Companies receiving a minimum of 1,000 pieces of customer feedback per month are unable to analyse it in a meaningful way, according to new findings from Warwick Business School.
The School found that sheer volume and variety of customer feedback prohibits its full use to help provide better customer service and aid management decision making.
Around 3,000 pieces of actual customer feedback in total from Asda, Audi and National Express were used in the study.
With large multinational companies encouraging feedback via multiple sources, such as text and voice messages, contact forms, letters and increasingly social media platforms, internal marketing teams are simply unable to analyse all customer feedback received, due to time constraints and fatigue encountered when reading and processing customer comments.
"Faced with a mass of data, human beings will make a rational choice: cut down the complexity to something manageable,” said Chris Worth, an associate of Warwick Business School.
“When dealing with thousands of customer comments, that led to 75% of the data being tossed and the focus narrowing to a few key categories.
He added, “That's dangerous, because the most profitable opportunities are often hidden in little gems of data hidden in dark corners, which companies appear to be missing."
The research replicates the situation within the majority of UK customer facing companies where human analysts try to understand and analyse customers’ feedback.
Around 1,000 pieces represents the minimum average amount of feedback a national high street company can expect per month.
When companies are running special promotions actively asking for feedback, the number can even reach 100,000 pieces of feedback per month.
In a major company, the feedback would need to be analysed, and used as the basis of concrete recommendations to remedy any issues raised within the feedback.
The analysis is then further collated to provide information which is critical to improving the overall customer experience from the company.
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