Continuous vs. Episodic Feedback - Continuous is better

I've recently received a number of survey requests. 

The requests are coming from companies that, apparently, are having business "issues" of one kind or another and are looking for feedback to help them address it. The issues range from "low open rates" on electronic content to subscription cancellations to non visitation to websites. 

It's a good thing that these businesses are seeking feedback. And, late is after all, better than never. The feedback these businesses get will help them address the problems they've noted. Though, their remedial actions will come a lot later and as a result be less effective for their businesses than if their feedback programs were continuous in nature. Furthermore, I can't help but think that if these businesses had on-going customer feedback programs, they probably wouldn't be experiencing the issues that created the need for the surveys they're sending out now. 

Continuous customer feedback is known to be better than episodic customer feedback for understanding customer experience. This doesn't mean that periodic relationship surveying isn't necessary. For most businesses, both continuous feedback surveys and relationship surveys are extremely important for understanding the overall health of the customer relationship.

Businesses that continuously collect, analyze and act on customer feedback are able to detect issues before they become widespread. This means that actions can be taken to mitigate or eliminate issues before they impact too many customer relationships. This often reduces direct costs and even more often avoids indirect costs (typically discounts given to "make things right" for customers impacted by issues).

Continuous analysis of feedback to detect trend changes is the key to a feedback program. After all, data is just that without analysis. Analyzing for change in NPS or CSAT scores, topic popularity, topic sentiment changes, etc., gives the Analyst the insights to visualize what issues might be cropping up in the business. The tools for generating these analytical insights are now both available and reasonably priced for most businesses.

I work with QuestBack AS for surveys and Etuma Ltd. for text analytics. Businesses implementing both are able to get continuous feedback process monitoring and analytics.  

Stewart Nash
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash