Stop Asking Customers For Feedback; Try Lessons Instead

Forbes

2 hours ago

Ever had a maitre'd, waiter, or waitress saunter up to your table and ask the ubiquitous "How was everything?" And even though you were unimpressed and underwhelmed, you likely said, "Fine." Congratulations – you are not alone – and you have participated in one of the most meaningless efforts in modern business, useless feedback solicitation.
What the restaurant learned from your "Fine" response is not only irrelevant; it's probably an absolute lie. The front-line employee thinks they have heard an accurate evaluation of the meal and service. The customer feels he's received a generic, oft-repeated greeting, akin to the other side of "Good morning, how are you?" And management falsely thinks they have another satisfied customer.
Evaluative customer feedback is pitched to organizations as a critical tool in understanding customers' needs and expectations. "Unless we ask customers, how can we know how good our service is?" asks the well-meaning but ill-informed. That belief leads to a lot of money wasted on plain-vanilla surveys, irritating dinnertime interrupting spam calls, and ends with long-winded market research reports replete with cross-tabulations and PowerPoint presentations.
What's wrong with soliciting evaluative customer feedback? It is a piece of superstitious corporate behavior built on five myths.
According to some research, over seventy-five percent of customers who leave a company for a competitor rate themselves as "satisfied" or "completely satisfied" with the company they are abandoning! The goal should be a focus on loyalty and advocacy, not mere satisfaction.
Most customers would rather tell a little white lie about being satisfied than engage in a potentially confrontational dialogue explaining why they were not satisfied.
Customers want organizations to read their minds! Only a raving fan or an agitated individual has the sincere, genuine motivation to provide honest feedback.
Most believe organizations solicit feedback because they are required to do so or are incentivized by some reward. Even if improvements are made using customers' feedback, most customers never learn of the changes.
Not so. The noisy ones have either hope or larceny in their souls. It's the quietly disappointed ones who are important to look out for. Those are the ones who never say a word but quietly abandon you for greener pastures.
Customers frankly view the solicitation of their feedback as a redundant activity. Customers believe they are giving the organization feedback each time they buy another product or service, recommend you to others, and remain a customer over time. So, how can an organization remain current on customers' ever-changing needs and expectations without annoying or estranging them? Focus on active learning, not on rear-view evaluation.
Customer feedback is about evaluation; customer learning is about problem solving. Evaluations are grades; learning is about improvement. Problem solving requires more customer insight than customer evaluation, more ideas than critique. Customers enjoy solving problems when invited, provided they believe there is a sincere interest. Shifting from a customer evaluation to a customer learning focus requires a new mindset, especially from leaders with a clipboard and stopwatch mentality. Apply these six rules to your search for relevant customer insight.
Customer surveys yield mildly interesting demographic information useful in marketplace positioning, benchmarking, or strategy. But true customer intelligence is best achieved face-to-face, ear-to-ear, and click-to-click. And the folks on the front line have that opportunity every day.
Learning begins with a spirit of openness. If customers feel free to move the conversation as they see fit, they will gravitate to what is important to them—the good, bad, and the ugly. "What are ways we can…" or "How would you suggest we…" are more likely to give you a helpful lesson your customer is willing to deliver, than questions that start with "On a 1-5 scale…"
Evaluative questions create a tone of critique--right and wrong, good and bad. Problem-solving questions can be fun for customers to answer and are generally taken seriously. Ask a customer questions like "If this were your restaurant, what would you do differently?" Or dreamer questions like, "What is something no other similar organization does that would be super cool?
Most customers have no particular interest in instructing you in their perspective on your service. Offer customers an incentive to provide you with a quick lesson. Let the customer know how you plan to report on the improvements made from their lessons. And always keep that promise.
People often behave in ways different from how they predict they would act. When a researcher compared reasons patients gave when switching physicians with the reasons they predicted would influence a switching decision, there was a significant difference. Actual customer behavior is often more telling than what customers say they would do.
Service wisdom comes from valuing an assortment of sources for customer intelligence. The security guard's assessment of a departing key customer's demeanor can be more instructive than forty focus groups. Talking with a customer you lost last year might be more helpful than talking with the one you acquired last week.
We typically think of customer feedback as judgmental opinions, not as instructive information. Consider the word itself. "Feeding back" implies nurturance, like returning essential nutrients to the soil through fertilizer. Customers will more likely give you their lessons that "fertilize" your customer service if you approach them as a student eager for a lesson rather than as a pupil uneasy about getting a grade.