Six issues that will cause your customer feedback process to fail long term

You’re all fired up to implement a new customer feedback process, secure in the knowledge that it will be the best your company has ever seen.

However, if you want it to succeed long term, you need to make sure that you overcome all six of these reasons that customer feedback processes fail long term.

Lack of Senior Management buy-in

Without senior management buy-in to the customer feedback process, not just the collection of data but the whole process, adoption will be limited and eventually fail.

When starting out on the customer feedback journey it’s okay to rely on a little faith based support from senior management. However, that support must actually exist. If senior management are not sure or give the process lip service support then you will fail to gain long term traction.

Because hard ROI figures are so difficult to find in the early days of the program you should be ready with case studies of the impact that a good customer feedback process has had for other companies.

Not thinking through the organisational change

When implementing a customer feedback process, adoption and impact can be substantially improved through the implementation of best practice organisation structures.

Elements such as a well thought out Governance process, the existence of Steering committees, properly documented service recovery processes, etc. will increase the impact of implementing the process and generate a much better overall business benefit.

Not linking feedback to business success

Explicitly linking customer feedback process to business success demonstrates to senior management how the investment in data collection and action is driving up overall company value. If this linkage is not created early in the process then budget for the implementation can quickly come under pressure.

Of course one of the better ways to create this linkage is to use Net Promoter Score as one of the core metrics for the process. NPS has been shown to link to long term revenue growth. What’s more there are some clear ways to link NPS to business value. These become invaluable when you need to demonstrate the return on investment for your program.

Not aligning KPI Targets

As the old saying goes “what gets measured gets done”. As you roll-out your new process you need to ensure that it is included in staff KPIs, as and where appropriate.

That is not to say that you just add the customer feedback KPI willy nilly to everyone’s objectives. The roll-out needs to be done carefully to ensure that people trust the numbers and understand how to change them.

Siloed approach to implementation

Customer feedback action is not the responsibility of one department. The best practice approach to customer feedback implementation is a cross functional management team where the roll of the customer feedback team is to facilitate and support the other departments.

The customer feedback team are the enablers of process within the organisation but they are not soley responsible for success.

Operational teams then use the data and analysis provided by the NPS team to drive change in their part of the organisation.

Thinking of it as a project not a process

Customer feedback is not a project to be completed but a due date; it is instead an approach to doing business. Once the data collection systems have been created the organisation needs to utilise the customer feedback gathered long term to improve the business.