Michael Maoz

A member of the Gartner Blog Network

Michael Maoz
VP Distinguished Analyst
13 years at Gartner
26 years IT industry

Michael Maoz is a research vice president and distinguished analyst in Gartner Research. His research focuses on CRM and customer-centric Web strategies. Mr. Maoz is the research leader for both the customer service and support strategies area and customer-centric Web… Read Full Bio

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Tossing Facebook and Twitter into the ‘feedback’ junkyard.

by Michael Maoz  |  May 28, 2010  |  1 Comment

The IT team from one of our clients was asking me to review their feedback management strategy. We have deep research coverage here, led by my colleague, Jim Davies, out of the UK. The team had created a nice graphic where they showed the 21 existing points where they gathered feedback. They now had two “Question Marks” hovering over the graphic, labeled “Twitter” and Facebook. I suggested putting them on either end and label them Scylla and Charybdis (dumb analyst humour). What was their dilemna?

Here it is: they are IT people. The marketing folks and the customer service folks and the procurement folks have been piling on requests for “Feedback” and Surveys and support of “Reviews” and social media monitoring on every channel for about ten years. But when IT asked the simple question of what is the overall feedback strategy they listened to four strategies – one for each department.

What is the approach to getting back to the customer? ummm, we don’t: we use the feedback to identify problems, or assign ratings to teams or individuals or products or channels.  But do you get back to the individual who took the time to complete a very specific survey, or send in unstructured information in the ‘comments?’

So here we are: the Hydra – one of Hercules twelve labours! Feedback. We master one channel and another head pops up more difficult than the former. How will you tame the chthonic water serpent, feedback, while adding another and another? Facebook and Twitter are only the latest. And your customers are getting Feedback Fatigue that is going to also sap your energies.

Great companies are re-thinking their customer feedback strategies to be more comprehensive and interconnected. We’ll be discussing this alot at our Gartner Customer 360 Summit in LA next month (28-30 June). http://www.gartner.com/technology/summits/na/customer-360/index.jsp - stop by and listen to Jim, myself, and another 15 of us discuss it all.

See you there. And share your experiences here.

 

 

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