[Lakota]

Fellow TreQnaites,

Customer feedback is of critical importance to your organizations. Customer feedback, analysis and corrective action plans, provide your organizations with a more focused and effective direction as to how you might best utilize your resources to maintain and or improve your products and services in support of your customers desired business results.

Remember we do not determine our success ... your customers do. The only way to validate your product and service performance standings is to directly and frequently involve your customers.

Question: How do you gather customer feedback when your customer's do not volunteer information and ignor your requests for feedback?

Would love to hear your comments and suggestions. Another opportunity to learn from each other and perhaps discover what "best paractices" others are deploying to gain feedback from an unwilling to respond customer.

Looking forward to lots of posts.

Blessings to all,
Lakota

[prabh]

Would love to hear your comments and suggestions. Another opportunity to learn from each other and perhaps discover what "best paractices" others are deploying to gain feedback from an unwilling to respond customer

the only method iam aware of is a telephonic follow up call and gather feedback over the phone...most of the auto companies here in India follow this technique to gather feedback on after sales service quality or after car service feedback....

[Haz]

I am not a lover of the customer satisfaction surveys, in my experience they are just ticking the box for ISO9000. The quality managers play lip service to them and cheery pick who and when to hand them out, however,

1) If you are to use them, hand them out to your contact and also people within your organisation when they are visiting, you will get different points of views from different departments.

2) In the event of sending and getting nothing back, introduce key performance indicators, if quality monitor customer complaints, speed of answering a complaint and the effectiveness. This process can be introduced across the organisation.

3) We have also use external professional organisations to do the job for us, they were able to get more responses and they will conduct the full analysis of the results identifying areas for improvement.

On a side note, i once got a questionnaire out to a very powerful engineer at Nisaan many years ago, his words to me were along the lines don't ask me to fill in that, if you don't know when i am satisifed or not you should not be doing the job.

Now the engineer and me were close friends outside work so i could ask almost anything of him and get it, but not in this case.

He did have a point to a certain degree.

[sparky]

In my experience there are the two extremes that complete CSAT surveys. Those that are incredibly happy and those that are really pi$$ed off.

If you get feedback from the latter and don't do anything about it (most don't because "it's not my job, I'm only collecting the data") then you make the whole situation very much worse.

Like Haz, I think companies are often only paying lip-service to this.

On a personal note, if I get very bad service I'm likely to go to the man at the top, bypassing all others. If I get the right response, great. If I get no response, or the "tough mate" response, the company finds itself named and shamed on every course I run where customer satisfaction gets discussed. - I always warn them before I do this, yet you'd be surprised at how many respond with a second, "tough" attitude.

Accurate CSAT is very difficult to get hold of, most companies only realise once they have lost the customer.

[lsilvaf]

Originally Posted by sparky

In my experience there are the two extremes that complete CSAT surveys. Those that are incredibly happy and those that are really pi$$ed off.

If you get feedback from the latter and don't do anything about it (most don't because "it's not my job, I'm only collecting the data") then you make the whole situation very much worse.

Like Haz, I think companies are often only paying lip-service to this.

On a personal note, if I get very bad service I'm likely to go to the man at the top, bypassing all others. If I get the right response, great. If I get no response, or the "tough mate" response, the company finds itself named and shamed on every course I run where customer satisfaction gets discussed. - I always warn them before I do this, yet you'd be surprised at how many respond with a second, "tough" attitude.

Accurate CSAT is very difficult to get hold of, most companies only realise once they have lost the customer.

If it is difficult to make a survey, you can consider complaints, returns, lost customers and in the other hand your loyal customers as sources.
A friend of mine, manager of a civil works design company, invited some of his customers to have lunch and, in conversation, asked them what things they like more of their services and he realised he did not have a right perception of his company strengths and weaknesses.

Regards,

lsilvaf

[Haz]

Originally Posted by lsilvaf

If it is difficult to make a survey, you can consider complaints, returns, lost customers and in the other hand your loyal customers as sources.
A friend of mine, manager of a civil works design company, invited some of his customers to have lunch and, in conversation, asked them what things they like more of their services and he realised he did not have a right perception of his company strengths and weaknesses.

Regards,

lsilvaf

I am 100% in support of this type of approach, a meal and a few drinks with a customer breaks down tonnes of barriers and where you can start to understand where you are going wrong and the what actually makes a customer happy, it also builds a realationship up with the person you have to deal with.

Too many companies miss this and deal with their customers as if they are always right. I have seen a Nissan audit where we got 60 plus NCR's raised, on the same night the engineer told me he was pi--ed off with the fact all the management team left me to deal with him and after we talked through the audit he really only wanted 5 issues closed, the first was for me to have management support.

[yogambala]

I too agree taking customers out for a dinner/lunch is a good idea to get customer feed back about your company/organisation. The customer will come out with honest openion. I know a very small company, they use to host a annual get together with their clients and dealers, now grown very big and they have sold their business to forein company for a very good price...

[sparky]

The biggest secret to feedback is to actually open your ears and listen.

I've lost count of the number of times I've been off out in a "feedback" group, having a few drinks and a meal, where those from my party (the ones attempting to get the feedback) just talk about themselves and their company.

It really isn't rocket science is it? But it's one trick we often get very wrong.

[Delphi]

I, too, like the idea of taking your customer out for dinner and a drink however, this really isn't feasible for companies that have millions of customers. Yes, you can choose a segment however, that can be cost prohibitive in the short run.

In my industry, there are literally thousands of captive customers who use the product daily. Quite literally, my industry has a large population of "customers" with which to draw upon that will not only provide feedback but will do so willingly. Why? Because these "customers" are the employees who have the product in their hands, in their homes and in their lives.

Of course, you will have those instances where the feedback will be at either extreme however, a large chunk of the feedback will be centered around the product, customer contact, etc that will give meaningful data. Obviously, there are drawbacks and definetly issues as the data can appear soft but, I contend that there is a significant population that will provide honest and open feedback.

Just my thoughts.... What say you, Treqnaites?

[yogambala]

Delphi,
Agree with your thoughts..
In case of large population of customers can opt for customer representatives ( Big Customers??!!!)
Yes Extrem customer is a problem...
But When we ask a honest question, what the customer wants from the Dealer is basically
1)Understand his problems/need
2) listening to his need/problem
3) Aknowledge & provide solutions
4) Act quicly and empathetic towards his needs

I sense the problem in acting quickly and providing reasonable and convincing solutions/
Any thoughts?