The article below is part 1 in a series we’re doing on common mistakes in customer feedback programs and what to do to improve them.
Right from the jump I’ll just say it: most companies’ customer sat programs are pretty lousy. In fact, in many cases, they end up damaging the very relationships they were meant to improve.
Here’s why…
I see this constantly – companies either rarely survey their customers and when they do, it’s a massive annual customer sat survey, or they hit them constantly with NPS surveys for everything from quarterly pulse checks to implementations to post-customer support surveys. In the first instance, you end up having massive blindspots across your customer base and in the second, you’re harassing your customers with the same exact survey over and over again even in cases where it doesn’t make any sense. Either way, you’re telling your customers: “We don’t really care about you.”
If you are one of those rare companies that actually collects feedback in a sensible way, do you have real plans to act on it internally and do you “return and report” to your customers? If you don’t (and very few companies do), you’re training your customers to ignore future feedback requests, because in their mind, “Why would I take even 60 seconds to give feedback when I don’t get a ‘thank you’ and, more importantly, I have no clue if my input helped improve anything”.
In the first instance, you end up having massive blindspots across your customer base and in the second, you’re harassing your customers with the same exact survey over and over again even in cases where it doesn’t make any sense.
Either way, you’re telling your customers: “We don’t really care about you.”
For those of you who rely primarily on notes in your CRM, or from information shared in sales/account management meetings, let’s be real: your account managers/sales executives have zero incentive to share negative feedback. They’re not going to document or share something that makes them, or their team, look bad. So what ends up in your CRM isn’t a true reflection of the customer relationship, how your customers really think of your company, or what they’re saying about your company to others in the industry. It’s a sanitized version that hides the real problems and leads to increased churn.
Asking your customers to participate in a long customer sat survey completely breaks the golden rule. Plus it ignores basic logic. Only masochists like long surveys. Many customers will quit surveys that are too long or they’ll just start clicking any answer as fast as they can to just get it over with, which means you’ll have swiss cheese results with a lot of data mixed in you simply cannot, and should not, trust.
Long surveys also will result in customers stopping responding altogether in the future, which means you’ll double-down and harass your customers even more in an attempt to get a decent participation rate. This ends up creating a negative feedback loop with your customers that is hard to escape.
If your feedback requests come from people in your company who can’t actually make a change based on that feedback, what’s the point in customers taking time out of their busy day to participate? Customers want to know their input is going directly to someone with the power and authority to make real changes. Otherwise, they’re just wasting their time. It’s an exercise in futility.
A good, comprehensive customer satisfaction program is critical. But if you don’t do it right by avoiding the 5 mistakes above, it will absolutely hurt your customers’ satisfaction and will end up really hurting your business as well.
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Reaction is a growth acceleration platform that companies use to easily manage client relationships, uncover new opportunities, and grow their business. Our platform is specifically designed to run client programs, manage employee feedback, gather critical market insights, increase mindshare, generate new business, and analyze existing data sources.
