If you contact the customer support of your utility company, phone carrier, bank, or other service provider you’ll likely be flooded with requests to rate the experience and provide feedback. Likewise, corporate websites and email communications often solicit feedback via embedded buttons or links to online forms.
What’s with this corporate obsession with customer feedback?
Are these huge piles of feedback actually analyzed and acted upon? Is customer feedback some sort of corporate cargo cult? Or maybe clever marketing by vendors of feedback tools and services?
The impression is the feedback is just discarded or ignored.
This practice comes from Japan. In 1980s, certain companies, like Toyota, understood the importance of product and process quality. And one of the practices to ensure that everyone is ‘on the same ground’, and that the product under development would surely satisfy the consumer’s needs, was close communication between the stakeholders and receiving the feedback.
Long story short, it was part of their broader ‘Quality first’ strategy. However, it is only viable if the organisation is properly managed, and all Quality management things are put into practice (the hardest part).
This is just my understanding from a book I read during my free time. My knowledge may be incorrect.