Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is Good Feedback Advice, Too
Posted by Sean Mahoney on Fri, Apr 22, 2011
My six year-old walked in from school yesterday, very excited. Granted, this is not unusual, as my son has a zest for life that I love to watch. But yesterday he immediately came downstairs after shucking his bag and started peppering me with questions. “Is your company green, Daddy?” “Does your company recycle?” “Do you know how many trees it takes to make that piece of paper?” Funnily enough, I had just been looking over my recycling bill (my town doesn’t provide recycling as a service, I have to contract with another company). It occurred to me that while Vovici is “green” in a traditional sense, when it comes to feedback management we always advocate the Three R’s that the green movement has become known for: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. In honor of Earth Day, here’s some research environmentalism.
Reduce – Reduce the number of questions you ask, the number of people you invite to surveys, the level of effort you spend getting a survey out the door. Your organization has data about your customers, employees and partners in CRM, HRIS, and other systems: pull that data into profiles in Vovici 6 so that you never have to ask for information that you (as an organization) already have on file. Use a Customer Experience Wheel to help you target clients at the right “moment of truth”, and use Vovici’s panel management capabilities to apply “cool-down” rules to prevent survey fatigue from reducing response rates. Draft your initial thoughts in Word, send the file to your colleagues and subject matter experts for review and refinement, then use the Word-import option to create your new survey—or collaborate within the application itself; whatever suits your team’s work style better.
Reuse – Reuse response scales, questions and reports. Consistency might have been the hobgoblin of little minds in the 18th century, but now it is mission critical. To measure how your changes and advances in product and service delivery affect your customers, you need consistent measuring sticks. Store your standard questions and response scales in the library and pull them into your survey to make longitudinal comparisons possible. Save time and energy by creating standard real-time reports that can you share with hundreds of colleagues interested in the survey findings.
Recycle – Use alert messages triggered by dissatisfied respondents to put mission critical customer issues in front of the teams who are empowered to take action. Pipe the survey responses and profile data from the survey into the alert, and add a link back to the survey so your team can annotate the original customer response. Now you have the whole picture of the customer engagement in a single response record. You can use the data from your CRM, customer support and HR platforms to inform your survey analysis. The demographic and transactional data stored in your “source of truth” can then be brought to bear in the reporting phase of your feedback project.
And one new R!
Review – Take a cold, hard look at your data and your surveys. Has there been a change to your products or services since you last revised the survey? Did you implement a new process? Is there a new mode of interaction your customers can use to engage with you? Take the time to review the content and logic of in your survey, so you can continue to measure against your internal benchmarks, but be sure to include new questions to capture the evolving picture.
So, as you go out and plant trees, clean up the roads and install new solar panels, go “green” in your feedback efforts, too. My son will thank you!