We recently surveyed a population of composed of mainly Sales, Marketing and Customer support people to collect some data on their Customer Feedback Management practices. We found some interesting data points. For instance:
- Understanding and Influencing Customer Loyalty & Satisfaction was the top priority (75% of respondents) for customer feedback.
- Yet respondents often (30%) reported difficulties in translating customer feedback into actions that support business priorities.
- 72% report using some type of manual approach for translating customer feedback into action (using MS Excel or a Statistical analysis tool).
- 24% report using their CRM system to help them act on customer feedback
Too many organizations pay lip service to the idea of metrics based customer feedback. Meaning that they track some type of metric (NPS, ACSI or "customized loyalty metric") but do not use the metric to manage their reactions to feedback that customers give them.
In the survey data we found many instances of organizations reporting that they use metrics, statistical analysis tools, "are very systematic about gathering" relationship feedback, yet are receiving lower than average value from their customer feedback towards improving customer loyalty (their highest priority). Our interpretation of this finding is that:
- The data these companies receive for action taking is tied to a transaction and thus not useful for guiding relationship "fixing" actions; and /or,
- Mechanisms don't really exist in the feedback management systems these companies use to convert data about problem relationships into relationship "fixing" actions.
- Roughly 70% of respondents report using feedback only tools (i.e. the systems they use to collect customer feedback are, by definition, data collection only toolsets).
The data behind this post can be seen at:
https://webreports.questback.com/isawebrep/webreporter.aspx?auth=D5D38D6AE02DB3D327F1CD14EB4316686C52668B&rid=1511507
