funny story about her disappointment.
The Warehouse respond in a way that is truly aligned with her feelings and experience. By reading and digesting her story – they respond in kind – echoing her tone and style and ending with a magnanimous gesture of kindness.
It is a beautiful thing – and many on social media have responded with delight at such a happy ending.
I am a sucker for customer feedback stories – especially ones as wonderful as this. And it reinforces in me our passion and commitment at BigEars to championing voice as a channel for customer feedback.
Because the thing is, big and small disappointments happen to customers every single day. But not everyone has the ability to communicate their feelings so clearly in writing as Emily does. It would take me hours to construct a story like that and it still wouldn’t be nearly as good! In fact very few people are able to write in this way – it is a skill and a talent, a gift to be able to communicate in such a way that people are drawn in to your story and are able to feel your experience.
Generally speaking (and I know this does not apply to all) we are better at telling our stories verbally than we are at writing them down. When we speak we don’t have to spend hours crafting our words to convey the correct emotion – the emotion (joy, disappointment, gratitude, sadness) is evident in our tone.And that is why so much customer feedback goes to waste and is a lost opportunity – as customers, we struggle to convey how an experience has affected us, and then we feel annoyed and frustrated when our feelings aren’t heard.
This is why, at BigEars, we believe in voice. Because not everyone can write like Emily Writes, but we all have a voice.
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