Cvent Survey

Many organizations have broken customer feedback programs. Organizations gather lots of information and feedback from customers: they conduct surveys; they engage through social media; people call or email customer service. Then organizations take all this data, plops it into presentations and fails to do anything with the results. More importantly, different departments never even bother to connect the information they have. So customer feedback survey reports don't even include the full picture.

Do you think this is broken? I do.

Organization who are good at listening to customers gather feedback from all over: blogs, forums, Twitter, Facebook, sales people, customer service representatives, emails, online surveys, etc. There's no one place an organization can go to get a simple solution for listen or conducting customer analysis. They need to get better at listening and act on the feedback. It's no longer big companies versus an individual. The internet has allowed customers to talk to each other, spread good (and bad) stories about an organization in minutes.

There are tools that can help organizations listen. I would recommend starting with a customer survey program that includes customer service surveys and monitoring inbound feedback.

I recently came across a speech Seth Godin gave in 2006 about how things are "Broken" and his reasons for it. While it may be three years old, I think his points are still relevant.


Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.
What are your tips for improving Customer Feedback Programs?

Final unrelated thought, if you're conducting any type of survey with incentives, think about Seth's advice on prepaid credit and debit cards.