ServiceFriday: Customer Feedback – Ask with Moderation

“Because satisfaction surveys serve a dual purpose of providing valuable customer feedback and incorporating bidirectional communication into relational marketing strategies, understanding their longer term effects is important.”

The findings, in a study published in the Journal of Service Research by Andrea Godfrey Flynn, et al., suggest that “soliciting customer feedback after every service visit could be detrimental to the firm in the long run. Service providers will yield the greatest marginal financial benefit (i.e. largest spending increase) when they request posttransaction satisfaction feedback from those customers who have the least purchase and contact experience with the firm. However, any financial benefit of recurring posttransaction surveys is accompanied by the risk of delaying the time until the customer’s next purchase visit, especially for customers with more limited purchase history. The resultant decrease in purchase frequency may overshadow any increase in spending due to posttransaction satisfaction surveys. It is possible that when the increased marginal purchase amount is combined with the accompanying extended interpurchase time, the combined effect on total firm revenues can be negative over time. Extrapolated over the entire customer base, the loss in potential revenue could be substantial. The posttransaction survey frequency ‘sweet spot’ that optimally balances spending and purchase frequency is an empirical question to be resolved by each service provider.”

To access the article, visit the Journal of Service Research at this link: https://bit.ly/2HewDbu (A fee to access the article may apply.)

An open access PDF of the article at this link: https://bit.ly/2HonwEl