Introduction: The Complexity of Feedback in Close Relationships
Have you ever found it hard to be completely honest with someone you care about, even when they ask for your opinion? Now imagine that on a professional scale, where exclusivity and gratitude complicate the feedback process.
Feedback isn’t just a simple transaction of thoughts. The relationship dynamics shape it, as well as the context in which it is given, and even the structure of the feedback request.
Challenges are diverse but interconnected. This article explores how biases stemming from different environments influence feedback and how targeted strategies can tackle these challenges.
Case Study 1: Financial Advisors and Relationship-Driven Feedback
I was talking to my friend recently, and he told me that, as a financial advisor, he cultivates deep trust with his clients, often becoming confidant in susceptible matters. He told me that this closeness can create barriers to honest feedback, and while his satisfaction rates are impressively high, he often reads comments like “Don’t get too popular and give me less attention”.
So it got me thinking: for some jobs and industries, the usual standard ways of surveying come with a risk of bias. In cases like this, people may be perfectly satisfied but intentionally rate lower to ensure they remain a high priority. This introduces a subtle but significant distortion in feedback results.
As with a financial advisor, this dynamic extends to interactions with a helpful customer service advisor or support team member via chat, phone, or email. After a positive experience, customers may feel loyalty and appreciation to the person, leading them to overrate their general opinion about the company. Questions like ‘Based on your last interaction, would you recommend our company?’ may overshadow any dissatisfaction with other aspects of the broader customer journey.
In both scenarios, personal bonds conflict with honest feedback about the company as a whole.
In examples like a financial advisor or a support agent, customer feedback might be shaped by some potential biases:
- Bias in Jeopardy: Clients might hesitate to give critical feedback, worrying it could strain their relationship with the advisor.
- Monetary impact: They might also hesitate to critique the organisation if they believe it could negatively affect their advisor’s bonus, commission, or other compensation.
- Selective Comments: Feedback often centres on the individual advisor rather than the wider company, leaving organisational improvements unaddressed.
- Concern for Exclusivity: Some clients express satisfaction but with caveats, such as “don’t get too popular and give me less attention,” reflecting fears about losing personalised service.
Case Study 2: Luxury Brands and the Exclusivity Dilemma
My friend’s case got me thinking, and reminded me of a secret travel club I spoke to recently who, similarly to my friend the financial advisor, finds it difficult to get actionable insights from their customers who fear good feedback could damage the exclusive element of the travel club product.
Luxury brands thrive on exclusivity, but that same exclusivity often turns feedback into a paradox. Customers’ reservations to fully share their experiences leave brands uncertain about their customers’ true feelings.
- Reluctance to Recommend: Customers value exclusivity and may resist giving high NPS scores, fearing that popularising the brand will dilute their VIP experience.
- Silent Satisfaction: While pleased with the product, some customers intentionally avoid publicising their positive experiences to maintain a sense of scarcity.
- Protective Behaviour: Customers’ feedback is shaped by a desire to safeguard the brand’s elite status rather than to help improve it.
Case Study 3: Charities and Gratitude-Driven Bias
Another friend of mine runs a charity, and similarly to the previous two, she also finds that the usual surveying strategies will bring a load of warmhearted comments and deep gratitude. While heartfelt, these responses can reduce opportunities for operational improvement.
Opposite to my friend the financial advisor, my friend running a charity faces the other extreme of bias. While the financial advisor risks people scoring lower, the charity sees the opposite: people are so grateful for the cause that they overrate their satisfaction. Even if there were a small issue they could raise, their appreciation would outweigh it, leading to inflated scores that don’t fully reflect reality.
Charities face unique challenges in gathering actionable feedback due to their deeply empathetic relationships:
- Gratitude Over Critique: Beneficiaries may feel reluctant to criticise organisations that have offered vital support, leading to overly positive responses.
- Donor-Centric Bias: Donors may prioritise emotional connections over operational outcomes, focusing their feedback on how the charity made them feel rather than its impact.
- Difficulty Identifying Improvement Areas: Gratitude-driven bias makes it harder for charities to pinpoint actionable insights for enhancing their services.
Case Study 4: Councillors Flooded with Competing Complaints and Demands
Let’s now think about the mayor of the English town I live in. Despite a generally positive public sentiment, I know he’s bombarded with complaints. If there are works on the road someone will complain, if there are not works on the road, someone else will. If these works on the road take longer than planned someone will complain, if the works on the road take less than planned someone else will complain. The mayor can’t win!
Knowing the high volume of complaints and demands, there’s a competition where people exaggerate their complaints to be heard, overact their feelings and keep evangelising what they think should be prioritised.
Welcome to the amplification bias Olympics, where the loudest voices often get the gold medal, regardless of the impact.
So here’s another related bias, where people will overbuild their complaints to make them stand out from the crowd of complainants.
- Competition Bias: Individuals may feel their complaint must be louder, more dramatic, or more urgent than others to ensure it is noticed. This behaviour stems from a perception that only the most attention-grabbing feedback will receive a response.
- Exaggeration Bias: To make their point stand out, people might overstate their dissatisfaction or fabricate urgency, skewing the true severity of issues.
- Misalignment of Priorities Bias: The competition for attention often leads to complaints reflecting personal priorities rather than a balanced view of communal needs, which can complicate decision-making.
Triggers for Feedback Bias in Different Industries
These biases are not exclusive to financial advisors, charities, luxury brands or customer service settings. Similar situations arise across various industries when specific factors are at play. Here’s what makes these biases more likely:
Bias for Priority
- This happens when feedback affects the perception of being prioritised.
- Likely industries: advisory services (financial, legal, educational or medical), luxury brands, or any scenario where clients feel the need to secure exceptional attention or exclusivity.
- Also likely in any scenario where customers feel they must protect access to a valued service, such as a highly demanded but limited service (e.g. premium tech support).
Bias for Gratitude
- Feedback is influenced by a sense of appreciation or moral obligation.
- Likely industries: charities, healthcare, education, or any service tied to a personal or emotional connection where the recipient feels a debt of gratitude.
Bias for Personal Bond
- This occurs when a strong rapport with an individual representative, based on a specific interaction, shapes feedback more than the overall experience with the organisation.
- Likely industries: customer service, technical support, or any touchpoint-driven field where advisors establish rapport or resolve problems in complex cases.
Bias of Amplification
This situation can be replicated in various contexts:
- Local Governance or Public Services: Public officials, like mayors or council members, face this bias when dealing with complaints about shared resources such as parks, infrastructure, or transportation.
- Customer Service in High-Volume Industries: Call centres or support desks often deal with exaggerated complaints from customers trying to escalate their issues.
- Social Media Feedback: Brands receiving mass feedback on Internet platforms see a similar pattern, where customers need to amplify dissatisfaction to grab attention.
- Education Systems: Teachers or administrators may encounter this when dealing with competing demands from parents or students, particularly in highly competitive school districts.
By identifying these patterns, businesses can better design surveys to account for such biases and capture more accurate feedback.
Strategies for Effective Feedback Collection
What’s the solution? How can we uncover meaningful feedback without making customers feel like they’re compromising their financial advisor’s bonus, their gratitude to a charity, or their sense of exclusivity with premium products?
To overcome these biases, organisations can implement tailored strategies:
1. Anonymity and Neutrality
- Use Third-Party Feedback Channels: Encourage anonymous surveys through independent platforms to alleviate pressures caused by personal relationships.
- Example: Tones of platforms in the market, some for free, can collect unbiased responses.
- Example: Externalise the insights collection so the respondent can give feedback more freely.
- Offer Follow-Up Questions: Use neutral framing and triggered questions after certain responses in surveys.
- Example: Ask, “If we could improve one thing, what would it be?” to invite actionable feedback without discomfort.
- Example: Use an external service to engage in follow-up discussions with customers.
2. Precision in Question Design
- Ask Context-Specific Questions: Break down feedback into distinct components.
- Example: Luxury brands might differentiate between “product quality” and “perceived exclusivity.”
- One Question At a Time: Avoid combining feedback on the representative and the organisation in a single question.
- Example: Use “Rate your support experience” and “Rate your overall satisfaction with the company” separately to avoid skewed results.
- Incorporate Open-Ended Questions: Let customers elaborate with written feedback rather than relying solely on numerical scales, especially in charity or emotionally charged contexts.
- Example: “Tell us what we could do better to support you.”
3. Customer Relationship Management
- Reassure Customers About Exclusivity: Especially for luxury brands, communicate that growth won’t compromise their unique experience.
- Example: “As we grow, we’re committed to maintaining our personalised service and exclusivity.”
4. Long-Term and High-Volume Feedback Strategies
- Leverage Longitudinal Data: Track trends over time to identify how relationships evolve and feedback shifts.
Example: Compare satisfaction scores across quarterly or annual touchpoints.
- Address Feedback Amplification in Competitive Contexts: When managing large-scale feedback (e.g., local governance), combat biases with:
- Segmentation by Issue Type: Group complaints (e.g., roadworks vs. public events) for prioritised responses.
- Weighting Systems: Focus on issues affecting larger groups, not just the loudest voices.
- Expectation Setting: Communicate how decisions are made and give regular updates on progress to reduce frustration.
- Fact-Checking Mechanisms: Validate complaints to filter out exaggerations.
- Inclusive Feedback Channels: Actively seek input from underrepresented voices.
Conclusion: Balancing Objectivity and Relationships
Feedback collection is essential, but it must be approached with sensitivity to the unique dynamics of each relationship.
Whether it’s a trusted financial advisor, a luxury brand, or even a local mayor overwhelmed by competing demands, feedback is a nuanced process shaped by human behaviour and relationships. Amplification bias, for instance, can distort priorities in public services just as exclusivity bias affects luxury brands. By addressing these biases thoughtfully, organisations or local governments can design systems that balance objectivity with trust, ensuring feedback leads to meaningful action rather than noise.
By doing so, organisations can gather actionable insights while maintaining the trust and satisfaction of their customers.
