Your Feedback Is(n’t) Important To Us…

This is a plea to all brands and businesses who send out automatic customer feedback requests, to stop and think clearly about the value of the data they’re collecting.

It’s a plea to consider these requests from the perspective of the customers who receive them, and it offers some thoughts on how to improve the quality of the insights that come from customer feedback forms.

Marketing-led businesses thrive on data, and collect it by the gigabyte. One of the wonderful things the internet and mobile technology have enabled is the ability to collect near-instantaneous feedback from customers and users on products and services. Businesses like Amazon have successfully used this kind of data to significant effect, triggering incremental sales through their ‘Other people who bought this (book) also bought…’ feature; TripAdvisor have used the power of crowd-sourced reviews to differentiate their travel business, providing much-needed reassurance for travellers exploring new destinations; the list goes on and isn’t restricted to online purchases … even coffee shops, the Post Office and DIY stores are now asking customers to go online and post feedback on the service they received in-store.

But it’s starting to feel like the feedback culture is running out of control and the usefulness of the data it produces may be starting to decline … when virtually every customer interaction triggers a request for feedback, it’s only a matter of time before customers get bored of providing it and either become anarchic … deliberately falsifying their feedback, or stop providing data altogether. Even with the best intentions of providing genuinely useful feedback for the great service they got from your brand today, customers just don’t have the headspace or time to actually give that feedback.

So, what can you do to ensure that your feedback requests are both actioned and completed in a way that gives you truly useful data? Here are a few thought-starters:

1. Say ‘please’…

This almost never happens … there’s an almost arrogant assumption that customers are waiting with baited breath to receive a feedback form! So, at the point of purchase / user experience, ask the customer if it’s okay to send them a feedback request later … research into persuasion techniques suggests that a customer who has made a small initial agreement to be contacted for feedback is significantly more likely to subsequently complete a form and will commit the time to completing it thoroughly

2. Softly softly…

Construct feedback forms in a way which allows customers to provide feedback to different levels of detail depending on how engaged they are with the product and how much time they are feel it’s worth committing to the feedback. I bought some replacement filters for my vacuum cleaner recently and received a mammoth feedback form that felt totally inappropriate for the purchase … if I’d bought a vacuum cleaner it would have been fine, though.

3. JIT delivery…

Feedback on services is best requested when it’s fresh in the customer’s mind, as close to the experience as possible, but feedback on products needs to be timely… there’s really no point in asking for product feedback before customers have had time to use the product, get to know it and discover its real strengths and weaknesses. Consider sending follow-up requests at three and six month intervals – this also serves to demonstrate you really care about your product quality and are committed to more than just making the initial sale

4. Are we having any fun yet..?

Let’s face it, most questionnaires read as if they’ve been written by a lawyer with a personality bypass, deliberately removing any language that might elicit emotion and often completely detached from the tone of voice and personality of the brand. There are no laws against using interesting language, employing a copywriter, using visuals instead of words, or gamifying the approach … it just takes a little bit of extra thinking, a splash of creativity and a bit of extra work to analyse the outputs, but it will pay dividends in the quality of the feedback received…

5. Say thank you … and really mean it!

Don’t just tell customers that their feedback is valuable … think about how you can demonstrate its importance: offer to share edited-highlights of the learning back with customers; reward them with access to privileges; or assuming they’ve given permission, re-contact them with updates on what you’ve done with the information you gathered.

… and if you have any feedback on these thoughts, please leave it in the round metal filing cabinet in the corner 😉