CUSTOMER FEEDBACK AND INTERNET

Means used by the Biggest Portuguese Companies

Ramiro Gonçalves, Frederico Branco, José Martins, Vítor Santos and Jorge Pereira

University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro- GECAD, Vila Real, Portugal

Keywords: Feedback, Customer, Internet.

Abstract: On this paper we proceed to the analysis of the means of obtaining customer feedback through the Internet.

Keeping demanding customers as well as attract new ones, has always been a major concern for the

majority of the companies. Knowing what customers think is an important part of developing products and

services, and differentiating factor against the competition. Obtaining customer feedback through the

Internet can be considered more cost efficient and accessible, when compared to more traditional means.

This work results from a study that identified the means of obtaining customer feedback, on the websites of

the Portuguese companies with the biggest business volume.

1 INTRODUCTION

Knowing the preferences and expectations of each

company customers has become more and more

necessary in the competitive world where

organizations are moving. With that objective,

several means of communication between a

company and its customers and it’s exactly on the

presence of these means on the Portuguese

companies websites, that this study is focused.

Companies give more prominence to the opinions of

customers, and due to this, behind these means of

communication are media professionals, so that each

complaint, suggestion or simple comment is given

the most attention.

The feedback (feedback, or simply, return) is the

procedure which consists in providing information

to a person or entity on their performance, conduct,

event or action performed, aiming to guide, redirect

and / or stimulate one or the further improvement on

future actions or previously executed (Söderlund,

1998).

In the process of developing interpersonal skills,

feedback is an important feature because it allows us

to see how we are perceived by others. In what

organizations concern, feedback can be an important

customer expectations and feelings monitoring tool

(Getha-Taylor, 2010).

The customer service centers, social networks

and traditional suggestion boxes are typically

passive means of getting any kind of opinion. In

them, the customer “asks to be heard” and sets out

its position, good or bad, in most cases without

knowing whether this view will be seen as being

important for the company or if it will be the subject

of attention.

Clearly, the customer feedback is important to

any business, because, better than anyone, he knows

the quality of service and the efficiency of what was

sold to him. For this reason, company manager can’t

waist this rich information.

In this article, we will show the results of a study

made to the means of obtaining customer feedback

that exist in the websites of the 1000 biggest

Portuguese companies in business volume.

Section 2 describes the concept of Customer

Feedback, Section 3 describes the approach for

gathering information, in Section 4 we proceed to

the presentation of the study results, and finally in

Section 5 we present the conclusions and prospects

for future work.

2 CUSTOMER FEEDBACK

The competition between companies requires the

constant improvement of products and services. The

collection and monitoring of customer feedback can

have a huge weight on the degree of customer

satisfaction (Wisner e Corney, 2001). The

Information obtained from customer suggestions and

complaints can also be used to create a basis for

measurement, allowing a long-term planning so that

Gonçalves R., Branco F., Martins J., Santos V. and Pereira J..

CUSTOMER FEEDBACK AND INTERNET - Means used by the Biggest Portuguese Companies.

DOI: 10.5220/0003517400690072

In Proceedings of the International Conference on e-Business (ICE-B-2011), pages 69-72

ISBN: 978-989-8425-70-6

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

businesses can target their improvement efforts more

effectively and efficiently.

Much investigation considers advantageous to

obtain customer feedback to improve products and

services (Wisner e Corney, 2001). The customers

changing needs over time, require a continuous

effort to converge in their direction and make

operational improvements in order to achieve their

satisfaction.

According to (Taikkenen e Alajoutsijarvi, 2002),

customer satisfaction can be defined as “the degree

to which expectations of re-purchase by the

consumer are met or surpassed by a product”. A

high level of customer satisfaction is one of the

strongest predictors for the future of business.

Satisfied customers are loyal customers that fit

financial guarantee in the future. A 5% increase in

customer loyalty can have an impact of 100% in

profit due to the fact that satisfied customers buy

products more often and in larger quantities

(Reichheld e Sasser, 1990).

The feedback to the vendor, will serve as an

important pillar of organizational learning and can

affect both costs and gains to the extent that

information can be used to develop new products,

improving existing ones, etc.. That is, learning is

likely to facilitate behavior change of supplier,

which in turn leads to improved performance (Slader

e Narver, 1995).

It is therefore extremely important to determine

as quickly as possible what customers should be

kept, and which new ones are to be attracted.

Obtaining customer feedback is essentially finding

this information (Wisney e Corney, 2001).

Create customer-centric organizations has been a

major priority for the biggest companies (Donovan

and Samler, 1994). Being present in the Internet

provides some opportunities in the process of

creating an effective system of customer feedback

(Wisner e Corney, 2001).

Gummesson (2002) argues that companies that

are managed based on principles of quality must

pursue the zero defection strategy in order to avoid

creating customers. The information obtained from

customers can be used by businesses to achieve the

desired quality level, identify quality problems and

suggestions for improvement of products or services

(Sampson, 1998). The advent of the Internet has

enhanced the way through witch companies can

obtain customer feedback. Collect customer

feedback over the Internet has become a prevalent

phenomenon (Sampson, 1998).

It is common for companies to gather customer

feedback by means of active or passive solicitation.

The feedback can be achieved in different ways,

including complaints made by the client directly to

an employee of the company, through calls to the

toll free customer service (toll-free number), and the

cards included with the products that allow

customers to express their views by returning the

card by mail to the company (Sampson, 1996). The

passive request consists in all the appeals made to

the customers without doing a focus on specific

groups. The active solicitation is focused on specific

clients (ex: market prospection). For the purpose of

this work, we’re going to be just analyzing the

passive solicitation.

3 INFORMATION GATHERING

APPROACH

The approach was divided into two stages: in the

first stage we proceeded to the collection and

organization of information from the Websites that

are relevant to the project objectives. In the second

stage, we’ve done the process of all the gathered

information obtained, as is possible to see Section 4.

The first stage aimed at gathering and organizing the

information, having the 1000 bigesst companies in

business volume that operate Portugal as the source

of that same information (INE, 2007).

It should be noted that due to various factors

such as the inexistence of the website, the website is

still in construction, is temporarily unavailable or

simply because the website no longer exist due to

the insolvency of the company, the initial database

was restricted to 777 websites. Alongside this, at the

time of the study, 48 websites of the initial 777,

were not available, forcing the study to focus on

only 729 sites.

Data collection was conducted between October

and December 2010. The ites were classified into

two groups: Institutional Sites (where they only

provide information) and Transactional Sites (where

they present features of e-commerce). An

Figure 1: Website Availability.

ICE-B 2011 - International Conference on e-Business

institutional website can be defined as a dynamic or

static webpage, which as by main objective the

disclosure of the company and does not fit the

definition of electronic commerce. The National

Association of Software and Service Companies

(NASSCOM) define electronic commerce including

all transactions where the offer for sale and

acceptance of the offer are made electronically

(NASSCOM, 2010).

The transactional e-commerce sites aim to

extend the trading capacity of its clients through the

implementation of online stores that can deliver

product catalogs and / or services and can integrate

with various other types of systems (NASSCOM,

2010). Each one of these websites was examined on

the means used to collect feedback. These were

divided in online means: chat / im (instant

messaging), email, VoIP (Skype or similar), Forum,

Blog, and offline means: address/location, telephone

(POTS), fax, and forms.

Within this study, online means refers to all

those who are directly related to the technologies

underlying the Internet. While the offline means are

all the traditional means of getting feedback, but that

are referenced in the sites of companies. Considering

that the number of users of social networks has been

growing sharply, the impact they have on users and

networks in organizations has also been growing.

Being social network a social structure composed of

individuals and / or organizations, connected by one

or more types of relationships that share common

values and objectives, they could be an excellent

vehicle for gathering feedback, since they can be an

easy and quick to get genuine feedback from users

via, for example, comments or publications.

This circumstance leads, beyond collecting

feedback, other implications, as the generalization of

positive or negative comments on a social network

around an organization can have an irreversible

impact on the image of them, for good or bad.

4 RESULTS

The analysis produced a number of indicators that

could be studied. As seen in Figure 2, the 729

websites studied showed that, 678 are institutional

websites while 51 websites include some kind of

e-commerce transaction.

From the offline means of obtaining feedback,

we highlight “location” when its objective is to

make the customer reach the companies offices.

Complementary information for those who

wish to take this path, such as: information of GPS

Figure 2: Types of Websites.

coordinates, map, and "Getting There" is also given

by some of the sites. The "Getting There" provides

road routes to be taken to a central location (it's a

good reference) to the final destination (business

offices). Figure 3 shows the amount of websites that

advertise means of location. Of these, 113 include a

map functionality, 77 indicate the coordinates of

GPS and 16 refer with, detailed indications, how to

get a place regarded as key to the organization.

Figure 3: Location Means.

From the offline means of collecting feedback

(figure 4) we highlight the “form”, present in a

considerable amount of websites – 147, that

essentially aims to allow users to expose their doubts

in a categorized manner. In the form we usually

have access to a dropbox with the options

"Information Request", "Complaint", etc, and

Figure 4: Identified Offline Communication Features.

CUSTOMER FEEDBACK AND INTERNET - Means used by the Biggest Portuguese Companies

another with the options "Products", "Services", etc..

Thus the comment could be directed towards those

who are better able to respond to requests.

In figure 5 we can see the presence of several

online means of gathering feedback, where “e-mail”

is the most present in the studied websites.

Figure 5: Identified Online Communication Features.

Beyond the studied means there are others who

appear more sporadically, such as: FAQs, RSS,

link-sharing and "ideas”. The client seeks certain

responses (through the FAQ's), know at the time (via

RSS) and share the link which is a way to get the

company to friends. The suggestions could also be

encompassed as a "Contact Form" but we chose not

to make this inclusion as the "Suggestions" does not

require contact client/company and vice versa, but

just something to be done by the customer. Even if

the suggestion has a great acceptance by the

company as much as a thank you replies will be.

5 CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE

WORK

By analyzing the results, we may infer the existence

of a high concern about the use of systems that allow

obtaining customer feedback through the companies

websites.

This is probably the recognition that companies

are giving more attention to comments made by

customers, so they can react promptly, meeting their

needs.

The development of systems for customer

feedback has been taking increasing interest and

importance to organizations (Raymond, 2010). The

enhancement of the company’s presence alongside

their customers made by the Internet, allowed the

use of a new and diverse array of tools to gather

feedback in a very cost efficient manner. Thus, this

has also helped the widespread use of these same

systems.

From the results analysis emerges that: the

telephone number exists almost in an equal amount

of times as the e-mail, being the only technological

mean that can be at the same level as the more

traditional means.

While undergoing the present study, it was

possible to verify that companies are increasingly

using websites as a mean for obtaining customer

feedback. However, in their majority, there are some

difficulties in maximizing all available means,

including the use of online tools and the use of

social networks. It's certainly very relevant in the

future to study successful cases of using various

means in order to serve as a guideline for other

firms.

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