The return on investment of a good customer feedback program is more complicated to quantify than, for example, a new speech recognition system or more efficient contact center scheduling.
The ROI comes from a lot of sources. Some of these are hard dollars, and others are squishier:
- The easiest return to quantify comes from finding and fixing broken processes and systems. It’s common to find policies which can be streamlined, self-service processes which make no sense to the customer, and even systems which are outright broken. These cost hard dollars, and customers are usually very happy to tell you about them.
- It’s also easy to quantify the value of better decision-making. A good customer feedback program will give hard data about the customer impact of spending money on different parts of the service experience. For example, how much will customer satisfaction and loyalty improve by streamlining an IVR, and is it worth the money? Without the data, you have to take the vendor’s word.
- Better service leads to a strong improvement in customer loyalty. Our NCSS data consistently shows a 40-45 percentage point gain in customer loyalty among customers who report excellent customer service as compared to those whose service was mediocre or poor. Measuring the quality of the customer service experience is a critical piece in delivering outstanding service.
- A strong customer feedback program is also a powerful training tool. People respond powerfully to hearing immediate feedback from real customers, and that means measurable improvements in service levels and less time spent in coaching or remediation.
- The hardest return to quantify, but perhaps the largest, comes in brand image. Many companies (I won’t name any but you can probably think of a few names) have seen hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing and brand equity destroyed when the company gets a bad reputation online because of poor service, missteps, and neglecting the basics of taking care of customers.
