There was a wonderful question asked recently on Linked In about the value of Trust and Loyalty, and whether this would make is easy for a Company such as Apple to move quickly and profitability into areas such as banking.

A survey had been conducted that suggested it would.

But then there were comments attached which stated (from Apple customers) that perhaps it wouldn't be that simple: because they felt 'tied in' by Apple and didn't want to be 'tied in' by a Bank (as they effectively feel already).

There's much shouting about how 'unfair' Trip Advisor are and how annoying it is to get bad reviews, so I feel compelled to put the record straight. Here goes:

> It's not 'unfair' everyone has the same issues!

> If you get it right it's free worldwide advertising for a little bit of effort, what on earth is anyone moaning about?

This is so often the case.

I suggest you do more than this if you want to spend time and money on customer feedback (and you MUST do this in 2012 to survive). Here's my short tips:

1. You don't want 'satisfaction' you want 'loyalty' and 'engagement' resulting in repeat sales, up sales and referrals

Here's a simple paragraph on John Lewis from the Guardian in 2010

In the depths of what everyone keeps telling us is the deepest financial and economic crisis since the second world war, John Lewis plainly has not done badly (operating profit up 20%, if you didn't read the business pages last week). That's partly because it stacks its shelves with goods of a certain quality, and sells them to a certain kind of customer with a certain standard of service. After all, Middle England loves John Lewis: if a product is on sale in one of its stores, you know you can trust it. Plus you can be sure you'll be served by someone who really knows what they're talking about and, most unusually of all, is eager to help.

I am fed up with seeing courses and ideas about ‘Social Media’ touted around trying to persuade businesses that it’s a universal panacea, and, if you come on this course, new customers will come flooding to you.     

  Bo***cks

Social media is just new technology that can be used effectively or ineffectively.

As customers, we know: as soon as someone tries to “sell” to us, we clam up, erect barriers, and do all we can to avoid ‘being sold to’.

In order to combat this, dysfunctional sales techniques have arisen, where sales people (desperate to ‘make a sale’ and ‘achieve budget’) try harder and harder to ‘make the sale’.

This charade ends up as a ‘cat and mouse’ game, where all sides waste time, effort  and money:

Everyone loves conducting and receiving Appraisals, don’t they?

Here’s a recent quote from ‘The Times’

the problem with appraisals is extreme. They take different forms in different companies, but what they have in common is that they are usually annual, usually involve a tense exchange between employer and employee, have a knack of being timed to coincide with the employee making a major cockup, and invariably leave both parties depressed.