Customer Satisfaction

Sometimes I feel like I'm always wearing my marketing hat. I watch TV and comment on commercials and their cohesion with the brand. I receive a sales and marketing email and critic the message. I go to a website and wonder how it could be more user friendly. I go on Twitter looking for help after a company offers terrible phone support and am irritated at their lack of presence in the social media realm. I'm always wearing my marketing hat. If you're like me, you probably are always wearing your hat too, whether it's marketing, customer service, HR, sales, the list goes on.

I went to Red Robin Friday night for dinner. We were seated in the first booth by the front - right by the kitchen which gave us great access to fresh bottomless fries. It was already loud and hard to hear the conversation with my table partners, but that's to be expected on a busy night, right? Then, out of no where, the manager starts blowing up balloons right next to us! We could no longer hear ourselves think, let alone have a conversation. I began looking for their feedback form on the table. I told you - I am always wearing my marketing hat. I wanted to give feedback because maybe they never thought blowing up balloons could be such an interruption (I'm always willing to give business the benefit of the doubt until they prove otherwise).

No customer feedback form on the table. I go to Red Robin a lot, and on occasion I've filled out the customer survey they leave on the table. I have always appreciated how easy it is to tell them they've done a good or bad job. Their feedback form was always easy to leave comments on - not just answer scale questions about my customer satisfaction. But there was no feedback form.

I began thinking, do organizations make it easy for customer to provide feedback?

At the end of the meal, the check came with an invitation to complete a customer satisfaction survey online. While I am a big supporter of using online survey tools to collect feedback, I was a little disappointed in their questionnaire. There was no real place for me to add additional comments like on the feedback form on the table, how were they ever going to hear my plea? So my point is two fold: 1. make it easy for customer to give you feedback on their experience and your service or product; 2. make sure you don't limit their responses on a client survey so the organization cannot see the whole picture. When your organization makes the switch from paper surveys to web based surveys, make sure you don't lose a critical part of your current process.