10. Gathering Customer Feedback

Scott, an IT director whose division was a profit center to internal customers, learned a tough lesson: Failing to regularly gather feedback is a great way to lose good customers. Scott’s staff members had been proud of their long-term relationship with the payroll department, for which they had provided extensive computer services. Unfortunately, they had begun to take this important and profitable customer for granted, competently delivering services but neglecting to maintain contact. There’d been no complaints, so why worry?

Imagine their surprise when the payroll manager abruptly announced plans to transfer the department’s computer needs to an outside vendor. Not for better service—service quality had been fine—but for a better price. The payroll department needed to cut costs, and the vendor had offered a competitive price. Scott’s group, having neglected to regularly visit the payroll department, was oblivious to the department’s growing cost pressures. The upshot: Their “happy” customer had upped and gone elsewhere.

Pete, the project manager in Chapter 3, also thought he had a happy customer, but he learned otherwise from a post-project satisfaction survey. Pete might have learned much sooner about Carl’s grievance—and might have prevented it altogether—if he had solicited Carl’s feedback while the project was under way.

In failing to systematically gather customer feedback, Scott and Pete fell victim to the dangerous assumption that the absence of complaints signifies happy customers. The reality is that unless a customer’s experience is exceptionally negative, he or she will rarely offer unsolicited feedback. Oh, the customer may think, “Gee, I wish they’d . . .” or “They really ought to . . .” but most minor grievances don’t trigger enough oomph for people to lodge a complaint.

Even with major grievances, many customers simply grouse to each other rather than to the source of their problems. Most customers who do go to the source eventually give up if repeated complaints aren’t addressed. In one company, a software director commented that customer complaints had decreased in recent months—a good sign, he noted. But when I asked customers about this decrease, they had a different explanation: They had just plain gotten tired of complaining. As one of them asked in an exasperated tone, “What was the point, when nothing ever changed?”

Of course, not all service providers want to hear complaints. In A Complaint Is a Gift, authors Barlow and Møller emphasize that “In order for us to treat complaints as gifts, we need to achieve a complete shift in perception and attitude about the role of complaints in modern business relationships.”¹ Their book helps readers gain an understanding of the emotional and interpersonal dynamics of disappointed people, which makes it easier to separate the content of the complaint from the emotion of being blamed for it.

¹ Janelle Barlow and Claus Møller, A Complaint Is a Gift: Using Customer Feedback As a Strategic Tool (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 1996), p. 13.

Gathering customer feedback is a communication process that’s woefully inadequate in most organizations. This chapter helps you learn how to successfully gather feedback from your customers, to avoid a gap between their view of your services and your own.

² Richard F. Gerson, Measuring Customer Satisfaction (Menlo Park, Calif.: Crisp Publications, 1993), p. 7.

In other words, if you don’t ask for feedback, you may not get any. But even if you do ask, how you ask strongly influences the quality and quantity of feedback you get. When I review the ways that organizations gather customer feedback, I regularly encounter several flaws, three of which are serious enough to undermine the entire effort:

1. inconveniencing customers to get feedback

2. making customers uncomfortable about providing feedback

3. ignoring the service attributes that are most important to customers

• Keep it short. One IT customer-satisfaction form asked customers to rate eighty items on a seven-point scale. Eighty items! Not surprisingly, feedback quality suffers when the respondents’ brains have turned to mush from the tedium of responding. Another survey, distributed by a help desk, was ten pages long—a discouraging oh-no-not-another-survey length. With people already suffocating under an overload of demands, you will be most successful in obtaining high-quality feedback if you ask for it in as concise a form as possible. Try to design surveys that can be completed in ten minutes, and make sure the instructions emphasize your estimate of the required time.

• Allow customers time to respond. A caller from my local office-supply emporium said he was conducting a survey and asked what I liked or didn’t like about the store. I told him I needed time to recall my experiences and asked him to call back the next day. He said he would, but he never called back. Apparently he hadn’t factored my need for time into his survey design. Similarly, as I checked out of a hotel, the checkout chap asked if I’d mind filling out a feedback form. I did mind. I was in a rush to get to the airport and he wouldn’t let me take it and mail it back after I’d filled it out. If you want useful feedback, give people time to reflect and don’t wait till they’re on the run to request their feedback.

• Omit unnecessary steps. As part of a badly needed service-improvement effort, the management of a rail line posted large notices in several train stations, asking customers for feedback. The only way to respond was by writing a letter and mailing it to the address specified on the posted notices. Because few people are willing to go to that much extra effort to provide feedback, the rail line received very little. In a seafood restaurant at which feedback was solicited by means of postcards placed on tables, customers were reminded, “Please do not forget to affix a stamp before mailing.” Asking customers to do extra work in order to provide feedback ensures that most simply won’t bother. Both the rail line and the restaurant could have provided forms for customers to fill out and a collection point for dropping them off.

Therefore, if you want to know about your customers’ concerns, it’s not enough simply to ask them. You must think carefully about how you ask them. Even in cultures and companies in which feedback-gathering is commonplace, it’s wise to help customers avoid experiencing any fear, awkwardness, or discomfort in providing feedback. For example, consider the following approaches:

• Explain that their feedback will help you help them. Many people respond favorably to a genuine request for help. By emphasizing that you value their feedback, you are, in effect, giving them permission to say what they might otherwise keep to themselves. Point out that you realize that their perspective differs from your own, and that their insights will help you understand their perspective. Explain that the more detail they provide about their service experiences, the better positioned you’ll be to make adjustments. Offer to accept their feedback in more than one form, such as by phone instead of in writing, if they’d prefer.

• Frame requests for feedback appropriately. Even people who don’t like to complain may be willing to offer helpful suggestions. (My on-line thesaurus supports this idea: It lists “suggestion” as a synonym for “complaint.”) To encourage this, you can frame your request along the following lines:

• “What are two things we’re doing well and two things you’d like to see changed?”

• “Based on your recent experience, what would you most like us to do differently?”

• “Please describe an experience with our service that pleased you and an experience that disappointed you.”

This approach invites respondents to offer constructive suggestions rather than complaints. As a result, otherwise reluctant respondents will be more likely to offer their ideas.

• Set the stage for feedback-gathering. Giving feedback is less awkward for customers if doing so is a routine part of the relationship. For example, in the opening stories of this chapter, Scott and Pete could have explicitly talked with their customers about incorporating a feedback-gathering process into their work together. They could have agreed, for example, to meet at designated intervals and discuss what pleased or concerned each of them. With this type of agreement, they’d be giving each other permission to voice grievances. Talking about feedback early in the project or relationship is an example of communicating about how you’re going to communicate, and it helps you build the strong foundation described in Chapter 4.

• Have customers interviewed by their coworkers. Rarely do providers invite customers to take an active role in gathering customer feedback. Yet one of the best feedback-gathering efforts I’ve ever seen involved IT customers who participated on a feedback team with IT personnel and assisted in collecting feedback from their own coworkers. With each feedback session jointly led by a customer representative and an IT staff member, customers openly described their grievances and recommendations.

• Have an objective third party conduct interviews for you. Although customers may suppress or edit their comments when asked directly by their supplier or vendor, they rarely seem reluctant to voice their concerns when an objective party asks for feedback. These third parties can be outside consultants, internal facilitators, or employees who are from internal groups other than those being critiqued.

• Ensure confidentiality. The fear of retribution is legitimate. Who can fault customers for preferring anonymity if complaints could cause the supplier to withhold service or shift priority to other customers? Even people who give enthusiastically positive feedback sometimes withhold their names, perhaps because they consider the very process of giving feedback too great a form of self-disclosure. Therefore, make signatures optional on written feedback, and ensure that revealed names will remain confidential. Where feasible, use on-line methods that allow anonymous comments to be submitted to a central location.

For example, a hotel I stayed at was excellent in terms of the attributes hotels generally ask customers about: check-in, room cleanliness, room service, and so on. Yet when I heard the chilling sound of someone trying to unlock my door, I made a startling discovery. The peephole in the door was way above my head. I had nothing to stand on to reach it, and no way to see who was there without opening the door and revealing that inside the room was a woman traveling alone—and a short one, at that. Fortunately, the person soon gave up and left, but when I checked the feedback form, I saw that it didn’t ask me to rate the peephole placement or provide room for me to describe my dissatisfaction with it.

In assessing customer satisfaction, find out what’s important to your customers and ask how well you’re doing with those things. Granted, other hotel guests may have found the size of the coffee pot, the location of the ice machine, or the choice of overpriced movies to be their particular pet peeve—concerns that in the greater scheme of things may be as narrowly focused as my own. But without finding out what’s important to customers, you have no way of knowing which concerns have become dominant and, therefore, worthy of attention.

1. Make it convenient for customers to give feedback.

2. Help customers feel comfortable about providing feedback.

3. Focus on the service attributes most important to customers.

In some organizations, the primary reason for conducting a survey is to serve management’s belief in quantification. As one fellow put it, describing an expensive survey his company was conducting, “It’s overkill for our purposes, but the president wants to do it. He likes numbers.” Despite the preferences of the quantitatively inclined, ratings alone give an incomplete and easily misinterpreted picture of the state of customer satisfaction.

³ Dean Leffingwell, “Understanding User Needs,” Software Development (August 1997), pp. 54–55.

Needless to say, the face-to-face interview approach doesn’t lend itself to collecting feedback from large numbers of customers, except at considerable expense. I was once called by a friend to comment on the merit of a proposal submitted to his company by a survey vendor. My friend’s management was interested in having a large-scale customer-satisfaction survey conducted, but, as the managers had not previously conducted any formal assessments of customer satisfaction, the details of the proposal were unfamiliar to them. According to the survey vendor’s proposal, the customer population would be segmented into several categories. Twelve customers from each category would undergo a seven-minute phone interview. In total, a squad of interviewers would conduct more than one hundred seven-minute interviews. The cost of designing and conducting the survey, analyzing the findings, and generating reports would exceed $150,000. My friend wanted to know whether I thought this was a wise investment.

Although this type of survey would surely yield some useful information, I view it as an overly complex and expensive starting point for assessing customer satisfaction. In my experience, a small number of in-depth customer interviews can generate volumes of high-quality information, at a fraction of the cost of a large-scale survey. I suggested to my friend that his company initiate its feedback-gathering process with some in-depth customer interviews. If serious patterns of dissatisfaction emerged, they could be rapidly addressed without the delays incurred in planning and running a mega-survey. Furthermore, a small-scale undertaking could serve as a prototype in the event the company still wanted to carry out the big-bucks survey.

Before ending our phone conversation, I asked my friend what his company would be likely to do with the findings if it proceeded with the large-scale survey. “Probably nothing,” he responded. “That’s our usual approach. We collect gobs of data. Then we ignore it.” Enough said.

⁴ Wayne Strider, Powerful Project Leadership (Vienna, Va.: Management Concepts, 2002), pp. 20–21. For more information, see www.striderandcline.com.

Other environmental factors can reduce the odds of productive interaction. Consider my experience when I was interviewed at the local mall by a woman conducting interviews with consumers to determine name preferences for a new suntan lotion. She assured me it would take only a few minutes and led me to a cramped cubicle in a back office on the lower level of the mall. Bidding me to sit on one of two straight-back wooden chairs, she then asked me a series of questions about my reactions to a list of proposed names for the new lotion. Stating that I thought all the names sounded like medicine you’d take after your suntan lotion failed to do its job, I was thanked for my time and sent out to find my own way back to daylight.

What made this experience memorable, however, was not the uncomfortable setting or the off-putting lotion names, but the unprofessional way the woman conducted the interview. Staff members kept poking their heads into the cubicle, shouting questions at her. Repeatedly, she interrupted the interview to help them. At several points, she even left the cubicle to resolve problems. Each time she returned, she told me how grateful she was for my participation. “It’ll only take a few minutes longer,” she repeated for the umpteenth time, attributing the chaos to the fact that, as supervisor for the department, she was on call to handle every problem, big or small, because several key staff members hadn’t shown up for work.

My interviewer became so flustered by the commotion that she read aloud not only the marketing-survey instructions for me, but also those intended for her as the interviewer, such as, “Allow the respondent to give multiple responses to this question.” Because her client was demanding results, she was trying to do many jobs at once. I could appreciate her problem—who hasn’t faced staff shortages and pressure from a demanding project? Still, if you want to appear professional, do the opposite of what she did.

For example, conduct the interview in a place that’s free of distractions and interruptions. Strive to appear relaxed and confident, even if your insides are trying out for the trampoline team. Be prepared. Reading from a script is fine, but practice beforehand, so you don’t sound as if you’re reading it for the first time. If things go wrong, don’t call undue attention to them. Repeated apologies are just plain annoying. Before you begin the interview, state how long it will take—and then stick to that time commitment. (My interview took about four minutes; the interruptions extended it to thirty.)

1. What are the reasons for your satisfaction rating with the group?

2. What would you describe as the group’s three most important services, and how well are they being delivered?

3. How would you describe the group’s strengths?

4. What do you see as opportunities for improvement?

Busy though employees were, they responded in detail, commenting on what pleased them and leaving little doubt about the service inadequacies that had upset them. Knowing only that the ratings averaged 3.2 on a 7-point scale would have meant little, but the verbal commentary that accompanied the ratings clarified what respondents meant and what was important to them.

These questions can also be used in an interview format, provided that people are given the questions in advance of the interview and are allowed ample time to review them. That way, people have a chance to recall their experiences, making it more likely that they’ll consider the whole of their experience rather than just the most recent (or most unpleasant) interaction.

Esther Derby, a software development consultant and facilitator, recommends that when feedback is likely to trigger strongly felt responses, it’s wise to begin by deliberately asking objective questions. In an e-mail discussion we had on this topic, Derby noted, “I find that when I ask people to remember events, words, and phrases before I ask about their gut reaction . . ., they are more able to see the big picture over a period of time, remember the good and not-so-good, and see patterns and progress.”⁵

⁵ Esther Derby, private communication. See www.estherderby.com for several of Esther’s articles and information on her services.

Derby has observed that beginning at this objective level has a calming effect by slowing down the natural thought process and encouraging people to pause consciously at each step. Derby finds that using this approach to solicit feedback in a group setting, such as during a project retrospective, helps those involved to reach agreement on the data before going further. Reaching agreement at the onset is especially important because different people see different things and draw different conclusions from what they see.

If we were to design a survey to evaluate services delivered by, say, the XYZ group, a set of objective-then-subjective questions that draw on Derby’s approach might include the following:

1. It’s been six months since we last asked for your feedback about XYZ’s service delivery. What events related to your interaction with XYZ stand out for you in that interval? What pictures, words, or phrases come to mind?

2. What is your reaction to what you’ve just noted?

3. Overall, what pleases you about the service you’ve received from XYZ? What concerns you?

4. (a) In reflecting on the past six months, how would you rate XYZ’s service delivery, using a 7-point scale, where 1 equals terrible and 7 equals superb? (b) Can you explain the reason for your rating?

5. Please describe any suggestions you have for improvement in XYZ’s services.

6. Add anything else you’d like to comment on.

The first question focuses on what customers actually saw and heard, the second focuses on meaning, and the third focuses on feelings, as though stepping through the Satir Interaction Model described in Chapter 4. Note that the request for a rating doesn’t appear until the fourth question. Positioning the rating question midway in the survey, rather than at the beginning, improves the odds that the rating will reflect in-depth thought about services and service delivery.

Case Study: Two or three times per year, a representative from each client company participates in a formal customer-satisfaction survey. But this formal survey isn’t the kind that ends up in the “Long, Boring Surveys” file. The survey takes the form of interviews conducted by phone by an employee charged with this responsibility. The objectives of the survey are as follows:

• Identify patterns of concern.

• Generate ideas for service improvement.

• Identify complaints that should be addressed immediately.

• Pinpoint problems that deserve attention and create a plan for taking action.

• Provide an outlet for grievances that may otherwise be withheld.

• Communicate to clients that their views are important.

Prior to each interview, the interviewer e-mails a list of questions to the customer. The questions remain the same for all interviews and include the following:

• How have you found our response time in answering your calls?

• How confident are you in the knowledge level of our technical staff?

• How would you rate the ability of our support staff to resolve problems?

• Can you suggest one improvement in the way we handle upgrades?

Unlike ratings-oriented surveys, these interviews ask for verbal feedback only. The interviewer records the feedback and then assigns numerical ratings to the customer’s responses. What? you may be thinking, but read on. The interviewer then e-mails the write-up of the comments and the assigned ratings to the customer and asks him or her to correct any inaccuracies. Customers are also asked to review the interviewer’s ratings and to lower any they feel are too high. Interestingly, most of the changes customers have requested have been to raise the ratings. It seems the interviewer rates his company more severely than his customers do!

Escalation procedures ensure that dissatisfied customers or serious problems receive immediate attention. If customers express complaints, the interviewer schedules a follow-up call to determine that improvements have been made to the customer’s satisfaction.

Every few months, survey results are compiled and stored on the company’s intranet for access by all employees. Both employees and customers receive a description of the improvements being undertaken in response to customer feedback.

1. Assess customer satisfaction regularly. The very process of soliciting feedback periodically tells customers that you genuinely care about their viewpoint. This is part of the psychology of feedback-gathering. People may not always feel comfortable about offering feedback, but they generally appreciate being asked. The very fact of being asked for their feedback can lead customers to boost the ratings they give.

2. Give customers advance notice of the survey. Doing so allows them time to gather their thoughts and to recall their service experiences. If possible, show them the questions that will be asked, so they can prepare. After all, the idea isn’t to trick customers, but to help them express what’s important to them.

3. Request open-ended comments. Whether or not you use ratings, solicit comments. Verbal commentary invariably generates more meaningful information about what pleases or distresses customers than ratings alone. By inviting comments, you can get specific examples of matters that concern them, and you can ask follow-up questions to be sure you understand.

4. Let customers confirm your understanding. Give them a chance to confirm that you really heard their comments. Doing so further communicates that their views count. In response, they will often make observations they hadn’t thought of before.

5. Develop response-escalation procedures. Ensure that serious problems identified through the survey are quickly addressed, so that dissatisfied customers don’t become even more unhappy. Establish criteria for selecting complaints that deserve quick attention, such as a rating below a certain level or a particularly negative comment. Problems that cry out for immediate attention provide a moment of truth: an opportunity to take action that will transform a negative experience into a positive one.⁶

⁶ The term “moment of truth,” popularized by Jan Carlzon, refers to the moment when the customer comes in contact with any aspect of your business and, on the basis of that contact, forms an opinion—positive or negative—about the quality of your service. By acting quickly, a negative situation can be transformed into a positive opportunity. See Jan Carlzon, Moments of Truth (New York: Perennial, HarperCollins, 1989).

6. Follow up with dissatisfied customers. While you resolve problems, stay in touch with the customers who reported them. Let them know you really heard their complaints. Express your appreciation for their feedback. Inform them of the changes you plan to make, and notify them once you’ve implemented the changes. If the complaints concern matters that you can’t change or choose not to change, or if they stem from misunderstandings on the part of the customer, provide an explanation or clarification. Bottom line: Don’t ignore dissatisfied customers. If treated appropriately, they can become your most satisfied customers.

7. Distribute survey results widely. Enlightened organizations disseminate feedback findings to both employees and customers. Granted, it’s not so easy to disclose the results when customer satisfaction is slithering off the bottom of the scale. But employees are likely to feel more ownership of problems if they have direct access to the feedback rather than secondhand accounts. When customers are informed that you’re making adjustments based on their feedback, they may hang in there with you.

8. Systematize the feedback-gathering process. The organized, step-by-step approach this case-study company has adopted makes its process easy to understand, document, and carry out. Both employees and customers know what to expect. The relationship that the employee who conducts the survey cultivates with the customers makes them more willing to describe their grievances. By surveying client companies on a staggered schedule, the work load in conducting the surveys is relatively small at any point in time.

The following points during a customer relationship may be appropriate for seeking feedback. Consider how soliciting feedback at each of the points can help you improve service.

At the Start of a New Customer Relationship: Feedback right at the outset? Absolutely. As noted in Chapter 5, the earlier you learn about what’s important to your customers—their plans, attitudes, fears, hopes, concerns, and preferences—the better positioned you will be to address their needs effectively or to help them understand why you can’t. You might think of feed back at this stage as feed forward: gathering information that will help you successfully address their needs.

The best way to gather this type of feedback is face-to-face, through one-on-one sessions or small group meetings. These sessions are a way to achieve the following:

• Begin to build a strong working relationship with customers.

• Develop rapport.

• Learn about their service history and noteworthy service experiences.

• Identify their criteria for success.

• Understand their needs and concerns.

• Identify their service expectations.

• Help them understand what they can realistically expect from you.

At Regular Points Throughout Your Working Relationship: Basically, every contact you have with your customers, whether planned or unplanned, is a potential opportunity to assess their satisfaction with your services. Ideally, everyone who interacts with customers is committed to listening carefully to their comments, so as to detect and respond to complaints and concerns.

Formal methods such as service reviews, group discussions, focus groups, and off-site meetings are fine, but you don’t need to post a “Feedback-Gathering in Progress” sign in order to ask customers how things are going. Sometimes, casual hallway conversations or just dropping by can help you find out what’s on people’s minds. Using a combination of formal and informal methods will help you to accomplish the following:

• Detect changes in satisfaction levels over time.

• Trap problems before they turn into crises.

• Identify requirements for changes in service delivery.

• Learn about customer concerns that might not surface otherwise.

• Learn what’s working well so that you can be sure to keep doing it.

• Keep reinforcing the “we care” message.

When Redesigning Customer Services: When providers plan improvements to better serve their customers, they often ignore the views of the very customers they’re striving to serve better. “Why’d they do that?” customers are left to wonder, especially when the changes aren’t what they would have liked. Making important decisions on behalf of customers without first considering their perspective is a mistake.

Methods for obtaining feedback to support service redesign include asking customers for examples of service problems, interviewing customers to test ideas for new approaches, and—perhaps best of all—inviting customers to participate on the redesign team. By seeking feedback from customers during your redesign effort, you’ll be more successful in doing the following:

• Ensure that you understand their needs as you plan the redesign.

• Avoid modifications that customers will resist or resent.

• Gain insight into their perspective of the proposed changes.

• Identify possible changes you would not have learned about otherwise.

• Gain customer buy-in in helping you help them, increasing the odds of success.

At Times of Service-Related Changes: When people are affected by change, they feel a greater need to know what’s happening. As you implement major service changes, it’s wise to keep customers in the loop. While formal get-togethers may be helpful, you can also benefit from spending time in customer areas talking with them. As one IT client liaison told me, “They tell you things when you’re there that they don’t tell you when you’re not there.”

By providing ad hoc ways for customers to give you feedback, you’ll improve your ability to accomplish the following:

• Reduce molehills of confusion before they become mountains.

• Resolve customers’ misconceptions, mistakes, and false assumptions.

• Relieve the fear or uncertainty customers may experience due to the changes.

• Build goodwill, confidence, and trust.

• Keep reinforcing the “we care” message.

At Selected Checkpoints During a Project: During lengthy or complex undertakings, the temptation is to just forge ahead without pausing to resolve conflicts. However, it’s far better to deal with concerns in a timely matter and to diffuse tensions before they escalate into shoot-outs.

The feedback-gathering methods you employ during a project can vary depending on the needs and preferences of those involved. For example, you may at different times put emphasis on face-to-face meetings, conferences calls, or e-mail check-ins with individual customers. Feedback-gathering at these checkpoints enables you to achieve the following:

• Identify customers’ concerns that have not yet been voiced.

• Solicit and answer questions that customers otherwise would not have asked.

• Discuss project status in a more casual manner than formal reporting methods would allow.

• Review expectations and confirm that you and they are still in sync.

• Identify business changes that could affect your project.

After Receiving Negative Feedback: When you receive a complaint or encounter evidence of customer dissatisfaction, it’s natural to want to defend against it, dismiss it, or find fault with the customer—or all three. But when one customer offers some feedback that’s hard to take, that person is rarely the only one with that view. And when many hold a negative view, it’s foolish to ignore it.

Stressful though it may be, dealing with negative feedback is best done face-to-face or, if that’s not feasible, voice-to-voice. This direct contact will help you to succeed at the following:

• Ensure that you understand the feedback.

• Get specific examples of situations that led to the negative reaction.

• Demonstrate that you are interested in addressing and resolving the problem.

• Provide an explanation if the situation was actually a customer misunderstanding.

• Involve customers in helping you make improvements.

• Rebuild confidence in your service delivery.

• Turn a negative situation into a positive one.

Examples of this “doing nothing” syndrome are easy to find. For example, one IT survey revealed that many customers felt the IT group didn’t understand their priorities. When I asked the manager what this complaint meant, he said he didn’t know. He confessed that no follow-up had been done to learn more about the customers’ concerns, let alone to address them. When was this feedback gathered? More than a year earlier!

In another company, when I asked about the status of a company-wide survey that a technology group had conducted, the manager went digging in his bottom drawer. He had stuffed the surveys in this drawer, and they’d been sitting there, untouched, for the eight months since the survey was conducted.

In a third company, three months had passed since a Web-based survey revealed widespread customer dissatisfaction with software services and support. Not only had the director not taken any action, he had not yet reported the feedback—even to his own division. Meanwhile, the problems cited by customers continued, unabated. Is it any wonder that customer dissatisfaction was on the rise?

Please take note: Gathering feedback and not taking action based on the findings can be more damaging to your reputation than not gathering feedback at all. You might as well send out a letter saying,

Dear Sir or Madam:

Here at XYZ Corp., we pride ourselves on not listening.

Yours truly,

The Management

Failure to act erodes customer confidence and respect because, having been asked for feedback, customers watch for changes to emerge as a consequence. When they see none, they question whether those who requested the feedback were really listening or were just going through the motions.

Not only must you take action, you must do so quickly, even if only to estimate when you will have more to report. When I visited the vice president of a division one month after his employees had participated in a large-scale customer survey, he complained, “They said they’d issue a report, but I haven’t seen anything yet.” He was oblivious to the complexity of the work in progress to capture, evaluate, organize, and summarize the feedback, and to write the report for distribution. These were not his concerns, and from his perspective, the absence of the promised report was part of the pattern of poor service. If he had simply been kept informed about the status of the survey and the estimated delivery date of the report, he might not have been so impatient.

If you’ve worked hard to upgrade service, this perceptual lag is unfair, if not infuriating. Therefore, take action to minimize it before, during, and after you make your service improvements. In particular, communicate. That is, keep a description of the improvements and your progress in implementing them visible to customers who’ve agitated for them or who will benefit from them.

Here’s how the situation played out for a network vendor who was unaware of this perceptual lag. Customers were dissatisfied with the service snags and snafus they’d been experiencing. They would have gladly obtained the same services elsewhere, if they had that option. But they didn’t. They felt trapped and very unhappy.

Vendor personnel agreed that something needed to be done. They started by taking the courageous step of administering a full-scale customer-satisfaction survey. They knew what the results would reveal, and they were right. Ratings teetered at the bottom of the scale, and customers’ comments were scathing. Difficult though it was to take, this feedback provided a baseline.

Group members set forth to make things better. The service environment was complex, but over the course of a year, they implemented numerous improvements. They were justifiably proud and badly needed a pat on the back from their customers. Yet, when I learned the group had conducted another full-scale survey, I became concerned. Group members expected ratings in this second survey to reflect a dramatic leap. I feared they were in for a colossal disappointment.

Although the ratings were somewhat higher than a year earlier and the comments were less stinging, customers were still dissatisfied. In fact, judging from the feedback, many customers barely noticed a difference. Others felt service was on the upswing, but still far from optimal. Vendor personnel were devastated. They had accomplished a lot, but hardly anyone seemed to notice or care. They were victims of the perceptual lag.

Most organizations fall short in publicizing the improvements they’ve made. As a result, customers may not associate an improvement with the feedback they provided. To minimize the perceptual lag, put on your public relations hat: When you’ve identified the changes you’ll make, inform your customers. Let them know how they can help you help them. Keep emphasizing the connection between their grievances and the action you’re taking. When you’ve implemented a change, inform employees, remind them, and then tell them again. Distribute graphs and charts that show your progress in implementing the improvements. Involve key customers in planning and implementing the changes, so they’ll have a stake in your success. Communicate, communicate, communicate. Don’t let them not know. And while you’re at it, acknowledge that there’s much left to do.

Supplement these activities with as much direct customer contact as possible. As much as anything else, customers want to know that you take their needs seriously. Visiting them is time-consuming, but it pays great dividends. Solicit their feedback to ensure that your improvements really work. Ask for their help in spreading the word. This kind of attention alone often leads customers to give higher ratings in subsequent surveys.

The most uplifting outcome is when your fiercest adversary becomes your strongest supporter—and yes, this does happen. For example, a provider that was recovering from a sorry service history called a meeting with several of its most disgruntled customers. One of these customers, Bruce, was a tough dude, whose very name sent chills through those in charge of supporting his service needs. After the provider team presented its findings, Bruce stood up and pointed to a chart depicting the provider’s improvement over the past year. With a level of enthusiasm that matched his level of outrage before the improvements, he told everyone that he would make sure his staff saw the chart and understood the improvement they’d been experiencing. While he acknowledged his staff’s complaints that things were far from perfect, he was adamant that his people give credit for the improvements that had occurred.

Obviously, you want to have happy customers. But while you’re working toward that goal, do what you can to limit the perceptual lag.