It’s easy to do a survey, but it’s hard to run an effective customer feedback program that leads to changes in a company’s actions and improved customer experience. There are a number of common mistakes: so common that nearly all companies make at least one of these mistakes, and a lot of companies manage to hit the entire list:
Not Understanding the Purpose of the Customer Survey
If you don’t know what you expect to accomplish through a customer feedback program, it’s hard to structure it in a way that will meet your goals. For example, a survey designed to help improve the performance of customer-facing employees will be very different than one merely intended to track metrics. When I ask companies why they are running a survey, often I hear answers like, “To collect customer feedback,” or “Because it’s a best practice.” Answers like that tell me that they don’t have a clear sense of why they need a survey, other than for the sake of having a survey.
Asking Too Many Questions
Long surveys generally have a poorer response rate than shorter surveys, can leave the customer with a bad feeling about the survey, and often don’t produce any more useful feedback than shorter surveys. In many cases, there is no good reason to ask a lot of questions, other than a need to appease a large group of internal stakeholders each of whom is overly attached to his or her favorite question or metric. It’s easy to find the questions you don’t need on your survey: go through all the questions and ask yourself, “Have we ever actually taken any action based on this question?” If the answer is no, the question should go.
Focusing on Metrics, Not Customers
Metrics are easy to fit into a numbers-driven business culture, but metrics are not customers. At best, metrics are grossly oversimplified measurements of your aggregate performance across thousands (or millions) of customer interactions. But behind those numbers are thousands (or millions) of actual human beings, each of whom had their own experience. Many companies focus solely on the metrics and forget the customers behind them. Metrics make sense as a progress marker, but the goal is not to improve metrics but to improve customer experiences.
Not Pushing Useful Data to the Front Lines Fast Enough
In many cases, creating a great customer experience isn’t about installing the right platform or systems, it’s making sure that thousands of little decisions all across the company are made the right way. Those people making those decisions need to know how their individual performance is helping contribute to the overall customer experience, and the best way to do that is give them access to immediate, impactful feedback from customers. Too often, though, customer feedback gets filtered through a centralized reporting team, or boiled down to dry statistics, or delivered in a way that masks the individual employee’s contribution to the whole.
Not Closing the Loop
Closed-loop feedback is one of the most powerful tools for making sure a customer survey inspires action in the company, yet even today most companies do not have a formal system in place to close the loop with customers. There are actually three loops that need to be closed: you need to close the loop with the customer, with the business, and with the survey. If you’re not closing all three loops, then your survey is not providing the value you should be expecting.
Always Using the Same Survey
Companies change and evolve. Markets shift. Customer’s expectations are not static. Entire industries transform themselves in just a few years. So why do so many customer surveys remain unchanged for years (or decades)? Surveys should be structured to respond to changing business needs and evolve over time, otherwise you’re not collecting feedback that’s relevant to current business problems. Surveys that never change quickly become irrelevant.
Not Appreciating Customers’ For Their Feedback
Finally, a lot of companies forget that when they do a survey they are asking a customer–a human being–to take time out of their day to help out. And they’re asking for hundreds or thousands of these favors on an ongoing basis. But when the reports come out and the statistics are compiled, all those individual bits of human helpfulness are lost in the data machine. I know it’s not practical to individually and personally thank thousands of customers for doing a survey, but it’s not that hard to let customers know that you’re listening to them and taking their feedback seriously. All too often the customer experience of completing a survey involves taking several minutes to answer a lot of questions and provide thoughtful feedback, and then it disappears into a black hole. You don’t need to pay customers for taking a survey (in fact, that’s often a bad idea), but you should at least stop and think about how helpful your customers are being and appreciate their efforts.
Nice article Peter. I’d say closing the loop is the most important factor that most companies omit as it helps in many ways.
1. They can figure if they’re asking the right questions.
2. Improvements can happen only if the loop is closed. And closing the loop means taking the findings through the entire Lean, Deming or Six Sigma cycle, which ever they may want to use for improving service quality.
3. Visible improvements based on feedback gives confidence to the customer that the company cares.
4. It engages the employee.
Managers need to remember that conducting the survey is not a tick mark in their list of jobs; it’s only a tool that enables them to do their job better – improving the customer’s experience.