For the first time in my working life, I have come this close to having to prepare a feedback procedure for a client. We are a B2B company, and we never ask for the client’s feedback. Either they are happy, and they buy, or they are not happy and they still buy (because they either don’t have an alternative or we are still better than others and the client just wants to complain) or they don’t buy. Simple as that (almost, but I make some oversimplifications to avoid complexity for this post.

I have been working for years now with an account, that brings some relatively medium business, which is usually complicated. I am stuck with them, as it happens that I am an engineer, so the commercial department does not have to occupy another person to deal with their requests. Things went smoothly through the years, until recently. The capacity of the customer care department has been reduced, as some other internal services. The reason: the complexity of the recent orders, which have increased dramatically. With that, my capacity to deal with complex requests was reduced as well. The result was that many mistakes and delays were made with their recent order, and we still haven’t concluded yet. As a result, the company rep asked my manager to intervene to try to improve the response rate and to improve the service.

From our point of view, not much can change. They asked more questions that were justified for the magnitude of their order and of my capacity to reply in time. So, what I could do, at least to smooth things out, was to promise that after we conclude with this order, we could review all the previous steps, to try to identify the causes of friction. I know what the reasons were, but the client does not apparently know them. However, with this proposal I have shown that we want to improve our services, to take responsibility, to give some credit and to correct what is wrong.

Furthermore, I want to use this as a leverage to push our manager for more resources. It’s been months since I complained about the lack of support, of mistakes, for bad service and late responses from the internal departments. In this way, I will push him to act and stop being diplomatic for the sake of other departments.

Conclusions:

When we design feedback eprocesses, we need to identify what the target is, otherwise the questions we ask, the resources that we invest, might be meaningless. Is it the satisfaction of the client? To use the results as a lever to make changes elsewhere? To prove that you are not guilty of doing something. It might not even matter what we ask about. And in the end, it does not matter if the client is right or wrong; what matters what we want to show and do.