The art of feedback forms: 6 reasons to adopt open-ended feedback
by Feedback Ferret on August 3, 2011 at 4:00 pm
by Piers Alington
Following my recent blog post highlighting the failings of using tick box surveys for customer feedback (as reported in The Independent), I thought it would be useful to point out that there is an alternative that allows customers to explain the reasons for their responses – open-ended feedback.
Below, we’ve put together our top five reasons why it’s always best to give respondents the space to express themselves.
1. Tick box surveys don’t always ask the right questions
Tick box forms tend to come with a built-in impossibility to collect the kind of nuanced customer feedback that delivers actionable insight. To put it bluntly there are questions that you do not know you need to ask, or could never put down as questions in a survey!
Questions like
- “Was the salesman rude to you and patronising to your wife?”
- “Was the ‘child-friendly’ lunchtime menu spoiled by the fact that the cutlery was several sizes too large?”
- “Was the dealer’s advertising dishonest?”
But customers will tell you these things, if you give them an opportunity.
2. You need to understand the drivers of customer satisfaction (or dissatisfaction)
Typically, 80% of your customers will be satisfied or very satisfied, but 20% are not. Now, what are you going to do about it?
Yes, of course it is reassuring to know that your customers are largely happy. But your job is to find out why. And this task is all too often ignored, or to be fair, traditional methods of collecting and analysing customer satisfaction surveys made it difficult or impossible to drill down into the reasons behind individual customer scores.
You’ll also discover that 10-15% of your “satisfied” customers have surprisingly negative things to say about their experience with you. Without gathering and analysis of customer feedback comments you will never know what those negative comments are about, and you will miss these opportunities to improve your customer experience.
3. You will uncover customer trends that can save you money!
By including open-ended questions on their customer feedback forms, Holidaybreak (Eurocamp and Keycamp) discovered that despite a general assumption by the management team that the garden furniture next to the tents and mobile homes needed to be upgraded, customers were actually more than happy with it.
On the other hand, the feedback revealed a high demand for duvets instead of sheets and blankets, and also for more and bigger BBQ equipment. These insights saved millions of pounds in possible misdirected investments, enabling funding to be channelled to the areas that customers would most value.
4. You can identify service issues and put them right immediately
Take Origin Energy, Australia’s largest energy supplier, with around three million customers. Every week, Feedback Ferret analyses the recorded audio verbatim answers from more than 1,800 IVR telephone surveys, automatically extracting the themes, topics and sentiment using its sophisticated contextual analysis engine.
One woman had left a verbatim comment saying there was a problem with the local third party support company who was unable to connect her electricity supply. She was very distraught and feared her two-year-old son wouldn’t get hot meals that week.
The IVR responses were sent to Feedback Ferret late one night and by lunchtime the following day, the supply was reconnected and the reason for the poor service from the third party was investigated so that it didn’t affect more customers.
5. Increased Response Rates
In a recent direct comparison in response rates between an online 12-question tick-box survey, and one-page feedback form from Feedback Ferret, the one-page form generated nearly double the response rate of the traditional survey. And analysis of the open ended comments provided considerably greater insight for the client than the alternative tick-box survey.
6. The technology to analyse open-ended data is now here
In the past, the seeming impossibility of collating, analysing and reporting on large amounts of verbal feedback, presented a very real obstacle for many organisations. However, the latest textual analysis technology is more then equal to the challenge.
