29-08-2025
Getting constructive customer feedback
How annoying to be asked to fill-in a customer satisfaction survey about a product you have ordered but not yet received.
And if you agree to fill-in the survey, you will probably find that it doesn’t give you the option to tell the supplier why you are annoyed.
Customer satisfaction surveys can be seen from different angles.
For the person in charge of ISO 9001 accreditation the focus is on showing the auditors that the company has a customer satisfaction process that generates pretty graphs from the feedback received.
However, this person is usually not involved with customers and projects or products delivered and is not in a position to take actions as a result of the feedback received.
The CEO on the other hand is keen to receive an objective view of his company’s performance to identify what needs to be improved to get more business from existing and new customers.
When I am asked to provide a template customer feedback form, I prefer to work with the business to come up with a process tailored to their specific needs.
Getting feedback from a large number of customers buying off-the-shelf products or services is very different from getting feedback from a small number of customers for which projects have been delivered to their specific requirements.
For example, below are the questions we addressed to develop a customer feedback process for an engineering consultancy delivering large projects to a relatively small number of customers.
What questions should we ask to the customer?
To make it quick and easy for the customer to provide feedback, we limited the number of questions to half a dozen.
To get genuine feedback without “influencing” the customer, most questions were open such as “what went well” or “what could have been better”.
Who should we ask for feedback?
To try and get an honest and balanced feedback, we asked people at the customer with whom we had developed a trusting relationship.
We avoided asking overly negative people such as aggressive purchasing managers solely focussed on negotiating the price down.
We also avoided asking overly polite engineers who may give falsely positive feedback because that is what is expected in their culture.
Who should ask for the feedback?
Again, we tried to identify people internally who had developed a trusting relationship with the person providing feedback.
This would generally be someone perceived as a “peer”, i.e. with a similar level of seniority.
When should we ask for feedback?
This should be at the delivery of major milestones or on completion of the project. The project manager was responsible to trigger the feedback process as he/she knew the timing of the project best.
It was also up to the project manager to work with colleagues in sales and engineering to identify who would be the best person to ask the customer for constructive feedback.
How should we ask for feedback?
To ensure the customer appreciated that their feedback was important, it was requested either in person during a project meeting or by phone.
Sending impersonal e-mails with a link to a standard feedback form was to be avoided.
Ideally, taking the opportunity of the final project meeting to ask for feedback could produce interesting nuggets of information that may not have been shared during delivery of the project.
What do we do with the feedback received?
Customer feedback was shared openly with project managers, sales managers, engineering managers and the CEO to ensure the lessons learnt were taken into account on future projects.
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