Customer Service Feedback

Do you listen to customer complaints? Who do the come from? If I had to guess, I would say they're probably coming from the user. In the B2B world, the user is not always the same person that signed the agreement and purchased your product or service. So when you review your customer feedback procedures and customer survey best practices, make sure you consider who you're surveying: the purchaser, the user or both?

Both groups will have a different perspective. Those who hold the purse strings are often going to focus on results: is your offering saving them money; is it producing measurable results; is it solving the problem? On the other hand, while the end user may share some of these concerns, they're more likely to be focused on the usability: is it hard to use; do I need a lot of help from product support; is customer service responsive and helpful; is it making my job easier?

Organizations should seek customer feedback through user surveys, particularly if they do not have a way to pass feedback through the organization from sales and customer service to product development to management. Even though the purchaser may be happy and seeing high ROI from your offering, the user may bang their head against the wall to make it achieve those results. Soon as a competitor enters the market, the user is likely to push for a change.

Depending on your survey goals, a customer feedback survey form may look very similar to a user survey, including similar goals. The key is who your survey respondents are. That's information you should have in your customer database. Collecting names, emails and additional contact information is sometimes the biggest hurdle for survey programs. From there, writing survey questions and building questionnaires in online survey software tools should all be downhill.