I just got back from the Concero Customer Experience Forum, and I’ve been mulling the many excellent conversations we had there. One thing on my mind are the challenges many companies have with their customer feedback programs. In no particular order, here are some of the things I heard:
- Inflexibility: The customer feedback process can’t adapt to changes in business needs.
- Unfriendliness: The survey doesn’t leave a positive impression with the customer.
- Low Response: It’s hard to get customers to participate (this may be related to unfriendliness).
- Not Actionable: The feedack doesn’t make it clear what specific changes have to take place.
- Not Relevant: The reports don’t address the specific needs of the people who need to use it (or they may address certain people’s needs but not others).
- Stale: By the time the feedback is delivered, it’s too old to be meaningful.
- Poor Metrics: Metrics are too high-level, not high-level enough, not relevant to business needs, create perverse incentives, or are not tailored to the recipient.
- Flood of Verbatims: Too much unstructured, free response feedback which takes too much time and effort to analyze.
- No Credibility: Obvious data quality problems aren’t addressed, leaving the whole process open to attack from people who disagree with the data.
- Not Persuasive: Nothing happens because the process doesn’t create a sense that something needs to be done.
That’s quite a list, and it’s far from exhaustive. If you have more, leave them in the comments.