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PROMISCUITY FOR THE MIND
Musical Feedback for your soul while reading this
A. Feedback is critical to any process , including marketing.
B. To avoid 'Backfiring' , the Marketing process has to be understood in its totality.
Feedback is primarily an engineering term, for outputs of a system that are 'fed' back into the input. Engineers are quick to admit that this is not a simple cause-effect relationship since the output affects the input and vice versa and hence the system needs to be studied as a whole. There are aspects of positive and negative feedback and each has its complicated implications for detection, deployment and desired results. None of this, however, bothers some marketers.--------
Digression: Jimi Hendrix cracked this in a completely new, musical way. His use of unwanted, annoying, difficult to control, noisy, raucous guitar amplification 'feedback' into an astonishing musical expression in everything he played, made him one of the greatest, maybe the greatest guitarist ever. But that’s in music.
Businesses have been quick to adopt 'feedback', specifically 'customer feedback' as an important vector in their unending quest for Taylorization and Druckerization. Quick Recap. Taylorization: maximum job fragmentation to enable easy teaching and analysis. Druckerization: if you cannot measure it, you cannot manage it.
The basic idea of customer feedback is to ask the customer "How did I do?/What can I improve?". And then 'feed-back ' the results of these questions into the input to improve the creating, communicating, delivering and sustaining value cycle that marketing seeks. Of course, anxiously seeking to be on par with precision engineering, marketing also employs both positive and negative feedback.
Here is why, sometimes, the quest for Customer (B2B or B2C) Feedback does not result in music. At the same time avoiding these mistakes can make for great harmony.
A. The very last thing: Firms need to know their business. They need to know the customer’s business. They need to know how their business amplifies the Customer’s business. That’s what business is about. After exhausting every other possibility, including standard research, ethnology, anthropology, voodoo, witchcraft and astrology please try prayer. Then meditation. Then wringing hands. Call mom. Call friends. And then consider, think, debate, ruminate and hesitate before asking the customer. Because having to ask the customer ‘How can I do better?’ is a humiliating admission that a firm does not know its business and how it is created, communicated, delivered and sustained.
B. The customer does not know How on earth is a customer to know how banking, logistics, recombinant DNA vaccines, ISIS Hubs ( International Splined Interface Standard for bicycles), Apache Servers, or Laser Keratomy units work? That's the firm’s business. And here's the thing: if you ask them, they will not admit ignorance, they WILL provide an answer that is impossible to chew or spit out. I wrote ZERO days in this Credit Card Company Feedback Form.
C. Gedankenerfahrung! Thought experiment. Borrowed from Theoretical Physics, this just encourages you to think through a process, assume answers and see where it takes the hypothetical Cat that Schrödinger put in the imaginary box with the supposed poison. The idea here is not just the experiment itself but what one decides to do, based on the result? If the feedback says 'green' is the preferred color for the pill, then will you tool up to produce the green? Get regulatory approval? Now manufacture in two colors? If it is not actionable, why find out at all? If 51% of guests said hotel appearance was bad what are you going to do? Demolish and rebuild? From a Hotel Feedback Form.
D. There are limits, perhaps, to what can be asked.
Who do i go on holiday with? Others? Specify? Are you serious? From an Airline Feedback Form.
E. Are you sure you want to know? Feedback demands that the nuances of language, business intent and process/product features are comprehended by the customer and are evaluated appropriately. Sometimes this is not understood by the marketer to start with. Here's a question whose purpose is difficult to understand and gets bizarre with translation.
From a Telecom Company Feedback Form. It is difficult enough in English asking to differentiate between Attitude and Behavior of Reception. In the optional, other language, this becomes: "How was the Receptionist?" !!!
And by the way, the combination of time scale and altruism is weird. A customer's feedback will not generate anything useful for them. Why on earth would they spend time and energy to improve a system, they have paid for, to make things better for the next customer who also has to pay? And, by the way, improving the system, who has been paid to do that job?!!! If you write this down as a diagram it is easy to see the Feedback Loop at work here !!!
F. Annoyance Visit any Telecom, Bank, Automobile, Appliance, Jewellery..outlet and you will be deluged by feedback requests. How was the store décor, air-conditioning, customer lounge, cleanliness, paper water-cup, salesperson's smile (Never Washroom !). This is an annoyance at an Industrial scale. When the flight lands, one is in a rush to move, not deliver feedback to the airline, travel agent, booking site, credit card company, payment gateway and ride company that dropped you at the origin.
G. Boundary Spanners Virtually all feedback is aimed at evaluating Boundary Spanners, the last line of the Organization and the first one the Customer meets. Tellers, Ramp Staff, Service Mechanics, Salespeople, Drivers, Checkout Staff...and so on who are the least qualified, paid at the lowest levels and have virtually no decision making authority are evaluated minutely.
Why are managers not evaluated? Or even better, Managers SHOULD work at the boundary. They would then KNOW and not need feedback at all. Check legendary Managers like Richard Egan (EMC), David Stern (NBA), Richard Branson (Virgin), Ricardo Semler (Semco) and Theodore Roosevelt (American President).
H. What happens to all that feedback? As a serious marketer, I think I must fill up feedback forms. It is a statement of solidarity with the brotherhood. In my years of filling up feedback forms for Airlines, Institutions, Hotels, Banks, Automotive and so on ..I have faithfully given honest feedback but and also add a line wherever possible, which has to do with an exotic animal! It would usually be "...the Rock Python and the Marsh Crocodile were a thoughtful addition to the room..." or some such. You know where this is going….. In all these years and hundreds of feedback forms later, not ONE receiver has ever written back asking what the hell did I mean. I am convinced, feedback forms are just a tick mark, a shamanic ritual meant to appease some FeedBack Avatar of ages past.
You should try too...write back to all these companies that helpfully add an email address for feedback on their packaging or collateral. And do add really exotic animals on every form you fill. It would be wonderful to know what happened.
Thanks. Lloyd Lawrence Lobo. https://www.instagram.com/meterchai. for the illustrations !
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