Consumers Beware! — Why feedback has lost its meaning

You walk into a shoe store, buy a pair of flip-flops and even as you are stepping out, you hear a ‘ping’ on your mobile. You know what it is: a WhatsApp message from the brand, requesting your feedback on your shopping experience!

When you get out of a cab, you are asked to rate your experience. You get off an airplane, and the airline wants your feedback on the service. You go to a restaurant and the owner requests you to fill out a questionnaire. You get your car serviced and you are urged to give your opinion on the service performance. You call the customer care number of a business and you are immediately asked to rate your satisfaction with the resolution of your complaint.

From hairdressers and telecom operators to couriers, gymnasiums, hospitals and online and offline stores, businesses are chasing you for feedback, cluttering your message boxes and WhatsApp with survey forms that are supposed to help them improve the quality of their goods and services! However, the formats of these surveys make you wonder whether they are serving consumer interest in any way!

Here is a sample: “On a scale of 0-5, how likely are you to recommend the store to your friends or colleagues?” asks a typical ‘customer satisfaction’ survey. If you say it is unlikely that you would recommend it to anyone, the questionnaire should ask you to cite reasons and request suggestions for improvement. However, the online feedback form gives you only four predetermined answers to choose from. If your answer is not one of them, that’s too bad! You try to suggest improvements, but after two lines, the online questionnaire abruptly closes, never mind that you have not even completed your sentence.

If businesses are genuinely interested in consumer response to their queries, there ought to be respect for those giving them negative feedback and a desire to seek and acknowledge suggestions for improvement. After all, consumers are investing their time in responding to these surveys in the hope of seeing better services and products.

In fact, most consumers say that the way these feedback forms are designed, there is no opportunity for them to give meaningful suggestions and even where they do get such a chance, they do not see any improvement based on their constructive criticism. So much so that the ‘feedback request’ seems more like a meaningless, routine exercise, a charade to give consumers a false impression that the businesses care for their views and opinions.

Here is an example of a consumer who ordered some clothes from an online marketplace while on a holiday in another city. The clothes were delivered the next day as promised, but were not what she had ordered. However, the website showed that the item chosen by her had been delivered. Since the customer interface on the website did not provide for resolution of such a complaint, she was forced to call the helpline number, not once, but three times, without success.

What was even more frustrating was that after every call, she got a text message on her cellphone asking her to evaluate the customer care service. She gave it the lowest ranking every time, but there was no way for her to explain, through the survey, that the customer care personnel could not even understand the problem, let alone come up with a solution. Any wonder then that consumers feel that filling up these forms is a futile exercise, a waste of time and the feedback messages are an annoyance.

I am not discounting the importance of customer feedback to businesses, but commenting on the poor format used by them and the lack of transparency and accountability in the entire process. How is it that businesses never acknowledge the suggestions made by consumers, nor inform them of the action taken based on the responses? In fact, one wonders what happens to all those feedback forms that customers so painstakingly fill in the hope of seeing an improvement in service. Surely, consumers too are entitled to feedback! And how about feedback forms with simple, open-ended questions such as “What did you dislike about our service” or “What problem did you face with our customer service” or “How can we improve our customer interface?”

If businesses are serious about consumer opinions, they must provide them with an opportunity to have their say, voice their grievances. Feedback should be designed to elicit meaningful information from consumers on the deficiencies in the system and utilised to bring about positive changes. And consumers must get feedback from businesses on the action taken on their suggestions and complaints. That would not only enhance consumer interactions with businesses, but also improve the quality of consumer feedback and thereby the quality of goods and services.

— The writer is a consumer rights and safety expert