Companies that pay more than lip service to soliciting and acting on customer feedback reap rewards that their trailing competitors can’t hope to match via other avenues. According to a June 2008 report from information technology research firm Aberdeen Group, marketers with best-in-class performance levels for customer feedback initiatives saw a 19 percent increase in customer-focused innovation over the 12 months prior to being surveyed. In addition, they realized 26 percent lifts in both customer retention and customer satisfaction—measures that strongly correlate to increased revenue and profit.
The report, Customer Feedback Management: Mind If I Ask You a Few Questions?, surveyed more than 300 firms between May and June 2008, revealing specific practices shared by best-in-class firms; for example, 62 percent have a centralized data repository for customer feedback, and half define performance metrics for evaluating customer survey effectiveness.
Digging deeper into data that marketers collect, the leading firms are nearly twice as likely to solicit product development ideas as those found to be laggards on this business activity (see chart below). Such insight, notes
Jeff Zabin, the Aberdeen Group analyst who generated this report, provides marketers the ability to better target their future product offerings for higher sales. Read the report in its entirety
here.
