Great customer experience is generally viewed as a practice of trickle-down behavior. If companies can engage their employees, the culture and experience will translate to their valued customers.
A recent report, however, shows that 64% of companies in the UK fail to create a culture of employee engagement that translates to consumers. The failure is manifested in ignorance of employee feedback, which negatively impacts staff ambition, customer satisfaction, and nonfulfillment of bottom-line business objectives. The report, The 2014 QuestBack Enterprise Feedback Study, also found that only about one-third of companies act on data gathered from their customer experience and employee engagement programs.
The general inability of UK companies to execute on this feedback data leaves analysts scratching their heads, as the benefits of integrating accumulated data about your customers and employees are many and well documented. 83% of companies that successfully integrated feedback saw real improvements in their overall customer experience, and 75% saw a marked increase in employee motivation and engagement.
“Collecting, analyzing and acting of feedback is increasingly crucial to business success,” Paul Barnes, UK Managing Director, QuestBack, said in a release. “…However, our research shows that a growing gulf is developing between those that are looking to integrate feedback and those that don’t.”
While the benefits of integrating feedback company-wide may seem obvious to some, not all companies know they’re staring a gift horse in the mouth. Among companies that did not integrate feedback, 56% said integration was never something they had considered doing. Additionally, 36% of companies lacking integration strategies said integration was too complex to fit snugly into existing company infrastructure.
“Technology should be acting as an enabler,” Barnes said, “but in many cases it is proving to be a barrier to change. Companies are quite rightly adopting a cross-departmental approach to combining feedback, but existing systems are forcing them to adopt time-consuming, error prone manual processes.”
It is a dangerous thing to be a company so stuck in siloed data compartments in the age of digital personalization. Companies that fail to adapt will find their functions calcified, and customer experience strategies falling short of more forward-thinking organizations that place greater emphasis on feedback integration.