The reality is that he experienced several frustrating moments during the purchase journey of his new car, including the car arriving late and without the agreed-upon specs and price disputes, resulting in senior management intervention. After all of this, he was asked (read: coerced) by the young sales consultant to rate his experience as "10" when he got the call to rate his feedback.

Despite the unpleasant experience of buying his car, when the research agent eventually called, he changed his mind and gave a high score. His reasoning for the change of heart, and for not giving his honest feedback as to the whole unpleasant experience, was interesting and rational. He described it as follows:

"I felt emotionally blackmailed initially, but as I reflected on the situation, I realised this young sales consultant, like my own son, was trying his best to earn a living. My feedback could jeopardise his earnings (commissions) if I shared my true feelings and my corresponding rating. He clearly lacked the maturity and training, and it was not entirely his fault. So, I went back on my original intention to rate my true experience. If I am being honest, I was probably hoping that some other customer will also cut my son some slack someday if he did not deliver the best service experience."

This projection is just one of many reasons why customers might only provide half-truths in their service rating feedback. Others include:

  • sympathy — for the frontline staff (sales agent or call centre agent)
  • time lapse — where memory is exaggerated by the emotional "residue" or the emotional impact of the experience (good or bad)
  • apathy — it is too much effort to fully engage in the feedback process
  • hopelessness — the belief that nothing will be done to remedy the situation
  • halo effect — the interaction and experience with one is assigned to all
  • speak no evil — unwilling to criticise, afraid an individual will be punished, or the inherent belief to always look on the "bright side"
  • avoidance — would prefer not to give feedback (maybe due to inconvenience, bad timing) and just want to get rid of the obstacle (the caller)
  • rationalisation — assigning valid reasons for experience or rating (off occurrence), and
  • guilt trip — the staff put undue pressure on the customer to rate the experience more favourably than deserved to avoid losing incentives.

The question is, do false truths serve any purpose? If customers don't share their honest feedback, how does the feedback help organisations improve customer experience? Why are organisations not digging deeper into their customer surveys to ensure that they really get to the bottom of authentic customer feedback?

There are a number of reasons for this:

  • Legacy and Purpose: The organisation may be stuck with legacy systems, churning out emails with surveys to customers, without any further consideration. The cost to make amendments could be too high or resistance to change may be embedded in ignorance. 
  • NPS Trumps Reason: The organisation may be solely focused on chasing the “industry” metrics like NPS or CSAT scores, rather than understanding or addressing the problems. When the results are positive, the motivation to review (or change the current feedback format) may be absent. 
  • Inside-Out: The results are embedded in the KPI (or balanced scorecards) structure and driven to achieve targets (or even incentives). NPS or CSAT are built into the business' performance structure. 
  • Yes but … : The questions in the survey do not cover what customers actually want to say, and open-ended questions are challenging to analyse.
  • Timing: The timing of when feedback is requested, is not right for the purpose — too soon, too late. 
  • No Chiefs: No one "owns" the management of the surveys, process, or dashboard in the organisation. 
  • CX Side-Plate: The survey results are not used as part of regular business practice or conversations. 
  • CX Silence: The results are not shared with everyone in the organisation, so no one knows how they perform (except top management). 
  • CX Focus: The intention of VoC is not to understand and learn (growth mindset), but to chase results (fixed mindset). 
  • Numbers Over Words: The results are only analysed in terms of metrics, not the customer's narrative. 
  • Fix This Now: The focus is on solving immediate problems, rather than avoiding those in the long run or using the information to understand how to enhance customer experience.

These are the realities for many organisations. Without a defined and considered VoC programme, sending surveys to customers will provide little or no value to an organisation, and even less to customers who share their feedback. Too often, organisations boast with pride about their NPS or CSAT scores in public forums or around the boardroom table, even when in reality customers' experience is at best accidental. There is a classic saying in research — "garbage in, garbage out".

How to Use Feedback Effectively, Given the Potential Half-Truths Offered by Customers

Firstly, review these fundamentals of VoC programmes to improve customer experience: 

  • understand and define the purpose of the VoC programme for your company
  • empower a support structure to manage and own the programme
  • include the employees in the design of the programme and feedback loop
  • get the timing of requested feedback from customers right
  • ask the right type of probing questions
  • choose the best-suited channels for the feedback, and
  • ensure there is ownership to work and manage the feedback.

Secondly, actually use feedback to improve and align the service to customers' needs (articulated through the feedback) and to engage with customers.

Top Tips to Get the Best Value From Customer Feedback

Don't ask customers about their experience if there is no intention to do anything about the feedback. Consumers are survey-fatigued. Don't waste your company's and the customer's time if the purpose is not to improve the customer experience. 

Use criticism to inspire problem-solving and innovation. Use feedback primarily for everyone to participate in problem-solving, contribute new ideas, a fresh look at the way things are done and build a learning culture.

Build effective 'close the loop' pathways. When feedback is reviewed by cross-functional teams, improvements implemented will be embraced and the 'threat' of honest feedback for employees, will be reduced. 

Give customers an opportunity to explain their sentiments, problems and what they want from you with open-ended questions. Including open-ended questions allows customers to express their thoughts in their own words. This can provide qualitative insights that may be missed with closed-ended questions and predefined response options. 

Don't ask questions only about what your company needs to know or track. Give customers the opportunity to tell you what they want to share about their interaction with your company. In this way, customers may point out opportunities to improve service delivery that may potentially be a blind spot, or 'low hanging fruit' (easy to fix) improvements. 

Avoid using customer feedback as a punitive mechanism for staff. It will only inspire creative ways to manipulate the results — like asking customers for a positive rating. Position customer feedback as part of the learning culture in the organisation.

Use compliments from customers to encourage best practices and team spirit. It's as important to know what hacks customers off as to what makes them happy and impresses them. Learn from the bad and fix the problems, and build on the good and elevate them.

Carefully consider the impact of integrating the VoC results with employees' individual performance and remuneration results as it can instil resentment, fear of failure or exposure and encourage manipulation — non-conducive behaviour for improving customer experience. 

Some other tips are: 

  • respect people's time and contribution to help your business improve
  • fix the problems raised by customers and give them feedback on how you can solve it
  • look at trends to identify internal system / process or people issues to fix
  • be on the lookout for ideas to solve problems mentioned which would not be considered in the direct influence of your organisation, for cues to differentiate your value offering
  • thank your customers for their support and investment to help improve your business … then improve your service, and
  • integrate employee feedback in the VoC methodology, and metrics.

Customer feedback, whether obtained through surveys, interviews, focus groups (organisational-driven), or spontaneous feedback (customer-driven) through many channels, provides organisations with precious gifts. They hold the key to unlocking the insights for planning, the opportunity to fix known and new problems, and provide the right amount of "push" to justify making investments to change. 

Careful VoC design helps avoid leading questions, ambiguous language, or any other factors that might introduce bias or half-truths into the responses.  It is a process that involves careful consideration of the survey's purpose, audience and the methods used to collect and analyse data. Make sure that the design of your VoC survey will get you the reliable, relevant, honest and actionable feedback you want and need from your customers to define and entrench your organisation's true competitive advantage.

For more information, visit www.consumerlab.co.za. You can also follow The Consumer Psychology Lab on Facebook, LinkedIn, or on X. 

*Image courtesy of contributor