There"s a thin line between gaining good-quality feedback and annoying your customers with endless emails, texts and pop-ups. So how do you stay on the right side?
If you"ve just been on a first date with someone, it"s probably not a good idea to leave them a string of messages the next day checking whether your restaurant choice was a good one, whether your outfit had struck the perfect balance between refined and relaxed, and if you were right to decline the offer of coming in for coffee. It would perhaps betray more than a hint of neediness.
Yet it seems that these days you can"t have the briefest encounter with any business without them doing something similar - bombarding you with texts, emails or, worse, the dreaded pop-up window, wanting to know just how well they"ve performed. Phone a mobile provider, for example, and two minutes later it"ll drop you a casual text saying it wants to ask you a string of questions about the call you just made.
Data is, of course, king, and the online review has become standard, be it on Amazon, Booking.com, Google or Tripadvisor. People naturally want to evaluate the quality of service or experience they had so that others can make informed decisions. But companies are clearly keen to claim some agency in the feedback process. The question is whether they can do it without appearing intrusive or, worse, dripping in desperation.
The first point that distinguishes pestering from something valuable is whether the information is actually used for anything. Iain Beresford, Head of Marketing and Business Development at law firm Collas Crill, says that whether a company gets positive or negative feedback, they then have to do something with it. "It comes down to whether you get off your backside and respond to what they say," Beresford explains. "People are more than happy to give feedback in a constructive way, because they want you to improve. But there are different levels of relationships, so it"s about getting the appropriate level of feedback from each kind of client and acting on it in a way they see it has been acted on."
A company such as Collas Crill is, however, not just unleashing a load of random pop-ups and hoping for the best. Instead, it seeks a combination of informal and structured feedback.
The same goes for mobile provider Sure International, whose customer feedback "plays a big part in forming our strategy", according to Customer Experience Director Charlotte Dunsterville. "It helps us see how we"re performing, how to do that better and how to turn that into an action plan," she says. "Based on the feedback, we know what we need to improve."
Sure asks for feedback after customers visit stores, call its contact centre or make orders online - sending an email or an SMS message with a link inviting customers to complete a survey on their phone or tablet. "They get seven questions, from how likely they are to recommend us, to how quickly we processed the order and how friendly we were," says Dunsterville.
One could be cynical and think that when companies ask questions such as "Would you recommend us to a friend?" it"s purely so that they can trumpet it in their marketing or advertising materials. But Dunsterville explains that it goes deeper than that.
"Customers are free to leave comments too," she says. "We can see trends and averages from the scores, but it"s the comments that give us the real insight. If something has gone wrong, we can fix it. Or if it"s positive feedback about a specific staff member, we can pass that back to the staff as recognition for good service."
All this begs the question: can the average customer be bothered to respond in the first place? BL Editor-in-Chief Nick Kirby was recently sent an email asking for feedback after only one night of a three-night stay in a hotel. "It smacked of desperation," he says. "If there"s something that needs addressing, then I"ll noodle down to reception and speak to a human being. What was more peculiar, I didn"t get an email after I"d completed my stay, which would have made more sense."
Effective follow-up
This is one mistake that Sure made in the past and quickly rectified. "When people reported a broadband problem that needed fixing, we used to send our feedback surveys out immediately," says Dunsterville. "But in some cases people became annoyed that the problem hadn"t been fixed yet.
"Now the issue needs to be resolved before you close the ticket, and we send a survey only 48 hours after the ticket has been closed. That"s the only negative feedback we"ve ever had about our surveys, and we quickly adjusted it."
As well as being mindful of when they send out requests for feedback, companies would do well to keep website pop-ups to a minimum. This technique, where a feedback form will magically appear as soon as you visit a company"s website, has become so universally derided that even its inventor has apologised for creating it.
Beresford points out that the biggest issue with pop-ups is that they don"t even work. "It"s not timely, the responsiveness is all wrong, and it annoys the crap out of people," he says. "This scattergun approach is horrendous and undermines what you"re trying to do - especially in a law firm, where the sales process is a longer-term thing.
"Our regular, informal feedback is done off the back of meetings, so it always has some relevance. And we run a major client survey every 18 months. More frequent than that and the clients would ignore it - it has to be meaningful to people."
Indeed, at the time of writing, this author had been asked for feedback on a service three times in the previous 24 hours. Twice I was happy to do so, not only because the service was good, but because the transaction had gone beyond the perfunctory and had instead become genuinely human - we"d chatted as people. It was then easier to express my feelings, because I knew who I was helping out.
While client opinions are important in all types of businesses, PR is one world where opinion is everything. The partners at London-based communications consultancy Pagefield, which looks after a range of clients including the UK"s Business Growth Fund, have a policy of sitting down with clients once a quarter for a coffee, just to get a picture of how they see the work going.
The company has another instructive practice - it asks people"s opinions when it knows something"s wrong. "We always ask for feedback whenever we fail to win a pitch," says Louise Fernley, a consultant at the company. "One company told me we"d lost out because our competitor had told them exactly how much media coverage they would get them - but how could they know? So it can be annoying, but it was still useful - after that, I was able to tweak how I pitched."
So how does a company go about acting on all this feedback? To the outside eye it seems a tall order - first you have to collate disparate opinions from all corners, then find some coherence in it all, decide how to act on it and finally communicate to your customers that you"ve done so. A good-quality CRM system not only allows companies to do all this more quickly, but to categorise and address only the issues that are key drivers to client satisfaction. And, says Beresford, it"s not actually that hard.
"When trying to embed the process of feedback, you"re trying to change behaviours, which is difficult," he says. "But once it becomes established, it becomes the norm.
"Our bigger client survey rolls out every 18 months and it takes a bit of work beforehand, during the actual roll out and afterwards to analyse and address the responses. But we"ve been processing feedback for so many years it"s become part of everyone"s day-to-day. This morning I had a chat about the company on the way to work, and even that gets collated and fed into the general input from emails and the analytics on our website."
Better quality feedback
The other advantage of putting the effort into setting up a respectful and considered process is that the information you get back is likely to be more trustworthy. After all, people could be churlish and give you a negative response to a pop-up survey, just because they were in a bad mood at that moment in time.
Establish your benchmarks early and maintain a consistent, steady approach. The more you do it, the better your client data gets, which only helps you ask better questions. Beresford describes feedback as an "iterative process", and maintains it"s one that can have immense value, if you"re willing to do the work.
"Don"t stick your head in the sand when it"s negative - and make sure you respond," says Beresford. "That"s what will change an organisation." So too, it seems, will customers responding to all these questions. On a scale of one to 10, how happy are you to do so?