Customer Feedback - Does Anyone Care?

A new study by the Chief Marketing Officer Council early in February of this year seems to indicate that companies are failing to take decisive, company wide action to integrate the feedback from customers and their experiences into their marketing processes. The study was based on a survey of 480 executives in various industries. Some of the facts that came out of the study were:
1. 58% of the executives say their companies do not compensate any employees or executives based on customer loyalty or satisfaction improvements.
2. 38% say their companies have no programs in place to track or propagate positive word of mouth among customers.
3. 29% rate highly their ability to handle and resolve customer problems or complaints.
4. Nearly 66% do not have a formal program in place to monitor and measure the voice of the customer
5. 13% have deployed real-time systems to collect, analyze and distribute customer feedback.
6. 74% receive customer feedback via e-mail.
7. 23% track and measure the volume and nature of these messages.
8. 14.5% of the companies track word of mouth on the Internet.

The bottom line is that many chief marketing officers are missing or ignoring a very important aspect of their business. I have shown many examples of the impact and importance of the customer experience and word-of-mouth in previous blogs. It seems from the statistics noted above that they know it and (i) they choose not to take advantage of this aspect of marketing, or (ii) they do not understand this aspect and because they do not understand are willing to ignore it or (iii) they really don't believe the importance of the customer experience. Maybe they just don't care.