How to get feedback on things you don’t know about

By Piers Alington

In a recent blog post, we offered five good reasons for adopting open-ended customer feedback.  In this latest post, we focus on how to frame your questions and give some pointers to explain how to elicit answers and opinions that yield actionable insight and earn customer loyalty.

Traditionally, when collecting customer feedback, companies ask a series of questions that aim to elicit answers on commonly-cited problems or issues that have already been identified. For example, ‘Was the waiting period satisfactory?’ or ‘Was the call centre representative you spoke to helpful?’

However, as we at Feedback Ferret have often pointed out, prescriptive questions will only ever provide you with feedback on the questions you ask. That’s not to say this won’t be valuable, but it won’t give you the full picture either. And it won’t tell you the things you don’t know or haven’t thought to ask.

In the past, asking questions that asked for longer verbatim answers were problematic, because of the resource required to collect, analyse and report on the data. With contextual analysis technology, this is no longer an issue.  Think about that for a second – it really doesn’t matter how much customer feedback you collect any more – a good contextual analysis engine will be able to analyse the data and discover meaningful trends and topics.

So how can you encourage open-ended feedback that delivers valuable customer insight.

1. Don’t ask leading questions

The answers you receive will depend very much on the questions you ask. So avoid asking questions that seem to be searching for specific answers.  For example rather than ‘Was the waiting period satisfactory’, asking ‘How did you find the waiting period?’ is likely to yield some surprising and useful insights based on your customers’ individual experience.

We avoid asking the question ‘What should we improve?’ – it results in ambiguous verbatim answers (“speedy checkouts” really means that the checkouts were slow. Whilst Feedback Ferret can cope with this type of inverse-positive answer when taking the ‘improve’ question into account, it isn’t a particularly helpful approach). More importantly, such a question seems to acknowledge to customers that you know things aren’t great and that there are things that could be improved.

If you make the question suitable open-ended, for example, after a simple rating question or NPS score, ask “Why did you score us in that way?”, you will get all the comments and context that you need from customers. They will tell you the things that are important to them.

2. Don’t ask yes/no questions

If the answer to a question is a yes or a no, this is unlikely to be much use to you or provide detailed insights. The next question you’ll want to ask is ‘why’ or ‘what is the reason for your answer’.  Only by asking ‘why’ do you really find out what the experience is actually like for your customer – which is after all the real purpose of feedback and the reason for investing in Voice of the Customer (VoC) programmes at all.

3. Encourage longer answers

Don’t use a word limit or restrict the feedback field (whether using a web or paper form). This will encourage longer responses and give you more information.  There is nothing more annoying for the customer when they are warming up to their subject and a pop up says there is no more room for feedback.

We know that some text analysis tools have limits to the length of the text that they can process – some as few as 1,500 characters. Feedback Ferret has no limits to the length of text that can be contextually analysed.

4. Be proactive, don’t leave it too long

People tend to give longer, more detailed questions when they are more passionate about the issue in question. So try and ask for feedback as soon as possible after the interaction someone has had with your brand. For example it is not unusual for an email sent to a customer within 24 hours of their call to your contact centre to elicit a 20% response rate.

 5. Close the loop

We have written on this topic before too but it cannot be stressed too often. If a customer has taken the time to write long detailed feedback, then the very least you can do is reply to thank them and let them know you are listening. True, this will involve setting up new business processes and allocating resource, but it will be worth it.  After all, isn’t putting customers at the heart of our business, one of the fundamental reason for inviting feedback in the first place?

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