Firm harnesses feedback to realise business potential

BACK HOME: Russell Herd has launched an Australasian company aimed at giving businesses client feedback.

A Wanganui man has returned to his home city to develop his business across the country, and then the Tasman.

Russell Herd has been away from Wanganui for 20 years but for the past six of those has been a director of a London-based online firm providing client feedback to businesses.

He was a member of the team at Working Feedback, which worked with England's Care Quality Commission and the National Health Services (NHS).

Now the company has launched its operation in New Zealand and from his Wanganui base Mr Herd said they intend to roll it out here and into Australia in the third quarter of this year.

He remains a director of the parent company and while he is currently doing business from his home he will be looking for office space in Wanganui at some stage. And he will be recruiting a national sales team later this year as well.

Put simply, Working Feedback specialises in market research.

"We're a company providing businesses with the means to gather feedback from their clients' experience of them as a business; finding out what they are doing well, and more importantly, what they can do better," he said.

They supply and control the feedback mechanism by way of online and offline forms, to gather and verify all feedback, testimonials and referrals. Working Feedback then publishes testimonials through social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Working Feedback's RSS feed then puts these testimonials directly into the business's own website. (RSS, often called Really Simple Syndication, uses a family of standard web feed formats to publish frequently updated information such as blogs, news headlines, audio and video).

"We capture any constructive feedback allowing the business every opportunity to resolve any issues with their customer - without the feedback being published - ensuring the highest level of service and customer retention," Mr Herd said.

He said his company's system was designed to ask for referrals for a business to help give their clients a non-confrontational method of getting referrals.

He said there were a number of advantages in working through Working Feedback.

"Having the RSS feed to the company website gives the site regular updates. And social media for the business is regularly updated with testimonial content, which is being seen by potential customers," he said.

He said the customer referrals provided a solid message that their customer loyalty was strong and gave the referred customer the confidence to buy from them.

"Having constructive feedback verified by a third party and passed back gives the customer every opportunity to ensure 100 per cent satisfaction. And keeping customers for longer increases the business's profitability.

"Simply put, it shows potential customers why they should come to that business, it generates referrals, captures constructive feedback privately and increases that business's digital footprint," Mr Herd said.

-For more information go to: Russell@mostrecommended.co.nz