If you contact the customer support of your utility company, phone carrier, bank, or other service provider you’ll likely be flooded with requests to rate the experience and provide feedback. Likewise, corporate websites and email communications often solicit feedback via embedded buttons or links to online forms.
What’s with this corporate obsession with customer feedback?
Are these huge piles of feedback actually analyzed and acted upon? Is customer feedback some sort of corporate cargo cult? Or maybe clever marketing by vendors of feedback tools and services?
The impression is the feedback is just discarded or ignored.
I work in data analysis and reporting on various feedback systems is part of my regular role. Every company’s data culture is different, so you can’t simply say “X is the reason why they’re doing this”. It could be:
- Maybe they are incorporating the data into agent/product reviews.
- Maybe they are trying to guide product & feature development on a quantitative basis
- Maybe at one point a product manager wanted to be “data-driven”, so a feedback system was set up, but now it’s basically ignored now that they haven’t been with the company for over a year and nobody wants to take ownership of it. But it’s more effort to remove than just leave in place.
- Maybe it’s used when we want to highlight our successes, and ignored when we want to downplay results we don’t like
What I’ve found is that there are a lot of confounding factors. For example, I work for a job board, and most people use the Overall Satisfaction category as more of a general measurement of how their job search is going, or whether or not they got the interview, rather than an assessment of how well our platform serves that purpose. And it’s usually going very shittily because job searching is a generally shitty process even when everything is going “right”.
