This is a wake-up call to all of you who measure (and measure and measure) the customer experience but do absolutely nothing with the results! You may think that your inaction doesn’t do anyone any harm, but you are wrong and incredibly short-sighted. Beyond simply wasting valuable and limited company assets, you are putting your brand at unnecessary risk!
Everyday we’re inundated with polite and well-intentioned requests for feedback from the companies we do business with – from our pharmacies, airlines, insurance providers, banks, the hotels at which we stay, alumni associations and car rental agencies. Many of us (myself included) take time out of our busy day to complete these surveys. And then we wait. We wait for a change, we wait for the next experience to be a better one, we wait for some kind of acknowledgement or response. The unfortunate thing is that many times, we wait in vain.
A fellow blogger, Barry Dalton recently polled his readers on this exact topic, asking “When you respond to a customer satisfaction survey, what is your number one expectation?” His findings are shown in the figure below:
If you’re not prepared to do something in response to customer feedback, you will disappoint, if not alienate 63%, of your respondents. An increasing number of these respondents will then seek to “force your hand” using social media. A poll conducted in January of this year by SmartPulse asked the following: How do you think social media affects consumer complaints? The results of the poll can be seen below.
- Social media forces companies to respond, follow up and resolve complaints almost immediately — 34.51%
- It only increases awareness of consumer complaints — 30.97%
- Complaining on social sites can elicit a quick response, but not get a fast resolution — 17.70%
- It gives consumers more control over their message – 13.27%
- It does not have major impact yet — 3.54%
Are you willing to take responsibility for creating this much noise for your organization? Assuming you responded ‘No,’ you won’t want to miss my next blog post where I’ll outline some processes and steps to turning your survey data into action.
