Most companies measure customer satisfaction through push surveys — the proactive kind. After a purchase, a call, or a delivery, a survey appears in your inbox. The timing makes sense, and people respond.
You get a healthy mix of praise, frustration, and suggestions.
That’s the familiar way to listen.
But there’s another kind of listening that too many organizations quietly ignore: the pull, or reactive, feedback channel.
In a pull setup, the initiative comes from the customer, not from you.
Instead of sending a questionnaire, you make it possible for someone to tell you what they think — through a QR code on a receipt, a “Give feedback” button on your site, or a short link in an email footer.
Because no one is directly invited, few will respond.
And when they do, it’s rarely to say thank you. Usually something went wrong — sometimes badly wrong.
That’s why many teams dismiss pull feedback as irrelevant.
Why build a channel that seems to attract only angry voices?
Because those voices matter more than you think.
When someone is upset enough to tell you, that’s not noise — that’s a flare in the dark.
It’s your last chance to act before the situation turns into a public complaint or a silent churn.
A pull channel gives that frustration a safe place to land. You may not always be able to fix the issue, but at least you know about it — and knowing early is half the battle.
Even the number of times people use the channel can tell a story.
Perhaps you usually receive one or two comments a month. Then suddenly, on a quiet Tuesday morning, fifteen messages appear in a few hours. Something just happened.
Maybe a system update failed. Maybe a product description disappeared.
Whatever it is, those unexpected spikes are early signals.
Pull feedback, in that sense, works like a canary in the coal mine: small, fragile, but incredibly valuable for detecting trouble before it becomes invisible — and expensive.
This one is often forgotten.
Simply showing that you welcome feedback — a QR code at the door, a button on your site — is already a message.
Think of how many companies claim to be customer-centric.
The words appear in mission statements, value slides, and annual reports. But talk is cheap.
A visible feedback entry point says something else entirely:
“We’re ready to listen. Right here, right now.”
Even if no one uses it, the fact that it’s there changes perception.
It’s proof that your organization isn’t just talking about customer centricity — it’s living it.
Push and pull are not opposites. They complete each other.
Push tells you how your processes perform when things go as planned.
Pull reveals what happens when they don’t.
The smartest organizations use both. They collect the steady rhythm of structured insights from push surveys and stay alert to the unexpected signals from pull feedback. Together, they paint a fuller, more honest picture of reality.
Reactive feedback channels will never deliver large volumes. That’s fine.
Their strength lies in what they reveal — and in what they symbolize.
They help you detect risks before they spread, and they make your openness visible to everyone who interacts with you.
Because in the end, being customer-centric isn’t just about managing satisfaction.
It’s about being visibly open to whatever your customers have to say.
Customer centricity must not only be done — it must also be seen to be done.
Bird by Muhammad Atif from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)
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