If you contact the customer support of your utility company, phone carrier, bank, or other service provider you’ll likely be flooded with requests to rate the experience and provide feedback. Likewise, corporate websites and email communications often solicit feedback via embedded buttons or links to online forms.

What’s with this corporate obsession with customer feedback?

Are these huge piles of feedback actually analyzed and acted upon? Is customer feedback some sort of corporate cargo cult? Or maybe clever marketing by vendors of feedback tools and services?

The impression is the feedback is just discarded or ignored.