Research by Warwick Business School has revealed that companies receiving a minimum of 1,000 pieces of customer feedback per month are unable to analyse it in a meaningful way.
Three thousand pieces of customer feedback from Asda, Audi and National Express were used in the study, which was the result of a £3,000 academic award granted to Rapide Communication by the INDEX (Innovation Delivers Expansion) scheme.
With large multinational companies encouraging feedback via multiple sources, such as text and voice messages, contact forms, letters and increasingly social media platforms, internal marketing teams are often unable to analyse all customer feedback received due to time constraints and fatigue encountered when reading and processing customer comments, the researchers found.
Chris Worth, an associate of Warwick Business School brought in as an independent researcher appointed by Warwick Business School’s Dr Temi Abimbola, said: “Faced with a mass of data, human beings will make a rational choice: cut down the complexity to something manageable.
“When dealing with thousands of customer comments, that led to 75 per cent of the data being tossed and the focus narrowing to a few key categories.
“That’s dangerous, because the most profitable opportunities are often hidden in little gems of data hidden in dark corners... which companies appear to be missing.”
The research replicates the situation within the majority of UK customer facing companies where human analysts try to understand and analyse customers’ feedback.
Anna Blackaby, Birmingham Post
