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Acquiring new customers has become increasingly challenging and expensive. Customer acquisition costs have risen substantially in the last five years, and theyre still climbing. Attention is scarce, and even a great product isnt enough to guarantee customer retention. The fastest growth can be found not by pouring more money into marketing but by turning your existing users into advocates. And we found that at our HR tech platform, which offers a suite of technological solutions and assumes all risks and obligations associated with engaging contractors, the insights that lead to the highest customer retention come from addressing negative reviews. Handled correctly, a one-star review can go from being a blemish on your reputation to a goldmine of insights that can drive product improvements, bolster user satisfaction, and ultimately, fuel growth. Heres how. The economics of listening Your current user base is a treasure trove of opportunity. These users have already navigated your onboarding processes and understand your products value. Engaging with their feedback can lead to enhancements that can make them champions of your brand. According to a Capital One Shopping report, 99% of American consumers read reviews before buying, and 93% say reviews impact their purchasing decisions. A CouponBirds survey found that 96% of consumers leave feedback at least some of the time, and 44% do so always. Reviews are a very loud source of business intelligencea real-world focus group if you will. For instance, at our company, we once received an angry message from a freelancer claiming we were withholding their payment. Our initial reaction was confusion. Everything looked fine. But after digging in, we discovered the real issuethe client had failed to approve the task. At the time, our system had no failsafe. If clients went silent, freelancers got stuck, which caused numerous payments to be delayed. This message led to a product changeafter a fixed time period, work now would be auto-approved. This tweak made our platform more efficient and trustworthy, not only for freelancers, but for businesses too. Every user is a potential advocate It can be tempting to only focus on decision-makers. But anyone who interacts with your product can become a powerful amplifier. A Kenyan contractor doing translations for $300 a month might not be on your CRM radar, but their experience matters. A single post on a Reddit thread, a comment in a WhatsApp group, or a Trustpilot review can influence dozens of prospective usersespecially in industries where reputation travels fast and word-of-mouth is gold. Thats why we treat every review seriously, regardless of where it appearsGoogle Play, the App Store, Trustpilot, or email. We reach out, ask follow-up questions, and even track users down on other platforms to ensure their voice is heard and their issues addressed. It only takes one frustrated customer sharing a bad experience to damage trust. Instead of letting that happen, why not use the opportunity to turn the customer into an evangelist for your brand? In addition, negative feedback can impact a companys culture. When engineers or operations teams see complaints go unaddressed, morale suffers. It has been well-documentedincluding by Harvard Business Reviewthat employees lose motivation when their work is publicly criticized and nothing changes. Getting to solve a problem for unhappy customers can become fuel for the team building the product and a motivated team will deliver better results. Four steps for turning feedback into growth #1: Know whos speaking Everyone sees the product from a different angleand their complaints address divergent priorities. A workflow bug might frustrate your end user but never reach leadership. A missing report might annoy your buyer, even if it doesnt block usage. Categorizing feedback by personatechnical user, business buyer, etc.helps you decide what to fix first and whats noise. #2: Build direct escalation paths The support team sees issues long before they reach the C-suite. If a complaint surfaces twice, it shouldnt need a third time to get flagged. Give customer-facing teams a clear path to share feedback with product, legal, operationswhoever can actually solve it. And empower them to identify patterns, not just create tickets. If your team has to make a case to be heard, your users are already slipping through the cracks. #3: Ask better questions A complaint is an invitation to find out the root problem. Instead of doing a surface fix, get curious. What is the complaint a symptom of? Why does this matter? What downstream effect is it creating? Thats how you find problems worth solving. We had a case like this. One HR representative told us our multi-currency setup was frustrating. We asked why. As it turned out, switching accounts required special permissions, delaying task creation and costing money. We redesigned the experience, enabling teams to work in a single window and assign tasks across currencies instantly. This change accelerated workflows as well as payments and led to happier clients. #4: Close the loopevery time When you resolve an issue, tell the person who flagged it. People remember when theyre heard, and this builds trust and loyalty. A report by Qualtrics found that 88% of customers will likely recommend an organization after a pleasant experience. Don’t automate empathy. Instead, respond like it matters, because it does. When handled with care, feedback becomes a road mapnot only for a better user experience, but for longer relationships, a stronger culture, and building trust. You dont need to turn every user into an ambassador. But if you treat each one like they could be, youll build a productand a brandthat people fight to stay with.
Category:
E-Commerce
As summer arrives, people are turning on air conditioners in most of the U.S. But if youre like me, you always feel a little guilty about that. Past generations managed without air conditioningdo I really need it? And how bad is it to use all this electricity for cooling in a warming world? If I leave my air conditioner off, I get too hot. But if everyone turns on their air conditioner at the same time, electricity demand spikes, which can force power grid operators to activate some of the most expensive, and dirtiest, power plants. Sometimes those spikes can ask too much of the grid and lead to brownouts or blackouts. Research I recently published with a team of scholars makes me feel a little better, though. We have found that it is possible to coordinate the operation of large numbers of home air-conditioning units, balancing supply and demand on the power gridand without making people endure high temperatures inside their homes. Studies along these lines, using remote control of air conditioners to support the grid, have for many years explored theoretical possibilities like this. However, few approaches have been demonstrated in practice and never for such a high-value application and at this scale. The system we developed not only demonstrated the ability to balance the grid on timescales of seconds, but also proved it was possible to do so without affecting residents comfort. The benefits include increasing the reliability of the power grid, which makes it easier for the grid to accept more renewable energy. Our goal is to turn air conditioners from a challenge for the power grid into an asset, supporting a shift away from fossil fuels toward cleaner energy. Adjustable equipment My research focuses on batteries, solar panels, and electric equipmentsuch as electric vehicles, water heaters, air conditioners, and heat pumpsthat can adjust itself to consume different amounts of energy at different times. Originally, the U.S. electric grid was built to transport electricity from large power plants to customers homes and businesses. And originally, power plants were large, centralized operations that burned coal or natural gas, or harvested energy from nuclear reactions. These plants were typically always available and could adjust how much power they generated in response to customer demand, so the grid would be balanced between power coming in from producers and being used by consumers. But the grid has changed. There are more renewable energy sources from which power isnt always available, like solar panels at night or wind turbines on calm days. And there are the devices and equipment I study. These newer options, called distributed energy resources, generate or store energy near where consumers need itor adjust how much energy theyre using in real time. One aspect of the grid hasnt changed, though: Theres not much storage built into the system. So every time you turn on a light, for a moment theres not enough electricity to supply everything that wants it right then: The grid needs a power producer to generate a little more power. And when you turn off a light, theres a little too much: A power producer needs to ramp down. The way power plants know what real-time power adjustments are needed is by closely monitoring the grid frequency. The goal is to provide electricity at a constant frequency60 hertzat all times. If more power is needed than is being produced, the frequency drops and a power plant boosts output. If theres too much power being produced, the frequency rises and a power plant slows production a little. These actions, a process called frequency regulation, happen in a matter of seconds to keep the grid balanced. This output flexibility, primarily from power plants, is key to keeping the lights on for everyone. Finding new options Im interested in how distributed energy resources can improve flexibility in the grid. They can release more energy, or consume less, to respond to the changing supply or demand, and help balance the grid, ensuring the frequency remains near 60 hertz. Some people fear that doing so might be invasive, giving someone outside your home the ability to control your battery or air conditioner. Therefore, we wanted to see if we could help balance the grid with frequency regulation using home air-conditioning units rather than power plants, without affecting how residents use their appliances or how comfortable they are in their homes. From 2019 to 2023, my group at the University of Michigan tried this approach, in collaboration with researchers at Pecan Street Inc., Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the University of California, Berkeley, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. We recruited 100 homeowners in Austin to do a real-world test of our system. All the homes had whole-house forced-air cooling systems, which we connected to custom control boards and sensors the owners allowed us to install in their homes. This equipment let us send instructions to the air-conditioning units based on the frequency of the grid. Before I explain how the system worked, I first need to explain how thermostats work. When people set thermostats, they pick a temperature, and the thermostat switches the air-conditioning compressor on and off to maintain the air temperature within a small range around that set point. If the temperature is set at 68 degrees, the thermostat turns the AC on when the temperature is, say, 70, and turns it off when its cooled down to, say, 66. Every few seconds, our system slightly changed the timing of air-conditioning compressor switching for some of the 100 air conditioners, causing the units aggregate power consumption to change. In this way, our small group of home air conditioners reacted to grid changes the way a power plant wouldusing more or less energy to balance the grid and keep the frequency near 60 hertz. Moreover, our system was designed to keep home temperatures within the same small temperature range around the set point. Testing the approach We ran our system in four tests, each lasting one hour. We found two encouraging results. First, the air conditioners were able to provide frequency regulation at least as accurately as a traditional power plant. Therefore, we showed that ar conditioners could play a significant role in increasing grid flexibility. But perhaps more importantlyat least in terms of encouraging people to participate in these types of systemswe found that we were able to do so without affecting peoples comfort in their homes. We found that home temperatures did not deviate more than 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit from their set point. Homeowners were allowed to override the controls if they got uncomfortable, but most didnt. For most tests, we received zero override requests. In the worst case, we received override requests from 2 of the 100 homes in our test. In practice, this sort of technology could be added to commercially available internet-connected thermostats. In exchange for credits on their energy bills, users could choose to join a service run by the thermostat company, their utility provider, or some other third party. Then people could turn on the air-conditioning in the summer heat without that pang of guilt, knowing they were helping to make the grid more reliable and more capable of accommodating renewable energy sourceswithout sacrificing their own comfort in the process. Johanna Mathieu is an associate professor of electrical engineering & computer science at the University of Michigan. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Category:
E-Commerce
President Trump won a temporary victory Thursday night when a federal appeals court blocked a lower court judges order to return control of Californias National Guard to the state. Senior U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer previously ruled that Trumps activation of the National Guard, a state-based reserve military force, in Los Angeles was unlawful and illegitimate. California Governor Gavin Newsom and the states attorney general, Rob Bonta, filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration this week after the president activated the troops in response to demonstrations against immigration raids. His actions were illegalboth exceeding the scope of his statutory authority and violating the Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, Breyer wrote. He must therefore return control of the California National Guard to the Governor of the State of California forthwith. While Newsom notched an early win, a federal appeals court did not agree. Three judges on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an administrative stay on the lower courts ruling late Thursday, leaving control of the troops with Trumpat least until a June 17 hearing. Trump vs. Newsom The clash between federal and states rights has set up a fiery confrontation between Newsom, who likely holds his own presidential ambitions, and the White House. We didnt have a problem until Trump got involved, Newsom wrote on X this week. Rescind the order. Return control to California. The Trump administration denies critics claims that the National Guards deployment intentionally escalated tensions in the city. If I didnt SEND IN THE TROOPS to Los Angeles the last three nights, that once beautiful and great City would be burning to the ground right now, much like 25,000 houses burned to the ground, Trump wrote on Truth Social. Newsom isnt the only Democrat clashing with the Trump administration. On Thursday, California Senator Alex Padilla was tackled and handcuffed after trying to interrupt Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem with a question during a press conference. Breaking with history Trumps move to deploy thousands of California National Guard troops to bolster the governments increasingly aggressive immigration crackdown is unprecedented in at least a few ways. Historically, a governornot the presidenttaps the National Guard when traditional state resources are overwhelmed. Guard members can be called up to meet many kinds of needs a state might have, from administering vaccines to filling in as substitute teachers (both of which occurred during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic). Trumps activation of the Guard was the first time since 1965 that a president has deployed the troops within a state against a governors wishes. That year, Lyndon B. Johnson sent troops to Alabama to protect civil rights protesters over the wishes of Governor George Wallace, a segregationist. Johnsons actions bear little resemblance to the Trump administrations decision to send troops into Los Angeles to back immigration and law enforcement agents as they conduct raids in locations ranging from downtown garment district businesses to suburban Home Depot parking lots. In recent days, violent mobs have attacked ICE officers and Federal Law Enforcement Agents carrying out basic deportation operations in Los Angeles, California, White House Press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement announcing the National Guard deployment. Law enforcement has made around 400 arrests related to the protests since they began last week, including two men charged with possessing Molotov cocktails. The Justice Department is also pursuing assault charges against two California residents for throwing objects including water bottles and beer cans at federal officers. A number of Waymo self-driving cars have been set on fire since protests began, prompting the company to pull its vehicles from the area. The White Houses narrative paints a dark picture of widespread social unrest and violence in Los Angeles, an image that many Angelenos pushed back against on social media with posts showing upbeat gatherings and normal brunch dates. On TikTok and other social networks, L.A. residents have rejected national portrayals of a city under siege, calling attention to the relatively small area of the sprawling city affected by ongoing protests.
Category:
E-Commerce
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