| By :
Martin Hofschroer
A recent report has found that the majority of businesses are not using social media sites to generate customer feedback. Research by business feedback management software vendor MarketTools revealed that only six per cent of companies currently use social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter to solicit feedback despite their growing importance. The study discovered that 92 per cent of businesses believe that gathering feedback is crucial to improving customer service but such firms are using outdated ways to do this. MarketTools found that 51 per cent of companies get their customer feedback through email or online surveys, while 28 per cent use formal phone surveys and the same number also utilise informal phone calls. Justin Schuster, vice president of enterprise products for MarketTools, said that while traditional methods of gathering feedback are useful, businesses need to modernise if they want to take advantage of the insights provided by social media. He said: "Organisations that use enterprise feedback management solutions to incorporate feedback gathered through social media channels are able to uncover richer insights to help them improve customer satisfaction." A related investigation by Forrester Research revealed that an increasing number of people are using social channels to express their discontent as 16 per cent have voiced negative customer service experiences over the internet. Mr Schuster said that businesses must investigate what is being said about them on the internet as not addressing issues can have negative implications for their customer service reputation. He said: "Companies need to know what their customers are saying about them online, and they need to use this unsolicited feedback to not only address the concerns of the individual customer." Businesses that use systems thinking will be able to see that current methods of gathering feedback are inefficient and counterproductive as they would have the demands of their customers at the heart of their processes. Using systems thinking will allow customers to concentrate on how to keep customers happy by viewing processes from their perspective and using the outcomes to help improve customer service. If any part of a current process is deemed to be inefficient or ineffective then it is important to research ways to change the methods used and this can be done by consulting customer-facing employees. Discussing how to boost consumer service levels with customer-facing employees is crucial to businesses performance as they will be able to advise on the potential of possible changes.
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