Don Peppers of the Peppers & Rogers Group recently posted to the Marketing Consortium weblog on the topic of Capturing Customer Feedback. Don addresses an interesting issue that (1) despite the massive amount of customer feedback information available today, very little of that information is put to productive use, and (2) the problem is only getting worse as more feedback channels are opening up to customers.

The data he uses comes from a Gartner study, which concluded:

• 95% of surveyed firms collect customer information
• 45% alert their staff to this feeback
• 35% use the insight gathered from this information in any way
• 10% deploy a change or policy based on customer feedback
• 5% let their customers know that they’re using their feedback

As the Read/Write Web (R/WW) continues to take off and customers are provided with new channels for delivering their feedback, companies will be challenged to find, understand, and make use of this additional feedback like never before. The fact that they do not have control over leveraging this feedback today does not bode well for enterprises seeking to engage in the R/WW.

What’s more, as companies realize they need to have a presence in the participatory R/WW, lest their message be co-opted entirely by external forces, the first thing they do is typically set up a blog or forum community site. What this accomplishes is only to add to the customer feedback clutter without adding any ability to understand the feedback, take relevant action upon it, and track the results. This is so because these tools (blogs & forums) do a decent job of allowing the feedback to happen, but do nothing to help understand the feedback, take action in response, or to track the success of any responses or participation. In my opinion, allowing a customer to provide feedback and doing nothing about it is worse (in terms of lost goodwill) than not allowing the feedback channel at all.

As Kalivo has begun its go to market push, the conversations we are having with our prospective customers have brought this pain to light. The Kalivo Hub is an elegant ground-up build of a customer engagement hub that has taken the best of blogs, forums, wikis, and other social tools and bundled it into an effective, easy-to-use solution for companies seeking to have conversations with its customers and constituents. Make no mistake, it is the first step.

Like the old days of the Web, when many companies had the bright idea of posting an email address on their website so that customers could contact them at their convenience only to find themselves flooded with emails and paralyzed in their ability to respond, stepping into the R/WW with the equivalent of an email inbox will yield the same results. Companies will require a solution that not only easily gathers the feedback, but allows them to take action on the information in an efficient and effective way.

We are hearing this feedback loud and clear, and it is clearly part of our mission to provide not only the ability to aggregate customer information, but to understand it, respond to it and ensure that the responses are understood and effective.

In the coming weeks and months on the Kalivo Customer Hub, look for new features and capabilities built upon our core Hub solution that will help companies to understand, take action on, and track the results of those actions both within the Hub itself and on blogs, forums, communities and other user-generated content areas of the Web. Our research is showing this to be a necessary requirement for widespread corporate adoption in the R/WW, and the Gartner data above support why.

– brian