How to Avoid the Biggest Feedback Mistake of All Time

So you’ve collected customer feedback – great! Congratulations, you are ahead of the overwhelming majority of small businesses. But your task isn’t completed just yet. In fact, the most common mistake companies make in the customer feedback loop is not sharing the results with employees afterward.

When you collect feedback from customers, you do it because you want to make the experience better for them. You might dissect the data, come up with some kind of solution or change, and share it with your management team. But if you don’t share that feedback with the employees who interact with your customers the most, then it’s all for naught.

Just sharing general insights you gathered from the feedback isn’t always enough either. Sometimes, it can be far more effective for your employees to hear or see feedback directly from your customers.

So, How Should You Go About Sharing That Feedback?

Say, for example, that you ask your customers to grade their satisfaction in different areas after they complete a transaction with your company. Once you receive those grades, you should set up a system to distribute them throughout the whole company.

For example, you could assemble reports weekly, monthly, or quarterly that include the company’s overall grades. This also implies you are measuring feedback over time which is very important. Those reports should also include a breakdown of satisfaction in each area. You could also send each department more detailed analysis and customer comments that are relevant to them. For instance, a report about customer service would be more relevant to your sales team than to your shipping and processing department.

Since there’s so much customer data available, you do need to filter through it a bit before sharing it with your employees. To do this, consider using:

• A CRM system that filters through the data to gather what’s most relevant.
• A survey tool with flexible reporting.
• Both (and it’s not as difficult or as costly as you might think).

But Don’t Stop There

As you continue to collect feedback from customers, keep sharing those results with your employees. That way, when you make changes to the customer experience, you’ll know if they are actually working, and your employees will know if what they’re doing is helping your company achieve its goals, or if they need to make further improvements.

In addition, be sure to share positive feedback along with the negative. Also pass along any suggestions from your customers. Your employees need constructive criticism to grow and improve, but they also need to know what they are doing correctly so that they can keep doing those things.

Sharing these insights can also make your employees feel more engaged with the company. According to Gallup’s 2013 State of the Global Workplace survey, just 13 percent of employees feel engaged at work. But if you share as much information with them as possible, it can make them feel more in touch with the company. It can also help them do a better job, which will, in turn, make them feel more satisfied at work.

Your employees should always know how they are doing when it comes to accomplishing your company’s goals. If they don’t know what those goals are and what they can do to help the company achieve them, then you can’t expect them to live up to their full potential. And if they don’t know how well they are doing in accomplishing those goals, they won’t know how to improve.

Feedback Photo via Shutterstock