Find Your Feedback
by Elizabeth Mansfield

When it comes to improving customer satisfaction, you’ve got to remember two things:

1. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
2. If it is, fix it right away!

But how do you know if it is broke or if it ain’t broke?

Through feedback. I know—that’s easy to say and hard to accomplish. But here are some ways to do it.

Persuading people to talk
First, remember that people are different. They have different preferred methods of communication. So if you want them to actually give you feedback, you need to provide them with different ways of doing so.

Take me, for example. I spend a lot of time on my computer and my preferred method of providing feedback is via an online survey. Most of the surveys I get relate to travel—airlines, hotels or car rentals. The travel industry is extremely interested in obtaining feedback from their customers. If you are looking for ways to solicit your customers’ input, look at the travel industry!

I flew Delta just the other day. One of the options on the seat-back entertainment system was a survey. It asked questions about everything: the cleanliness of the tray table, the quality of the food and the variety of entertainment options available. How convenient and how timely! Ask me my opinion as I am going through my actual travel experience.

Grab them when you’ve got them
If you’ve got a patient care facility, why not solicit feedback as your patients are going through their experience? It does not need to be as sophisticated as an interactive video display, but it could be a short series of questions that pertain to what the patient is currently experiencing. Was the receptionist friendly? Was the waiting area clean? Was the temperature in the fitting room comfortable? If your goal is real, meaningful customer feedback, then having them give their input during the process can help ensure that you receive the most accurate data.

If it’s not possible to solicit feedback during the customer experience, there are a number of other options. For example, post-transaction surveys that are sent out in the mail and include a postage-paid return envelope can be effective if they are sent out shortly after the transaction is complete. The longer you wait, the harder it is to obtain objective feedback.

Ask your employees
An often overlooked way to obtain feedback is to ask your employees, especially the ones in the front office. When I worked in patient care, I was routinely privy to comments and input from patients that they would never share with the practitioners. I made sure that I relayed the patient’s feedback to the practitioners, and they had rarely heard it.

The most common feedback I got was that the patient was frustrated with the practitioner being late for an appointment. By discussing the patient’s frustration with the practitioner and whoever was scheduling the appointments, we could come up with a solution that would improve that patient’s satisfaction. We often did things as simple as lengthening the appointment time or scheduling the patient for the first appointment after lunch.

The wired world
To reach busy, computer-oriented customers, an e-mail with a link to an online survey can be a simple and extremely cost-effective way of obtaining their input. Zoomerang.com and Surveymonkey.com are online survey companies that allow you to create your own surveys and then view the results online, graphically and in real time. Analysis is key to being able to actually create the solutions and solve the problems that will improve your overall customer satisfaction. Using online survey tools can really be a boon if you don’t have means to collect and interpret data.

Ten people in a room
A little less high-tech but more hands-on option is a focus group. To get the most objective results, however, a focus group should be run by a trained professional. If you are asking for people’s input and opinions, conducting a focus group yourself can be counterproductive. Try contacting your local university’s business school and see if they offer focus group facilitation as an alternative to hiring a market research company.

Tell people about it
If you’re serious about improving customer satisfaction, you may think that finding out what needs to be improved and fixing it is all you need to do. Not really. When you’ve determined what needs to be done in order to improve, it’s important to communicate to customers that you are aware of what needs to be done and how you intend to do it. In other words, market your efforts!

Advertisers do it all the time. You see it every time a car company redesigns a car. Suddenly, here comes a new ad talking all about how the company improved the latest model. The car company is letting you know that it heard what you said about the useless cup holders or the hard-to-use temperature controls.

Some days, trying to get feedback can seem like a lot of work for a little response. But even if they don’t respond, patients who know you want to hear what they have to say are much more likely to come back. Asking for feedback is good marketing—and good business.

Elizabeth Mansfield is a marketing consultant with Outsource Marketing Solutions LLC in Hartford, Conn. Contact her at elizabeth@askelizabeth.net.