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3 Customer Feedback Mistakes

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Brian Cantor
Brian Cantor
05/05/2015

Openly asking customers for feedback is a great way to show that you value their input.

Acting on that feedback is an even greater way to send that message.

Beneficial from a lip service standpoint, customer feedback is infinitely more valuable as a source of actionable intelligence. Business success hinges on forging powerfully lucrative connections with customers, and knowing what they want and how they feel is integral to doing so.

Customer feedback is not something to be taken lightly. It is not something to do when keeping up appearances. It is something to revere as a pivotal component of the customer experience.

Far too many of our contact center operations lack that reverence. As a result, far too many inhibit their ability to connect with customers.

Illustrated by anecdotes but embedded in widespread practice, here are three examples of flawed customer feedback approaches:

Poisoning the Well

Everyone loves praise. Everyone enjoys hearing what they are doing right. Businesses—and their leaders—are not exempt from that thirst for self-affirmation.

Insofar as feedback is their ticket to improvement, they cannot let a desire for self-affirmation overshadow the need for candid input. Knowing what they are doing right is great, but recognizing what they are doing wrong is the key to becoming even greater.

In a 2013 article, Call Center IQ discussed the problematic manner in which at least one Pizza Hut franchise was incentivizing survey responses. Instead of rewarding customers for their candid feedback, the restaurant explicitly stated that it would only provide coupons to customers who provided a 5-star review. In essence, Pizza Hut was incentivizing positive feedback and thus encouraging those with negative remarks to either lie or abstain.

If true insight was the goal, the approach was a failure.

While waiting in line at a nearby Dunkin Donuts, I learned that the location adheres to a flawed feedback approach of its own.

The doughnut shop’s call for feedback comes in the form of a sign posted on the wall. In addition to providing instructions for accessing the survey online, the sign also details the opportunity for discounts/rewards associated with participation.

Unfortunately, the seemingly noble effort to elicit feedback is rendered problematic by the text that boldly appears atop the sign.

"Tell Us About Your FAVORITE Employee."

Because the note does not condition the reward on actually telling Dunkin Donuts about one’s favorite employee, it is not as fundamentally troubling as the Pizza Hut approach.

It is not, however, worthy of admiration.

By framing the survey as a means for communicating positive information about an employee, the call-to-action poisons the well. It presents the survey as a chance to boast about employees rather than an opportunity to offer honest feedback.

Moreover, it suggests that Dunkin Donuts is only using the survey to gain positive feedback about its employees – perhaps as a means of determining the "employee of the month."

Customer-facing jobs can be unforgiving, and a desire to shower employees with rewards and compliments is laudable. That desire should not, however, come at the expense of getting candid feedback. Businesses should want to know which employees are doing well, but they should also be interested in learning which employees are not doing well. They should also want to know how other experiential elements are affecting customer satisfaction.

When soliciting customers for feedback, it is important to rely on a neutral call-to-action. Customers should not feel pressure to offer anything but the truth of their experience.

Discounting Emotion

"I will now connect you to an agent….We value your feedback, press 1 if you would like to participate in a post-call survey. Press 2 if you decline."

The message I received from my bank’s IVR was very confusing. Beyond my brief encounter with the IVR system, I had not yet experienced the interaction with the bank. I had not yet developed a sense of whether the support process warranted praise or condemnation. How could I make an educated decision about whether or not to participate in a post-call survey?

The only thing I knew for sure was that I did not want to commit additional time to the call. I thus pressed "2" to decline the survey.

A forty-five minute, disastrous call later, and I wished I had pressed "1."

From a purely scientific standpoint, there is merit to eliciting survey consent prior to the live interaction. Customers are not necessarily devoid of emotion at that point, but they are devoid of an extreme opinion regarding the actual service experience. As such, the ones who consent to the survey are theoretically more likely to represent a random sample.

Unfortunately, customer feedback is not about collecting data for a published research report. It is not meant to be scientific. It is meant to be revelatory.

Businesses should therefore be as interested—if not more interested—in experiences that elicit emotional reactions. Those are the ones that can very notably impact customer retention and attrition, and those are the ones in which a business learns of its truest successes or failures.

When criticizing customer feedback surveys, opponents will rely on lines like "the only people who fill out surveys are those who were really mad or really happy – so you don’t get accurate data." That philosophy is wrong. A business is accountable for every individual customer experience – not the aggregate of them – and the calls that drive extreme emotional reactions are often the ones that provide the best learning opportunities.

Customer centricity is not about the mean of all experiences. It is about creating the best possible outcome for every customer with whom a business interacts. Knowing what drives specific customer emotion is the key to creating a more customer centric experience.

Isolating Feedback

Shortly after using a pre-workout energy supplement I purchased through an Amazon.com Merchant, I began to notice an unusual reaction. The product seemed to produce a different, more jarring form of energy than that to which I was accustomed, and I worried that something was wrong.

My worry was not unjustified: it turns out that the version of the product I received, contrary to what was listed on the website, featured a since-banned stimulant.

I needed to order a replacement. I also needed assurance that the replacement item I ordered would match what was listed on the website.

I thus needed to communicate with the brand prior to the new purchase.

Sadly, that was not an option.

While Amazon provides support for transactions with third-party merchants, it does not provide support for the products they sell.

Neither does this particular merchant, unfortunately.

When I looked into methods of contacting the business, I was unable to find a phone number, direct email address or live chat account. My only option was to use a generic Amazon.com contact form.

Worse, the contact form specified that it was only valid for questions regarding invoicing or to say "thank you." Support questions, says the form, are to be directed to Amazon.

Already aware that Amazon cannot support a third-party merchant’s products, I thus had no means of actually communicating about the product issue. Worse, I had every reason to believe this merchant ascribes zero importance to customer support. If one’s communication does not involve praise or a billing issue, it is not important to the brand.

I did have the option of writing a review or issuing feedback via Amazon’s standard form, but insofar as I knew this brand did not care enough to interact with its customers, I had no reason to believe it cared about their feedback.

I imagine many join me in my condemnation of this business, but I also imagine many are wondering what this has to do with customer feedback. It is a support issue, not a feedback issue, you might be saying.

That they are being viewed as isolated processes, I argue, is itself indicative of a problem.

While surveys are undoubtedly important, they are not the only valuable means of gaining customer insights. Real-time interactions also play a fundamental role in illuminating the voice of the customer.

It is within those interactions that the business can engage the customer. They can work to get a clearer sense of the customer’s perspective. They can learn what the customer truly seeks from both the product and from the support experience. They can understand which processes and policies trigger emotional reactions. They can connect—or understand the barriers to connecting—with customers.

Even if the merchant indeed reads—and operationalizes—every piece of customer feedback it receives (and I highly doubt it does), it is consciously closing the door to the feedback and insight that can come from active conversations.

Through surveys, customers share feedback about how they feel or about what they experienced. Within a live interaction, customers communicate how they feel and share what they are experiencing. They also give businesses a chance to actively illuminate and contextualize the feedback. A business truly committed to customer feedback is, therefore, necessarily committed to real-time customer engagement.


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