Turning customer feedback into gold: challenges and hindrances

Purpose: Despite the fact that the service innovation and complaint management literature address - independent from one another - respectively positive customer feedback in the form of suggestions/ideas and negative customer feedback in the form of complaints, no research has considered both forms of feedback simultaneously. This paper aims to address this issue by (1) comparing and contrasting the content of both types of customer feedback, and (2) investigating organizational practices that help firms to act upon both types of customer feedback, because both literature streams have suggested that organizational characteristics affect the degree to which firms turn customer feedback into action. Methodology: Managers of 145 nursing homes participated in an online survey. Nursing homes are high-contact services where customers have plenty of opportunities to give both positive and negative feedback. We gathered information about the content of both types of customer feedback and organizational practices to act upon both types of customer feedback through open-ended questions. These qualitative data were analyzed with Nvivo10. Results: The results demonstrate that the content of positive and negative customer feedback largely overlaps: customers give both positive and negative customer feedback in relation to environmental, interactional, administrative, and technical quality. Regarding the degree to which firms act upon customer feedback in relation to these quality dimensions, the results demonstrate the importance of a customer-oriented culture, a commitment-based strategy, and innovation capacity. Originality/Value: By focusing on challenges and hindrances to act upon customer feedback, this paper contributes to an understudied field to date. It also contributes to the literature by examining positive and negative feedback simultaneously. From a managerial viewpoint, this research calls for managing positive and negative customer feedback in an integrated fashion, as both contribute to improving and innovating existing service offerings to better meet the customersU+2019 current and future needs.