I'm going to share here a forum posting I just made in an obscure corner of the net concerning customer feedback, where a cynical poster (he may have been right to be cynical) was worried that his inputs were not being taken seriously. "But that doesn't mean it will do anything about them" he wrote.

My comment ....

True. Looking wider (beyond [company name]) I have come across a number of organstaions looking for customer feedback and consultation inputs over time. The range from the "crocodile tears" of "We didn't really want your input - but thank you". Through the "We have noted this and are sorry" which - sometimes - people just want to blow off. And - it seems all too rare - "Good idea, we'll do that".

I run a business. I solicit customer feedback - and I solicit constructive criticism.

Most of the reviews we get of our hotel and our training courses are positive - so positive that we call them "Torvill and Dean"s and they give a warm and fuzzy feeling, put a spring in the step and motivate. But they do NOT help us step forward; they give us nothing to work on.

Reviews that say "have you thought of doing xxx" are great - MUCH more useful. But very rarely do they give us new ideas; chances are that we have already heard in a number of times before, and that we have probably taken a careful look at the idea. Sometimes it will just be impractical. Other times it would cost too much. On further occasions we don't have the resources, or doing "xxx" would mean we would have to stop doing "yyy" and upset far more people. And yet ... frustrating thought it might be for contributors, and much though they might feel they're not being taken seriously ... this input is so valuable. We can and do pick up on fresh good ideas. We do continue to review based on the weight of various requests and a changing balance and market can lead to a change in what we do.

When I was running the technical end of a software company, writing standard software for multiple customers, we had what I called a "WIBNIF" list - "Wouldn't it be nice if". And onto that list we added ideas that came from ourselves and our customers. For sure, some things got deleted quite quickly but ongoing it formed a major reservoir of forward looking thoughts for each new release - not only allowing us to plan the next release, but also to look multiple releases ahead and not put something in place that closed doors that clearly were required to open in a year or two's time. I have always been very impressed by the [company name] communications systems - they seem to all speak from the same hymn sheet (or word processor?) and I would be suprised if they didn't have a WIBNIF list too.

Do we have a "WIBNIF" at Well House Consultants? Well - we keep ALL course reviews on file, and we enter them electronically as a valuable source of marketing. And we do look back at them. We do not - at the present time - have a specific "WIBNIF" list condensed from them and updated based on our own inside knowledge and judgement too - but that's more of a question of how we store that data rather than whether we collect it at all.
(written 2007-08-25 09:15:18)

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Easy handling of errors in PHP
Flash - is it available to your web page?
Resetting session based tests in PHP
Perl for Larger Projects - Object Oriented Perl
Customer feedback - lifeblood of a business
Well House Manor - feature comparison against the old place!
2008 course schedule - Perl, Python, PHP, Linux, Java Deployment, Ruby and more
Filtering and altering Perl lists with grep and map
Two years of campaigning for a train service
Business travel by train in the USA
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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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