Your feedback is important to us…or is it?

Practically every day I feel like I am asked to give feedback on products or services that I have used; I often wonder what exactly they do with this information.

Picture the day…..

It’s Saturday morning and raining, but its ok, as it’s been a hard week I’m going to spend some quality time with the family. But my idea of quality time is different to my wife so here is how the day went.

• 1st – Supermarket shopping (not my idea) – there’s a c/sat survey on the bottom of the receipt

• 2nd – Stop for a coffee (my idea and supported by my wee girl on the promise of a cake!) – I ordered and was asked to complete a survey by the waiter Peter, who incidentally happened to be a very friendly guy. You may win a free coffee he said for completing this survey (maybe this is bribery for a good score? Or just another thank you for taking the time – I’ll let you decide)

• 3rd – Clothes shopping (not my idea, but at 5 years old I don’t think my daughter should have been given the deciding vote!!) – from 4 shops we received 3 requests to complete surveys.

• 4th – Pick up the car from the garage – all good and not too expensive. Before I arrived home I got a text message, “great” I think, hopefully it’s from someone who wants to go out to watch the football, but no it’s another survey to complete about my experience at the garage.

I make a point of always completing surveys as I know how important they are, but when you have so many to complete you start to wonder where is the value and how will this be used to improve my customer experience.

Now contact centres will use a variety of ways to survey people to find out about their experience. In training we use Net Promoter Score at the end of the training course (commonly referred to as happy sheets) and the scores are generally exceptionally high. After reviewing the benefit of gathering this information however, we implemented further evaluation 6 weeks after the training and guess what; the scores were lower, in fact, actually showing in the detractor space.

(Note for those who don’t know NPS methodology, rating your experience at 0-6 means you are a detractor, 7-8 is passive and 9-10 a promoter).

The feedback, not the score, was the most valuable thing, so we changed the course content and for the last 2 months we have been back in the promoter space, with the positive comments to reflect.

So it makes me think….

• Are customer surveys completed at the time just happy sheets?

• Who actually reads the feedback?

• Do people just concentrate on the score?

At RESPONSE we try take all of this information into consideration, interpreting what the data is telling us and using it to continuously improve what we do. For us it is more than just a process to be followed, with the feedback given alongside even more important than the scores themselves.

So to end my blog I thought I would ask for some feedback of my own; is my blog great, ok, average or poor??

Please let me know, but be warned I’ll probably ignore it completely…..