“Amazing customer service!” “Great experience!” “Love my new look.” 

While it’s always nice to receive positive feedback and glowing reviews, critical feedback can help a company better understand its customer’s needs and iterate on its products. 

Customer success managers are crucial to this process, and those at Ruggable understand the importance of exactly how such feedback contributes to the overall company. 

“Taking customer feedback head on and iterating can make or break a company’s success,” Emily McArhur, a senior manager customer experience at Ruggable, said. “Embracing feedback will make your product better, your processes cleaner, and grow your team’s confidence in solving difficult problems. It’s nothing to shy away from.”

McArthur and her team embrace critical feedback by recognizing that not all issues can be solved quickly and even that bouncing back isn’t what customer success is all about. It’s more important to learn from critical feedback than to “recover” from it. 

Built In Los Angeles spoke to Ruggable about how its customer experience team handles critical feedback and how the team uses it to continue to develop their craft. 

Emily McArthur

Senior Manager, Customer Experience • Ruggable

Ruggable is an e-commerce company dedicated to creating machine-washable rugs. 

If a customer shares critical feedback about your product, what are the strategic steps you take to preserve the long-term health of the relationship?

If an aspect of the customer’s experience was missed, handling the situation with empathy and care will keep them optimistic and invested. It’s essential that the customer feels fully understood — avoid jumping to conclusions or assuming their experience. Once the situation is clear, there are usually two paths forward depending on what’s happened. 

First, if something outside of the norm happened resulting in customer frustration, what can be done quickly to recover what went wrong? Once the immediate is resolved, consider how that aspect of the workflow can be strengthened so that it’s less likely to break.

Second, if feedback is received that the customer is unhappy even though the product worked as expected and processes went to plan, then look to ensure the customer feels understood while considering if there’s room to iterate internally.

It all comes back to clear communication and empathy. Not all customer issues can be resolved immediately (or sometimes at all), but you can make sure they feel understood and validated.

There are few things better than when you know you’ve made a customer’s day.’’

How do you bounce back from receiving a piece of critical feedback?

You and your customers are on the same team. Critical feedback is the most valuable thing a customer can give you. Everyone wants the product or solution to fit a customer’s needs perfectly. That leads to high returning customer rate, positive customer sentiment and increased revenue.

Of course, we love when a customer has a positive experience. There are few things better than when you know you’ve made a customer’s day. While there’s room for celebration in those scenarios, they rarely lead to change.

Feedback is always going to come, and often it’s in an intense way that can be painful when received. At the end of the day, it’s less about bouncing back and more about what a team can make of it. If a customer’s expectation has been severely missed such that they reach out and tell you about it — those are the places you can really make a difference. The customer taking time to provide feedback means that there is still a door open to address the issue and make things right.

Ultimately, once you stop hearing critical feedback is when you should really worry — that’s when your customers have given up!

How does critical feedback allow you to learn and develop your craft as a CSM professional?

The customer experience is all about expectation setting. Telling a customer what they want to hear in the immediate term always feels better, but realistic expectations truly build trust and brand loyalty over time. The balance between what is promised to a customer and what is delivered takes time to get right, and critical feedback is essential to getting there. 

No one attempts to mislead when communicating the best case scenario to a customer, that’s all done with good intention. However, deadlines can be missed, rollouts aren’t always as smooth as we hope, and sometimes someone just doesn’t see value in your product. Critical feedback helps you identify where the company is losing confidence or trust with a customer, which is essential to maintaining positive relationships and improving the customer experience.