"Closing-the-loop": Critical for Success, but hard to do

Closing-the-loop on customer feedback is considered "Critical for Success" by many people in customer facing roles. Yet, in practice it seems to be difficult to do effectively and consistently.

A couple of statistics from our recent survey:

• 87% of our respondents chose a relationship metric - "customer loyalty/satisfaction" as the #1 (75%) or #2 (12%) priority for their customer feedback.
• 74% say "closing the loop" is "Critical" or "Important" for their business' success
• 16% say they "always" close-the-loop on relationship feedback

Organizations seem to be particularly challenged with "closing-the-loop" effectively on relationship feedback. We think process issues are inhibiting effective follow-up on feedback and we infer from the data that two process issues are contributing factors:

- Connecting customer feedback with other customer data: i.e. Profile data, Customer value information and "Responsible internal actor" information.
- Determining an action to be taken on customer feedback, then routing the feedback data to the "Responsible internal actor" for action.

When we examined these issues some thoughts occurred to us about why they might occur:

• Many businesses collect customer feedback centrally via one or two internal departments, very often product marketing or customer support. But, "loop-closing" activities must be performed by other departments (Sales, Marketing, Shipping, Accounting, Etc.).
• Often, data collected is not designed to facilitate a "closed loop" process (i.e. market research), may have a very specific type of "loop-closing" process attached (closing a support case, for instance) or requires a decision from another department prior to loop-closing actions taking place.
• Relationship feedback in particular seems to suffer from these challenges, as its a simple matter to insert a satisfaction or loyalty question into a multitude of surveys. But, based on the feedback provided, complex to "close-the-loop".

In our opinion, solving these "Loop Closing" issues begins with a better planning process. When feedback is solicited a process with ownership for follow-up should be defined for each key piece of feedback collected. And, mechanisms should be employed that facilitate getting feedback data to the correct internal actors in a timely fashion. This is especially important in the case of relationship feedback, where "Closing-the-loop" is often not only respectful, but is a known driver of higher customer loyalty.