Last week, we passed the one-third mark of the Spring Semester for my courses at Augusta University’s Hull College of Business. As I typically do at this point in the semester, I asked my students to provide me with anonymous, written feedback on how their class is going so far this term by responding to three questions: 1) What do you like about the class so far? 2) What do you not like about the class so far? 3) What changes would you make to the class for the remainder of the semester? At Augusta University (AU), students are asked to evaluate and provide feedback on each of their courses at the end of the semester. While I think this is a great idea for me to improve future offerings of my courses, the current students do not gain any benefit from the end-of-semester feedback they provide. So, by asking the students for their feedback at this juncture of the semester, I can act on it if it is warranted and practical. My goal is to continually provide a better product/service (course) to my customers (students). As business owners and leaders, you should feel the same way and customer feedback is critical to doing that, particularly if you run a business in the service industry.
Customer feedback is more important for companies who provide services than those who provide physical products. If your company provides a physical product, it is relatively easy to measure the quality of the product by testing its performance against its expected specifications. However, in the case of a service provided, while some quality can be measured, much of its quality comes from the customer’s experience related to the service. While physical products are consumed, services are experienced. So, in services, the customer’s experience has an outsized influence on the customer’s decision to purchase that service again. Unfortunately, the only way to really gauge customer experience is to ask the customer about it. Therefore, if you are in the service industry, you must request customer feedback to determine what you are doing well and what needs to be improved.
According to a Harvard Business Review (HBR) study, the more customer feedback a company receives, the better it can understand what customers want and such feedback is essential to making informed product decisions and business success. Customer feedback, first and foremost, makes you listen to your customers, determine what they like, dislike, and value most in your product, allowing you to better understand customer satisfaction. Customer feedback also enhances customer loyalty and customer retention. It shows your customers that you care, that you have their best interests in mind, and that you are striving to improve. As noted from the HBR study, it will allow you to make better decisions about your current and future products that better meet customer needs and wants. This will improve the customer experience and overall customer service. As former Amazon CEO, Jeff Bezos said, “We see our customers as invited guests to a party and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
I think this makes a very compelling case for the use of customer feedback, particularly in service industries. The tricky part is the actual collection of customer feedback. At AU, our end-of-semester course evaluation/feedback requests are online, and the response rates are often less than 50%. However, when I do my in-class requests, my students are a “captive audience,” so everyone who is there does it. Collecting feedback is a challenge for businesses because they tend to do it in the same way AU does, at the end of the semester. They send out surveys typically via email or text and return rates range between 10% and 30%. As consumers, we tend to be deluged by these feedback requests, and we typically do not fill them out unless our experience was either really good or really bad. From the business side, we would like to hear from a large cross-section of our customer base. This begs the question: How can we collect more feedback from our customers?
First, I would say not to give up on the online surveys. Although the return rate is not very good, if you send them out to all of your customers post-purchase, you will get a decent amount of feedback based on pure volume. However, if you really want to get more in-depth feedback, there are some other methods. Customer “interviews” are very helpful. At your point of sale, if a customer appears to not be in too much of a rush, it would be a good time to ask specific questions about their experience. Another great tool is a customer focus group. Bring a group of customers together who can discuss their needs and wants and their perceptions on how you deliver on them. In all of these cases, providing your customers with thank-you gifts for their feedback will help engender more business loyalty and reward them for the extra time they are spending with you.
Customer feedback is critically important for improving your competitiveness in your markets, particularly for service companies. While collecting feedback is not easy, it is well worth any time and financial investment you make in it.
