Has the communication needs of you customers changed?
April 30, 2010Customer complaints are key to customer retention
May 5, 2010
I’ve just returned from a climbing trip to Mallorca with a bunch of friends. It was a great trip with lots of laughs and some fantastic climbing. Thank you Mallorca and everyone involved.
However, on the plane of the way back the air crew distributed a customer satisfaction/feedback survey and asked the passengers to complete it and return it to the crew before they disembarked.
I looked at this questionnaire and it was 5 pages long and very detailed. This caused me some concerns as I thought about how many passengers would complete such a survey. I looked around the cabin and saw many passengers receive the questionnaire, look it over and then, turned off, place it in the pocket in the chair in front of them.
I completed a small part of the survey and then went to hand it in to one of the staff and asked how these surveys went down and what response rates they got. The stewardess I asked replied that they didn’t get many responses as it was too long but they continued to distribute it as they were targeted on this in their performance reviews, despite giving feedback to senior management and recommendations that they make it shorter.
I wrote another post here about the impact of customer surveys and if they do more harm than good. I think this travel company is missing a great opportunity to get more feedback from its customers but is not willing to put the effort in to make their surveys shorter.
Why is it that senior management ignore feedback from frontline staff about things not working and don’t implement recommended changes? Is it that it is too hard? Is it to do with internal data needs, politics and culture? How does it impact the relationship with the customer?
What do you think?
Thanks to kikashi for the photo
5 Comments
Customer surveys, low response rates and staff targets @ http://bit.ly/9bSmEE
I completely agree with you Adrian, what a complete waste of time. Anything more than say half a dozen questions is more than enough. Plus what’s the airline going to do with all the information?
Surely it would be much better just to focus on getting everyone to answer rather than every bit of detail and getting a few people to answer?
.-= Matthew Needham´s last blog ..How to write your ebook (part 2) =-.
Hi Matthew,
They say that they have used the information to drop a number of hotels/resorts over the last year but I am sure that they could do more positive stuff if they simplified their approach to get more qualitative feedback.
Adrian
They just trying to show their professionalism with a pack but the senior management forget the purpose of that survey – good number of feedback. And surprisingly the senior management just trying to avoid that responsibility.
.-= Arafat Hossain Piyada´s last blog ..6 Excellent site to learn Origami instructions =-.
Hi Arafat,
You make a great point about senior management trying to show their professionalism but losing site of the goal. This can be the challenge for many organisations who get caught up in too much ‘management’ and not enough ‘leadership’. Don’t you think?
Adrian