Jennifer Kirkby writes:
Although 95 percent of companies collect feedback, only 50 percent brief staff on its contents, a mere 30 percent use it and a paltry 5 percent bother to tell the customer what action they took. Prime causes of this sorry state are poor cross-functional collaboration and lack of information culture. But the main culprit is the disparate sources of feedback with no overall owner, plan or use.
The choice of feedback method depends on use:
- Senior Managers need methods to keep them in touch with reality, enabling them to champion the customer focussed cause in relation to corporate objectives
- Operational Managers need feedback methods that guide strategies and day to day decisions, rather than threaten them with a beating.
- Staff need feedback to do the best they can in their day-to-day job. Some feedback owners pompously say that feedback should be divulged on a need-to-know basis. But if people are not delivering or supporting the customer experience, what are they doing? Frontline service causes less customer frustration than back-office support, but it's the former who pays the cost incurred by the latter, who gaily carry on in their misguided ways.
To me, I always feel that the word feedback evokes a monologue process in my mind. Hence, may be it is prone to no action within companies. For example, words like plan, growth pushes people into doing something. If we were to replace feedback with a new word which had a bias for action, it might help . What could it be? Let's coin a new term for this.