Over the past several months we’ve taken a hard look at a subtle – but extremely important – aspect of measuring live customer feedback.What we learned surprised even us.

Slow praise, quick criticism. Companies and franchise organizations use Customerville to allow their own customers to grade them. They check these grades via the web. Our system – and others like it – has the capacity to identify an upset customer, “red flag” that customer’s survey, and alert the appropriate person immediately via email or SMS message. This alert gives that manager a chance to address the situation quickly and save the customer from defecting.

But there can be an unintended consequence: These managers end up getting proactive, real-time feedback about things that are bad, butpassive and significantly slower feedback about things that are going well.

Why it creates problems. The psychological effects on front-line managers seem obvious, though it took us years to fully come to terms with them. In some circumstances and over time, front-line managers and franchisees can come to associate customer feedback with criticism.Worse, this negative emotional association can create an aversion to paying attention to important customer information.

Positively true. Ironically, most customer comments are extremely positive. We generally find that customer comments are either mostly positive or exclusively positive over 85% of the time. At its best, customer feedback is used as a positive, uplifting leadership tool. This red flag trap, as we’ve come to call it, creates a distorted view of that reality.

This year will see us spending even more time studying this pitfall and working with our clients on ways to avoid it. We think this is so important that we’ve focused two out of the next three upgrades currently in development on addressing and preventing the red flag trap.