Smart companies however are one step ahead of what I call their “listen and respond” counterparts. Smart companies see turning feedback into insights and actions as a core process, not a calendar driven add-on. It is not just about collecting and acting on feedback but using that feedback to enhance their single view of the customer. For smart companies, feedback is just one, albeit essential part of the data set that helps them understand the customer and for that reason, they integrate feedback with the rest of their customer data in CRM. This gives them substantive benefits. Smart companies extend this personalization of the customer experience to marketing campaigns.
Integrating feedback into CRM also helps with one of the most commonly reported challenges facing those charged with implementing customer feedback getting staff across the company to adopt and use it. Platform proliferation is a significant issue here. By making feedback an integral part of CRM data, smart companies know that they reduce this problem. Customer facing staff and their managers don’t have to go elsewhere to see this important data. It is right there in the system they live in daily. It is presented in context to their role, making the data even richer It removes another barrier (or excuse) for not considering the customer’s views. Smart companies make feedback very visible, for example using a traffic light style indicator of feedback results to clearly display the contact or account health. (Customerexperiencemagazine. 2015)