Customer feedback is a critical aspect of making your company better. Allowing customers to provide feedback on your products, services, and transactions helps you improve in the long term and increase customer loyalty. But some things can compromise the quality of your customer feedback program.
- Your Feedback focuses on One or Two Metrics
- You Don’t Ask “What went well?” and “What didn’t.”
- Your Feedback Data isn’t Current
- You Routinely Dismiss Negative Feedback
- You Ignore Your Customers’ Emotions
Focusing only on scores will not improve customer loyalty. Understanding the “why” behind scores and building a change plan around these whys, will improve customer loyalty.
Recently, a potential client spoke with me about getting only scores and no other insightful, actionable information from their current program. They had scores but nothing else. Their program was exclusively email surveys. I shared with them the results from a recent project to illustrate how different methods get different feedback. The phone responses provided the most actionable information; not just a score.
- 88 Responses
- NPS: 70%
- Comments: a mix of positive and negative
- Probe on likelihood to recommend so qualitative feedback is more than 95%
- Frequency of qualitative comments to suggestions question: 1 per 2 surveys
- 44 Responses (12%)
- NPS: 88%
- Comments: mostly positive and cryptic
- Frequency of qualitative comments to suggestion: 1 per 4 surveys
Psychological Reactance Theory
I wrote about the findings of Psychology of Marketing on baiting customers for scores, In a nutshell, if you do this it will result in:
- Lower levels of satisfaction with their experience,
- Less willingness to repurchase, and
- Less willingness to provide positive word-of-mouth intentions.
Customers are interested in feedback that helps them feel a part of the company and not a number or an avatar. I found the quote below from Fred Reichheld, explaining why a high NPS shouldn’t be your ultimate goal.
“A high NPS in and of itself is not the real objective, because a high NPS by itself does not guarantee success. NPS merely measures the quality of a company’s relationship with its current customers, and high-quality relationships are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for profitable growth… a company must build an army of promoters, but it will squander the potential they create if it can’t then make effective decisions about risk, pricing, innovation, cost management, and everything else necessary for sustainable, profitable growth.” Fred Reichheld
Conclusion
While it’s important to recognize the impact that customer feedback programs have on your business, it’s also important, to be honest with yourself about the impact and success of your program.
With St. Patrick’s Day next week and thinking of those suffering in Ukraine, I would like to share this quote from St. Patrick,
Be still and know that I am
Be still and know
Be still
Be