Amazing But True...Customer Feedback Rarely Gets Fed Back
II was reading an article - a good, if a bit dry one - on customer feedback that was published on the Customer Management Community (CMC) site this morning called "Customer Experience - The Voice of the Customer" by Jennifer Kirby (you'll have to register) and I found out something that was sort of mindblowing. Here's the quote from Jennifer's article:
"Although 95% of companies collect feedback only 50% brief staff on its contents, a mere 30% use it, and a paltry 5% bother to tell the customer what action they took. Prime causes of this sorry state are poor cross functional collaboration and lack of information culture. But the main culprit is the disparate sources of feedback with no overall owner, plan or use. (See Squeezing more value from marketing information - by Professor Robert Shaw, City of London Business School)"
Think about the irony in this statement. Companies spend all this time talking about the "voice of the customer" - giving it lip service, so to speak. Then when they collect the feedback that provides the voice of the customer "information" they get laryngitis when it comes to feeding it back to the customers who gave them the insights - even though it is obviously useful for a customer to know what other customers think. Heck, that's what websites like Epinions and Bizrate are all about. Whoa.. Tell us ALL about yourself but don't expect to find out what we found out. The thinking must go like this, "not only is that our proprietary information, but we reserve the right to neither tell each other about it nor use it."
So, get it from the customers, then keep it from the employees, don't use it, and keep it from the customers. That is one helluva collaborative relationship. I am, once again, amazed.
This doesn't even come close to some of the experiences going on in the UK and around the world with Landrover.
Posted by: Dennis Howlett | July 21, 2005 at 06:45 PM