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The Horror of Customer Feedback

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Today's post is from BB Cline-Thomas, a senior project manager in Vovici's services department. He's been doing customer-satisfaction research using Vovici software since the days we shipped out floppy disks to customers.

I like horror movies, especially Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13^th.  All good stuff—well, at least the first couple versions of each! (My enthusiasm wanes once bad guys from different movies somehow start fighting each other in space.) I like being scared—it’s a thrill.  A standard in horror movies is a character slowly approaches a door, and as we yell, “No, no, don’t open it!” they open the door, and…

…there is nothing there. See, nothing to worry about. 

Which is a bit like the fear of negative customer feedback.

Companies often don’t want to ask customers for the bad news, especially not in any explicit fashion. They don’t want to show customers a list and say, “Please tell us if you’ve experienced any of these problems.” Customers will see all the ways the organization has messed up in the past.

My argument has always been that customers don’t magically come up with problems to complain about just because you asked: they’ve either experienced them or they haven’t. If a respondent’s experience has been problem-free, they’ll check the ‘Experienced no problems’ box and move on. One concession that I have made is to sometimes use the word issues or concerns instead of problems.

The list of problems – er, issues – to present to customers in a survey can come from a variety of sources:

• Focus groups
• Open-ended comments from previous surveys
• Social media searches
• Interviews with call center reps
• Call center data

An argument can be made that “I know what problems my customers are having and how often: look at my call center logs.”  Well, those are the problems of the people who bother to contact you.  Wouldn’t you like to know if there are common problems, especially problems that are easily solved, that you aren’t being contacted about? Quite a few times when I’ve presented survey results, an attendee has muttered “Didn’t think that was a big one.”

That’s why it’s important to do a representative sample of your customers. Some of the benefits you get from asking customers about issues you think they are having are you discover:

1. The percent of your customer base experiencing specific issues
2. Which issues produce disproportionately more or less contact
3. Evaluation of how well you are solving specific issues when contacted

While you can ask customers an open-ended question, you are then going to have code all of the answers – an added layer of effort. And some responses are terse or unclear—and respondents may omit minor issues that you want to track. Better to marry the two approaches: ask the closed-end question with its exhaustive list of choices and an Other (please specify) choice to capture anything you might have missed.

Most importantly, companies should not only be on a mission to find out what problems their customers are experiencing but which ones have the greatest impact on all aspects of loyalty.  With that information in hand, issues can be prioritized and corrective actions targeted to the key problem areas.  Look for relationships between old surveys reporting issues and the subsequent retention or attrition of those customers. Resources will not be wasted on fixing issues that don’t necessarily have to be fixed immediately, or at all.

I understand the fear of getting a lot of bad news from a survey; I suppose a cynical way of looking at a survey is ‘Tell us how bad we are.’  The Pollyanna in me prefers to look at a survey as ‘Tell us what we can do better.’ 

What should really be feared is the unknown. Realizing that your annual customer attrition rate is 15%, and you have no idea why is the business equivalent of Freddy, Jason and Michael Myers all rolled in to one.  I say open that door and find out that there is no bogeyman on the other side.