Making Feedback an Interactive Conversation
Posted by Dean Wiltse on Fri, Jun 08, 2007
I have seen this happen many, many times. A well intentioned survey is distributed to customers and they are asked to provide their feedback on a product or service. The survey instrument includes an open ended comment at the end asking the person if they would like to comment on anything else (the "catch all" question). Open ended sections are great; they can provide unique insights into how your customers feel. Unfortunately they can also lead to problems if you don't monitor them very carefully.
Say for example a customer completes that survey and, thinking that someone will actually respond, types a question in that comment area.
If the survey is going out to a small audience this may be OK. If someone is reading the survey results all the time they may be able to react quickly and contact their customer to address the question. More often than not that data simply sits in the survey results for days, weeks or even months before anyone sees that someone has asked a question.
As far as the customer is concerned they used the form you provided them to give you some valuable feedback. They took time out of their day to give you something useful, yet you never even bothered to get back to them.
This is like putting a "Suggestion Box" sign on a paper shredder and asking your customers to submit their questions through it.
At Vovici we solved this problem in our own surveys by placing a single checkbox question right below our comments box. We ask the user if they would like someone to contact them because of what they typed in the comments section. We then add an alert to our survey, sending an e-mail to a manager in the event that a user submits a survey response and would like someone to reach out to them.
By using this method we don't need to have someone constantly monitor the surveys that we have running. It also means that within minutes of someone asking a question in a survey the employee most responsible for dealing with it is notified and can reach out to the person immediately.
If you are going to ask your customers to provide you with feedback then you owe it to them to respond when they have questions of their own.