Customer feedback
is the single most important type of communication an organization can receive.
Feedback can ultimately determine whether the organization lives or dies.
Despite the highly critical nature of customer feedback, organizations often
treat customer feedback as an afterthought, something that they might get
around to, if time allows.
Customer feedback
is a leading indicator. A leading
indicator is a measure that tells us the future. Customer feedback is a leading
indicator because it reveals whether customers are likely to continue doing
business with us in the weeks, months and years ahead.
There’s nothing
terribly sophisticated about acting on customer feedback. Follow-through takes
discipline and a guiding process, and it generally comprises these steps:
- Analyzing
trends in feedback - Identifying
the most promising opportunities or most ominous challenges - Assigning
an owner to the opportunity - Obtaining
needed resources - Investigating
the underlying issues and identifying the causes - Determining
the action necessary to make improvements - Implementing
actions - Evaluating
effectiveness - Communicating
improvements to customers
The final step,
communicating improvements to customers, is critical. If customers don’t
realize there’s been an improvement, there hasn’t. Make sure to let your
customers and the marketplace in general know the important improvements your
organization has made.
Fundamentals of
Effective Customer Feedback :
- Don’t
wait for customers to contact you. Reach out to the customer and ask how you’re
doing. - Keep
your tools for capturing customer feedback as simple and streamlined as
possible. - Remember
that customer feedback is a leading indicator, unlike most other indicators
that businesses use. That’s why customer feedback is so important to an
organization’s success. - Take
action quickly. The informational value of customer feedback doesn’t last long. - Utilize
lean tools that can be applied all the time by a variety of people. Don’t make
capturing and analyzing customer feedback an event that only happens every now
and then. - Share
the trends of customer feedback with the entire organization. The more people
understand customers, perceptions, the better prepared they'll be to help
improve them. Everybody in the organization can affect customer satisfaction
positively. - Follow-through
on customer feedback. If you don’t take action and follow through to completion
then the process will produce nothing.
Source :
Fundamentals of Effective Customer Feedback; Quality Digest Magazine; Craig
Cochran
