Do Managers Listen to Their Customers’ Feedback? Evidence from a Field Experiment in Retail Settings

Even though, the existing literature does not yet explain how voluntary customer-initiated operational suggestions transmitted through official feedback channels are treated at the local store level in large retail operations. An exploratory field experiment was conducted by engaging 31 volunteers which are also direct customers of one local hypermarket from Arad, Romania, and one local supermarket from Arad, Romania. Both the supermarket and the hypermarket are part of a multinational German chains. The aim of this experiment is to test whether the suggestions of their customers are taken into consideration by the local store managers without leading to observable operational outcomes. A number of 31 volunteers contacted the official communication channels of the retails, which are dedicated to this exact purpose, of sending feedback, and each of them made the same suggestion for improvement using their own words. The analysed suggestion is aimed at a simple modification, with low cost and easy to implement at the local level. The managers response was assessed based on the type of response received, the existence of further integration and the effective implementation of the suggestion over a 30-day observation period. The results indicate that all suggestions were formally acknowledged through standardized or automated responses, but there was no request for clarification, no contact from local management and no observable operational implementation. The analysis of these results through the lens of the Plan–Do–Check–Act cycle highlights a dysfunction of the continuous growth process, with customer feedback being managed only at procedural level, without it triggering the testing and implementation phase. The current study contributes theoretically by refining the concept of managerial responsiveness and empirically by providing field-based evidence of procedural acknowledgment without operational integration.