Learn more about Colin Shaw: Join over 85,000 people on our LinkedIn Newsletter list or visit our website for more great podcast episodes.
Listen to the podcast:
Getting customers to leave feedback is a challenge. However, that feedback is essential to managing your experience. So, what’s the secret here? An expert told me this: do it immediately, keep it fast, and keep it simple.
Tim Waterton, Chief Revenue Officer of HappyOrNot©, a company helping organizations gather customer feedback, has over 20 years of experience leading and building revenue for global technology companies. Chatting with him recently, I thought it would be great to have him on the podcast to discuss this issue. So, I am sharing it here as well since many of you might have the same question about getting customer feedback.
First, we should talk about the difference between feedback and reviews. These often get confused, Waterton says, but they both have significant value regarding looking into data and the signals there. He differentiates feedback as a company-initiated interaction, where the company reaches out for the customers’ perspective, but reviews are customer-initiated interactions, where they volunteer it.
For my part, I only give feedback when I have had a really good or really bad experience. However, Waterton says that people tend to provide feedback that is good most of the time. He estimates that positive feedback outweighs negative feedback by four to one.
For example, in the initial customer feedback forms, you will see that most of it is positive. People usually choose the smiley face for feedback.
However, he does say that the type of feedback given in the follow-up questions, which follow the initial engagement questions, is really valuable. Also, the follow-up questions feature more negative feedback than positive. Presumably, Waterton says that is because people who want to make a point will linger to type in what went wrong.
By contrast, most of the positive feedback in the follow-up section calls out individuals in the customer-facing team. So, the principle of happy employees delivering happy customers plays out there. Plus, you can go back and tell somebody the next day, they did a great job, and it’s tremendous from a motivational perspective.
Both Feedback Types Are Good
So, if people are generally positive and you get a lot of positive feedback, does that mean you don’t have opportunities for improvement? Not necessarily, Waterton says, adding that the value is the balance between them, like the yin to the yang.
With only negative feedback, you cannot tell where you are on a scale like customer satisfaction. With only positive feedback, you cannot tell where your opportunities are to improve. So, both feedback types have value in different areas.
I agree it is important to notice both, not just the areas of opportunity. We do a piece of research called an Emotional Signature® that helps companies determine what drives value. In my experience, companies take away from this research more actionable items on the problems than the positives. While that is understandable, it does increase the risk that in fixing a problem, they wreck one of the things customers liked in the experience.
For example, we used to have a milkman. I know it sounds ridiculous to some of you in this day and age, but we did. My wife Lorraine liked to talk to the milkman when he came round to collect the check. Unfortunately, that milkman moved on, and the new one didn’t chat; he left a bill under the milk bottles for the sake of efficiency. When Lorraine no longer had someone to chat with, she no longer needed a milkman, and that was that. Unwittingly, the new milkman had improved efficiency but eliminated the value from the experience, resulting in one less stop on his route.
I worry that organizations will do the same thing as the milkman with AI implementations. Firms will automate too much and take away the goodness in an experience.
Waterton agrees that there is danger in removing the human element from critical parts of the interaction to drive greater profit, automation, and efficiency. Therefore, knowing what customers value and appreciate is equally important as knowing what to fix in an experience.
So, How Do You Get More Feedback from Customers?
Waterton says the Customer Experience space has many different approaches, from email surveys to SMS surveys and many other survey types. Hence, “survey fatigue” seems to have bubbled up over the last year.
Customers are tired of answering surveys. Plus, some surveys begin with too many situational questions to define the location, time of day, and type of visit, which can wear customers out further before they can even get to the questions where they actually provide feedback.
Moreover, the survey can become part of the experience. Solicitation to give answers that take many times longer to answer than it does to have the experience itself will wear thin with customers, which will then become part of their memory of the experience. In this way, an annoying survey can ruin what might have otherwise been a perfectly delightful interaction.
Waterton says the key to getting more customer feedback is choosing the right channel and choosing the right balance for the experience versus the channel. HappyOrNot is about capturing and analyzing input as close to the point of experience as possible, both physically and time-wise.
People’s recollections of their experience ages very quickly. Waterton uses the example of waiting in line at a store for a long time to buy and seeing many people around the checkout who could be helping but aren’t. Customers feel frustrated at that moment. However, once they complete the purchase and leave, customers are on to the next component of their lives, and this frustrating part of the experience fades.
If the survey about the experience comes later that day, the customer probably won’t give the same feedback that they would just after waiting in the checkout line. The company then misses out on a crucial data point about their experience.
HappyOrNot seeks to collect a consistent pulse from many people at the moment at the point of service—a key differentiator from after-the-fact weighty surveys.
Also, the length of the survey interaction matters, too. If an after-the-fact survey comes a week later and takes several minutes, customers might not be willing to participate. They aren’t willing to give it that much time.
However, suppose the feedback is easy and fast, like choosing an emoji (i.e., happy or sad) with an option to type more open-ended feedback and be available at the moment of the interaction. In that case, customers might be more interested in participating. For example, HappyOrNot uses these types, called micro-surveys, that are tap-and-go at high traffic areas.
Getting Deeper with Feedback
The one problem I saw with Waterton’s approach is that it doesn’t allow us to get to the next layer of feedback beyond that surface reaction. So, what do you do to get a little deeper into the customer feedback?
Waterton says the question construct at the top is useful for this effort. Different industry verticals will structure a specific high-level question, which creates engagement. In other words, customers for this firm are willing to answer that high-level question, and then, once they have already received permission to get feedback, the firm follows up with more specific ones that go deeper.
For example, HappyOrNot often starts with a variation of, “How do you feel about the service you had today?” Then, they will drill down with a multiple-choice question asking the customer why these six left their feedback. Off the back of that multiple-choice selection, they will follow up with an open feedback query that allows customers a free answer to deliver additional and specific feedback. He also adds that the closer an organization can get to being relevant at the point of service with that question, it ties it into what somebody’s experiencing.
His company is also exploring broader deployments of this format at multiple experience points. Then, HappyOrNot can target specific moments in the experience their client wants to address. For example, the opening question at a particular moment in the experience might be, “Was the coffee service speedy enough for you?” This approach increases the relevancy of the query and allows you to keep the survey short since you already know at what point in the process the customer recorded the response.
Experimentation with the question is key, too, per Waterton. When you have a series of versions that are refinements of the one before, you end up with very specific feedback over time. You have the when, the where, the why, and the what—with very few questions and piped back in real-time.
Operationally, this quick-hit-immediate-feedback capability also increases your ability to respond in real-time. For example, if you were to get a series of negative feedback inputs at a specific terminal, you know there is a problem of some sort at that moment in the experience. Now, you can act and remedy it before it gets worse. Alternatively, in the case of a hotel situation where one guest is giving repeatedly bad feedback, the manager could respond quickly to a guest having a less-than-satisfactory stay before it’s too late.
So, What Should Someone Do with This?
There is a lot of value in getting customer feedback. Based on this conversation with Waterton, there are a few key takeaways that can help you focus your efforts on getting useful feedback.
First and foremost, Waterton says that organizations shouldn’t overengineer the process but should have a clear idea of the objective. If you know why you are gathering the feedback, then getting it will be a valid exercise. However, keeping it simple is essential, too, so don’t overthink the why.
Also, remember that the real-time, light-touch approach should be as contextual as possible. You don’t want to annoy your customer right before you ask them to provide feedback on their experience.
Along with these ideas is getting the right data to answer that question. A lot of data is available; ensure it is the right stuff. You can go to the data you already have and look around, but if it doesn’t answer your questions, you need to collect more.
Also, it is important to recognize that market research always has tradeoffs. There is no “right” design or “right” question. There are some ways to get information that are better for a particular question, and there are some that are worse. These negotiations are constant and continuous. In other words, the question you ask today might be appropriate, but that doesn’t mean it will be the following week. Be prepared to adjust it as needed to optimize the tradeoffs for your reason why.
Finally, act on the bloody stuff. Don’t just collect it. Too many organizations boast about their market research and the excellent customer feedback they collect. However, when you ask them what they did with it, they often have nothing to say. That’s criminal. If you take the time to collect the feedback, then take the time to act on it.
There you have it; the secret to getting customer feedback and the step to get you there. How do you feel about this issue of the newsletter? Let us know in the comments below with a smiley emoji or a frowny one.
Colin has conducted numerous educational workshops, on how to improve your Customer Experience, to inspire and motivate your team. He prides himself on making this fun, humorous, and practical. Speak to Colin and find out more. Click here!