Blog

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

Avoiding the Status Quo Bias through Voice of the Customer Feedback

This blog was written by Harriet Peabody, Research Analyst at Anova.

Status quo bias is a cognitive bias that leads people to prefer the current state and resist change. This bias can be seen in many different areas of life, from personal decision-making to organizational decision-making.

In the context of organizations, status quo bias can lead to several problems, including:

A failure to innovate. Organizations that are stuck in the status quo are less likely to develop new products and services, or adopt new ways of doing things, putting them at a competitive disadvantage.

A failure to meet customer needs. Customers’ needs and expectations are constantly changing. Organizations that don’t listen to their customers’ feedback and make changes accordingly are at risk of losing their customers to competitors.

A failure to adapt to change. The business world is constantly changing, and organizations that don’t adapt to change are likely to fall behind their competitors.

Voice of the customer (VOC) feedback is a way to collect and analyze customer feedback to better understand their needs, expectations, and pain points. By listening to VOC feedback, organizations can identify addressable areas that will directly benefit their customers.

VOC feedback can help organizations avoid status quo bias in a number of ways:

It provides a fresh perspective. VOC feedback comes from customers with different perspectives than employees, helping organizations identify areas where they are falling short of customer expectations.

It identifies areas for improvement. VOC feedback helps organizations identify weaknesses and implement improvement plans that address customer needs.

It provides evidence for change. VOC feedback provides crucial evidence to support the need for change, helping overcome potential resistance from employees and other stakeholders.

Anova helps clients avoid status quo bias not only by providing VOC feedback in the form of win/loss, customer satisfaction, and customer churn programs, but also by generating actionable insights from the VOC data. Clients learn directly from the customer what they need to do to stay competitive, coming away with ideas on how they can begin making improvements. Additionally, Anova’s competitive benchmarking data helps clients prioritize areas for improvement by comparing client results to others in their industry. Keeping up on competitor innovation drives organizations to innovate themselves to avoid falling behind.

The Anova value of a growth mindset means that we as a team are ‘content but never complacent.’ Rather than sticking to the status quo and an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ mindset, we push ourselves to continuously improve and better serve our clients. This involves being receptive to feedback as well as pushing ourselves outside of our comfort zone to embrace change. Using VOC data combined with a commitment to being open to change, data driven, and customer centric, Anova aims to ensure our clients are well-positioned to remain competitive and win more deals by virtue of avoiding intrinsic status quo bias.