Feedback Management
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, May 04, 2009
Ironically, large organizations seeking to better research customer experience don't even understand their customer's experience with their research.
Let's look at the feedback process from the perspective of the typical customer of a large organization: the customer is surrounded on all sides by survey requests.
In this example, survey invitations come from the training department, the customer service department, the marketing department and the sales department. Each department has selected its own survey tool with no central coordination of how frequently customers are invited to take part in research. In fact, one Vovici client had subjected customers to 450 different survey initiatives in the prior year. The result?
- Customers stopped taking requests for surveys seriously and responded less often
- As response rates dropped, individuals invited even more customers to take surveys
- Survey content often overlapped with that of other surveys
- Significant time and energy was invested in gathering survey results, but those results were not even shared within departments, let alone between departments
- Information was gathered inconsistently by different authors, limiting:
- the ability to study changes in customer attitudes over time
- the ability to compare results across departments and product lines
- Wasted investment in redundant tools and surveys
- No one had a true, holistic picture of the customer experience.
Any organization serious about understanding its customer experience needs to start by analyzing and standardizing its own research into that experience. A feedback assessment is a great place to start on the path to enterprise feedback management.