Developing a Non-Intrusive Customer Feedback

Well it may sound quite surprising but before we explain what does Non-Intrusive Customer Feedback  defines first let me give a brief idea about the meaning of “Customer feedback” (CF).

In very simple terms CF implies a Customers sharing of experience with a vendor, from whom the former has recently leveraged some services or products. My emphasis of CF is primarily negative feedback that is things which are not going well on the client site.

Most of us know why CF is critical for the long term benefit of a service provider. The basic reason to decipher are to measure:

• The customer existing degree of satisfaction with our services.
• Identify client’s pain areas, which are part of existing service arrangement.

We primarily conduct FB by either electronic format, filling-up questionnaires or one-one interactions.

But my hypothesis is that is when we make blatant declaration that we are doing customer feedback, the responses from clients will be biased. This is what I call as Intrusive feedback.

The primary reasons can be

• It is difficult to give a dull feedback about your vendor, if you have professional relationship with them and not strategic interest aligned.
• Most of the time the corporate syndrome of keeping things under the carpet, makes it difficult for clients to share there expectations with us.
• It’s difficult as per human psyche to give negative feedback upfront, if somebody asks us voluntarily for a feedback.
• Most of the time electronic feedback questioners , which pop-up while browsing  a website are bit irritating, and people may give positive feedback, just for the shake of getting rid of this questionnaire and continue their web browse.

I believe, a proactively customer centric organization, should also develop Non-Intrusive Feedback mechanism (NIFM).NIFM makes a conscious effort to track Customers Interactions with vendors. Some of the parameters can be:

•  
  1. How frequently is the client’s communication with us?
  2. How much is the degree of cooperation of client with onsite team?
  3. How are the clients behaving with our onsite resources?
  4. How receptive is the client to visit our offshore facility.

This is an area of further research, which can be developed and we can add further Vital signs. My beliefs is that NIFM should be used as complementary tool to the traditional method of feedback and not as a competing body of knowledge .But this methodology of feedback if developed and conducted in a regulated environment, can surely assist us in knowing our customers better.

“A service provider should be like a mother, who always can anticipate the unstated needs of his child (client)”.