According to CMO Council research (www.cmocouncil.org) “only 10.7 percent of companies have deployed real-time systems to collect, analyze and distribute customer feedback. While 75 percent say they receive customer feedback via e-mail, only 23 percent say they track and measure the volume and nature of these messages”. In addition the CMO Council advocates that “CMOs take a leadership role in benchmarking and transforming the levels of market and customer centricity and responsiveness throughout their organizations”.

Unfortunately the companies who have developed customer feedback system or track and measure their customer responses are facing several challenges. Our studies indicate that low response rate and participation from customers as a major challenge during customer feedback process. It is not unusual to receive single digits response rates from your customers for US and global surveys.
And without enough number of participants, any meaningful analysis and recommendations will be useless. Another issue, for the companies who have or have not developed customer feedback system, is how to measure the value of recommendations from their customer feedback system, before implementing them? Our experience indicates that many companies are not confident that the recommendations from analysis of customer feedback will benefit them. For example, if customers are requesting additional support, should it be provided or not? How do we measure the value of providing this additional support for the company? And a major challenge for the CMO’s who would like to take leadership role in transforming the customer responsiveness and centricity throughout their company is to provide, the CEO, product, sales and advertising/PR departments, the benefit of the customer feedback system before starting one.

At MAHAK (www.mahakinc.com) we have provided, in dollar value, the benefits of such a system that is shared with our clients before developing and deploying their customer feedback system. In addition, we have methods and procedures in place to ensure high participation and response rates from customers, and have quantitative techniques in place to provide the benefits (in dollar value) of recommendations before full implementations.

Best,
Michael