More Pitfalls Associated with Traditional Customer Feedback Methods

A few months ago, we wrote about some of the pitfalls associated with mystery shopping, one of the most commonly-used customer feedback methods.

Today, we’re going to briefly look at the pitfalls associated with two more customer feedback methods: comments cards and traditional market research surveys.

Comment Cards

An old school yet still popular method of soliciting feedback is through the ever popular comment card. Typically, short comment cards are filled out at the point of sale and handed in; longer ones are taken home and mailed in.

While comment card information can be useful, this type of feedback tends to be “reactive” in nature.  There is no incentive to act, unless the customer has had a very poor or catastrophic experience.  Hence, these cards essentially become “complaint” forms.  Knowing that 95% of dissatisfied customers never complain, comment cards typically yield very low, statistically unreliable, response rates which compromise their effectiveness. Unfortunately, comment cards are sometimes kept at the individual store level, are filtered, and often never make their way to senior management for resolution.

Aggregating comment card data across all store locations to detect trends and benchmark performance is difficult to achieve with a paper-based system. By the time cards are returned in the mail to a central point for processing, it may be too late to resolve issues expressed by individual customers.

Traditional Market Research Surveys

Another approach is to proactively ask customers for their feedback through conventional survey research. This includes using qualitative and quantitative techniques such as focus groups, paper, telephone and face-to-face “store intercept” interviews.

While traditional surveying can paint a broad or even detailed picture, it is an extremely expensive option if the aim is to do it longitudinally across all locations. Given typical response rates, achieving an adequate sample size by location, with a high degree of confidence in the statistical data, requires large sample sizes. To attain the necessary volume of data on an ongoing basis, this type of surveying can become quite a costly and time-consuming venture. That is why conventional surveying in retail environments is not typically used for quality control purposes. Furthermore, the data is not likely to be timely because it can take months to compile and report.

Compared to mystery shopping and comment cards, traditional surveying provides the opportunity to capture the voice of the customer at an aggregate level to gauge the overall customer experiences. However, due to high costs and logistical reasons, traditional surveying is impractical as a mechanism for monitoring the quality of operations at individual locations.