The customer feedback is a very important data. It provides businesses with an opportunity to communicate directly with their customers and learn about their opinion, thoughts, demands, and expectations. These days businesses all over the world are switching to digital customer feedback systems rather collecting the feedback with a paper pen/handwritten forms. Similarly businesses and organizations in Dubai and all around the UAE are also seeking digital methods and techniques to collect customer feedback data. The reason why businesses should pay more attentions to the customer feedback collection is that the customer feedback is a very accurate and direct information from the customers. Businesses often overlooked the importance of customer feedback, and even if they are collecting the customer feedback they might not utilize it properly. Any smart business knows how important the customer feedback is for the customer happiness and how it can impact the business. Before the digital era, the customer feedback was collected through printed forms, either businesses were taking feedback when customers are visiting them or either later. Then businesses start using the telephone, later the emails and now a variety of purpose build and customized tools are available to collect customer feedback.
However even in 2021 a huge number of businesses are still taking customer feedback through manual/handwritten forms and surveys. Here are some disadvantages of taking manual/handwritten customer feedback:
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Low Data Accuracy
The manual/handwritten customer feedback collection always has lower accuracy. For manual/handwritten customer feedback collection a sales representative or staff will have to ask your customers and visitors to submit their feedbacks and share their opinion about their experience and quality of service and products or any other topic. The customers are tend to hide their true feelings. It is a human nature that when we are talking to a person we try to avoid highlighting their negative traits. Similarly when a customer or visitor is being asked by the employees to share their experiences they might hide their true feelings or they might try to be more positive. No one likes to be rude with a strangers, even if they know the employees, they will try to be more polite and friendly which will lead to get a biased opinion or even if the customers are truthful they might try to sugarcoat their opinion.
In such situations when a customer is unhappy they might answer negatively for certain questions, and also try to give rating at few questions too. Similarly when they are happy and satisfied they might exaggerate and answer positively for all questions. Whatever the case is they customers and visitors will try to be more balanced in sharing their opinion. Which results in inaccurate or misleading information. However with a customer feedback system, when the customers are giving their feedback through a digital medium, they are tend to be more honest. As there will be no staff assisting them with the process, so they can be more expressing and truthful with their opinion. The digital customer feedback system is more capable of collecting highly accurate customer feedback data than the manual/handwritten customer feedback collection.
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Expensive in Terms of Cost, Time and Resources
Manual/handwritten customer feedback collection is very expensive, take too much time and require a lot of resources. A business must have to appoint fixed staff who reach out to the customers and visitors and ask them for their feedback. This means a fixed amount of staff will be continuously engaged in collecting customer feedback. The businesses always have to allocate resources for training for the staff and other relevant tasks. Manual customer feedback collection requires more time too. For example a five to ten question customer feedback survey could take up to fifteen minutes or even more, depends upon the customers and the staff also. Then the business will also have to manage a team who will process all this manual data and do the data entry. These things makes the customer feedback collection very expensive. The entire process and several other factors affect the quality of the data too. Businesses end up spending a lot more and getting a lot less in terms of quality of the customer feedback data.
However, with a digital customer feedback system, there is only initial cost to implement the system. There is very less operational cost. It collects the feedback automatically and it prepares the reports automatically. It doesn’t even require a permanent operator, all the functions can be automated and configured and the system will do the rest. The managers and staff can prepare reports within a few clicks and download also. A digital customer feedback system is far less expensive and more efficient than the manual/handwritten customer feedback collection and it provide much superior quality data.
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The Data Quality is Totally Dependent on Staff, It Lack Security and Contains Errors
The manual/handwritten customer feedback collection method is totally dependent on the staff and doesn’t provide much security. The staff member who are collecting the customer feedback can influence the customer’s answers as well and the staff who is doing data entry can also input wrong or incorrect data which will reduce the accuracy. As the human are responsible for collecting the customer feedback and uploading the data into the system so it requires a lot of human efforts and always have errors. In fact most of the time the errors occurred while uploading the data into the system. Usually businesses use MS Excel or any equivalent program to process and analyze the data which also provide more room for errors. The errors could be due to lack of understanding of the program or the policy and the errors could also occur due to incorrect data entries. Which further dilute the data and sometimes the businesses will have to double check everything, which is also not a guarantee to eliminate all errors and it also costs a lot of time, efforts and resources.
Another very common problem with the manual/handwritten customer feedback collection is the duplication of the data. It is very hard to identify the duplication. The duplication occurs at two places, one is when the data entry operators do the data entry and the major cause is collecting same feedback data from a same customer for multiple time over the duration of the campaign. As during the duration of a campaign a customer might have visit the business for multiple times and sometimes customer tell the staff that they had previously given the feedback and sometime they don’t. Sometimes the staff also collect the feedback twice to meet their daily targets. However the digital customer feedback system doesn’t have any of such issue. The feedback is collected through a digital user interface, which immediately save the input into the database and can prevent duplication as well. The quality of the customer feedback data is highly accurate when collected from a digital customer feedback system.
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The Customer Response Rate is Low
Whit the manual/handwritten customer feedback collection the customer response rates are always low comparing to a digital platform. There are two major factors, one is that customers and visitors who got a service or made a purchase are always in hurry, and especially in case of service based industries the customers who had to wait in the queue also will always prefer to leave as soon as the service is delivered. The second factor is the staff. For example a business has appointed 10 trained employees to collect customer feedback manually. In case when there are less customers these 10 employees could have better chance to intercept each of them, when there are more than average customers or during the busy hours, these 10 employees will not be sufficient to intercept each customers and request them for the feedback, this reduce the customer response rate. Either a customer have already spend too much time or either they have never been asked to provide the feedback, in both cases the business will end up collecting very less number of feedbacks comparing to the number of customers they are serving in a day.
The customer feedback survey also impact the response rate. If your survey contains too many questions, even if your employeessucceed in intercepting the customer and the customer initially got agree for it but when the customer will see too many questions most of the time they refuse, else they just try to finish it as quickly as possible and don’t provide thoughtful answers. However, in case of a digital customer feedback system the feedback collection mediums are either fully digital or by self-service kiosk/touch screens. The digital platforms provide the customer with the flexibility to do the customer feedback survey at any time. They are not bound to stay at the business, in fact they can do it from their mobile phones or computers too. This results in better customer response rate and it also provide more accurate data. As the customer are not facing any employee so they would be more honest in expressing their feelings and opinion. The customer feedback systems are much better in getting higher response rate at lower cost that is why the ROI of a digital customer feedback system is always high.
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Report Creation, Data Analysis and Sharing is Difficult
In case of manual/handwritten customer feedback the report creation, data analysis and data sharing is very difficult. The very first step is to manage the physical papers/forms, then it comes to the uploading of the data in the system. Mostly businesses in Dubai and all around the UAE prefer MS Excel for such processes. The data upload is a very time consuming task and also require a lot of human resource, which impact on the campaign budget and make it more expensive. However once the data is uploaded it is still in raw format. In order to be able to utilize the data for sharing with the management and decision making, evaluation or other managerial tasks, the data must be processed, analyzed and compiled in the form of actionable reports. Which again is a very time consuming task, it is worth mentioning that the MS Excel program also has its limitation. Usually the reports compiled through manual processing are difficult and lengthier. Which also makes it difficult for the management to act upon. A lot of room is there for errors and duplication which further reduces the accuracy and effectiveness of the final reports.
However in case of a digital customer feedback system the data analytical engine do the job. It can prepare reports as per the preconfigured formats and it also provide facility to customize the reporting format as per the needs and requirements. The digital customer feedback system also provide options to customize the reports and it also provide facility to integrate the customer feedback data and reports with other systems via APIs Integration. The data sharing is much easy and the reports are highly accurate and completely customized. The reports are also available in multiple different data and visual/graphical formats which makes it easier for the higher management to understand the trends, overall behavior of the customer and progress.
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Conclusion
The customer feedback is a very important data and it provides a deeper insight to the customer’s perception of the brand. Earlier businesses were collecting customer feedback using various manual methods, the most commonly used method was manual/handwritten customer feedback collection. The manual/handwriting customer feedback collection method is old, provide less data accuracy and it is very expensive. It requires a permanent trained staff to collect the customer feedback from the customers and visitors manually. It is a human nature that when we are talking to a person, we act in a more polite and calm way. There are tons of more variables which can have a great impact on the customer feedback and they might not express themselves more openly. The ultimate goal is to understand what is in your customers’ minds. When businesses collect the customer feedback they will have to put it into a system where they can process the data and produce actionable reports. That too is a very costly process and require a lot of resources. Another biggest hurdle is the manual data entry itself. As the entire process is totally dependent on the humans so human errors are very common which reduce the quality of the data.
In case of a digital customer feedback system there is no such problem. The data is well organized and collected automatically through digital mediums which not only increase the quality of the data but also increase the customer response rate. The customer feedback systems are more cost-efficient and provide good quality data. RSI Concepts is a leading customer satisfaction solution provider and our digital customer feedback system is very popular among SMBs and large enterprises. If you need a customer feedback system feel free to contact us through Contact Us or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch soon.
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