Determining the effectiveness of quarterly customer feedback reports; American Express TRS

Abstract

The quarterly Customer Feedback Report (CFR) is a valuable source of customer feedback next only to direct interaction with the customers. 16 (i.e, 28%) of the 57 respondents had not seen a copy of CFR at all. Among those who had read the CFR, 50% felt that layout and presentation is good while the other 50% felt that the layout and presentation could be improved upon though they could not tell how exactly they wanted the report to look like. A large chunk of the 78.38%, who felt that CFR is very wholesome in its coverage were from Travel, and the rest 21% who felt that-CFR does not cover much on their functional area were from other functional areas. Although quite a few expressed that there should be more pictures, more/less graphs/charts should be there etc. etc., most of them found the report easy to read and understand. Utility of the information contained in the report was held very high if the information related to one’s functional area 91.89% of the respondents felt that Verbatim Comments are important and revealed that they look for verbatim comments relating to their location and functional area. Present frequency (quarterly) of publication is just right as told by 62% of the respondents. Contents of the report are shared by informal discussions with colleagues. But in most cases they read it individually. Though most of the respondents gave a good rating on the availability of the report, on close examination they didn't seem to be getting these quarterly reports regularly. In fact 40% of the travel staff(frontline) were not aware of the report at all, indicating a major gap in dissemination. Though more than 50% of the respondents said that contents of the report are actioned many in this 50% seem to confuse “the actioning of the issues highlighted in the report with "the actioning of the complaints itself" which occurs long before the report is churn out. Many of them felt that functional area specific analysis should be sent to respective areas plus an overall summary, Many suggested putting it on the E-Mail and inclusion in the AmEx Press. They also felt that distribution list should be expanded to include the supervisors. There were a lot of suggestion about making the report more comprehensive by capturing all MIS on customer feedback floating around in various functional areas of the company.