feedback review

Harnessing The Power Of Regular Feedback

Survey Tips

Do you know how your customers feel about your services and your products? Do you know what you’re doing right and where you can improve?

By building constant feedback into your processes, you can learn more about how to fine tune and increase your business.

Through regular customer feedback, you have the opportunity to improve loyalty, retention and sales.

In this article, we look at harnessing the power of regular feedback so you can learn more about your customer’s satisfaction levels.

You’ll find there are several ways to gain customer feedback and use it to improve your business.

Use Surveys for Regular Feedback

When it comes to surveys, you have several ways to reach your customers and at different times in their journey with your company.

Survey After First Purchase:

For example, you can survey your customers after their first purchase, their sign up for your service, or their sign up for your free trial.

It’s important to find out what your customers thought of their first experience with your company from your products and services to your checkout process and the ease of using your website.

You’ll find out from this survey where you can improve your processes.

Survey After Subsequent Purchases:

Each time your customers make subsequent purchases, you can also survey them. Once they’ve used your products and services and come back for more is a great time to ask more in-depth survey questions.

Survey At Specified Times After-Purchase:

Another time to survey your customers is at specified times after their purchase. You might consider three months, six months and one year afterwards.

For these surveys, you want to know what they think of your products and services long-term, if they’re still using them and if so, why.

If they haven’t made a purchase in a while, you also want to find out why.

Customer Satisfaction Survey:

Yet another survey you can send is after a customer has an interaction with your customer support team.

For example, someone calls in and has a question. After the phone call, you send a survey to find out your customer’s satisfaction level.

This survey helps you learn about the quality of your customer support. This is highly important to your business as you’ll find your customers will not shop with you if they receive poor service.

You can harness the power of this feedback to create employee training manuals and training sessions to help your staff learn more about providing great service.

Having this feedback helps you continue to monitor your service staff and make improvements or changes as necessary.

Engagement Survey:

You’ll find that gauging customer engagement is helpful to know as you grow your company. (tweet this)

By learning how engaged your customers are, you learn why they stay or why they leave. You’ll gain insight into your customer churn rates and the reasons why they are high, normal or low.

You can then make improvements in your products and services to try and increase retention.

For example, perhaps your items always arrive broken. At this point, your customers may disengage from you and decide they’re better off without your product because they don’t want to wait for a new shipment.

Learning this from a survey, you can then find a new shipping company that won’t consistently break your items.

You should send surveys after each interaction your customers have with your staff as this is highly useful regular feedback for your business.

Leverage Review Sites

Claim your social media business pages and review site listings.

Why? You want to do this so you can monitor your online customers reviews. By taking ownership of these profiles, you can respond to all positive and negative reviews.

While you didn’t necessarily ask for the feedback, you can still harness it by responding appropriately to each review so when others search for your business they see you are empathetic, appreciative and involved.

Track Your Reviews

Sites like Google, Yelp, Yellow Pages and more can affect your business by the sheer number of reviews that are possible.

It’s vital that you track your reviews and monitor your feedback as they affect your business.

Now, let’s look at how to use your regular feedback as a tool in your marketing arsenal.

Feature Feedback on Your Website

Once you’ve got the feedback, not only can you use it to improve your business, products and services, but you can use it as a marketing tool.

The easiest way to highlight your feedback is on your website. Take a look at these ideas:

Create a page for your reviews. Highlight the positive ones so visitors from your website can see what others think of your company.
Add reviews on product pages and also have a spot for people to leave reviews of their own. Adding reviews to your product pages means people don’t have to leave their shopping experience to read your feedback.
Create customer feedback videos. These pack a real punch because they are real people talking about your business in a visual manner. Video is a top marketing tool today, and one you should use.
Highlight customer stories on your blog. These could be testimonials written by your clients that also include a photo and/or video.
After you send out online surveys, you can feature the results on your blog along with a synopsis of your findings and what you plan to do with the results.

Feature Feedback on Social Media

We live in an age of social proof – it seems most of your customers want to see what others think about your business before making their own purchase.

Use your social media platforms to invite your customers to leave reviews. Highlight these reviews in your email marketing and send people to your social media review pages.

Showcase Feedback in Other Places

You’ll find other arenas are the perfect place to showcase your feedback, whether it’s from a survey or an online review site.

Use the feedback in your email marketing. Highlight it in your eBooks, white papers and other downloadables.

Don’t forget to include blurbs in your print marketing as well.

Final Thoughts

You want to harness the power of regular feedback because your customers’ opinions are important to the success of your business.

Asking your customers what they think, using customers surveys, shows them you care and are dedicated to improvement. The same can be said for monitoring and responding to online feedback.

Make regular feedback part of your daily processes and watch your business grow.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Image: Osman Rana on Unsplash

What Is A 360-Feedback Review?

General

Performance reviews happen in companies the world over, and some of them are done well, and others aren’t.

In this article, we’re going to talk about how to conduct employee reviews so you can see the entire picture of your team members’ performance.

We ask the question, “What is a 360-feedback review?”

The 360-Feedback Review

As the name implies, the 360-feedback review provides a full-circle review of each member of your team.

While you’re most likely familiar with the traditional annual or semi-annual review, this type of review is a bit different.

How? The traditional review only involves the manager and the employee, so there is only one opinion involved. The traditional review is appropriate in many instances, but it doesn’t give a total snapshot of the employee as a whole.

With the 360 review, which is not a performance review in the traditional terms, the employee is given the feedback needed to develop business and interpersonal skills.

The 360-feedback review provides the following:

An identified place to begin working on new skills.
A way to measure progress. For example, if your employee needs to improve conflict management skills, you have a starting point to begin measuring progress.
The chance for you and the employee to identify personal blind spots of behavior that the employee may not notice. For example, the feedback review may alert you to personality issues or traits that bother co-workers.

Just remember: the traditional review is about the job the employee is doing, and the 360-feedback review is about the employee personally.

Who Participates in the 360-Feedback Review?

A team member’s co-workers provide the feedback on an employee’s performance. The manager requests this information.

The co-workers who participate may include:

The boss or manager
Peers
Other employees who come into contact with the employee

The best part of the 360-feedback review is that you can gauge your employee’s performance from 360 degrees of your organization. (tweet this)

Co-workers can weigh in on the skills and contributions of the reviewed employees. They’ll let others see how they feel about the employee’s contribution and performance. Areas they’ll weigh in on include:

Leadership
Teamwork
Interpersonal communication and interaction with employees and customers
Management
Work habits
Accountability and punctuality

How Does the Feedback Work?

You’ll find a few different methods for gathering feedback about your employees.

In most businesses, the managers request and receive the feedback. They then analyze the feedback paying particular attention to the employee’s behavior. They aren’t just looking for the negative feedback but the positive as well.

The goal is not to degrade the employee, but to give them important information about how others view his work and his work habits so he can improve.

Some businesses hire external consultants to administer the surveys. This is most often true if it’s the manager receiving the 360-feedback review.

Other companies use electronic employee surveys to look at the results objectively in an electronic format.

With electronic surveys, employees can score their peers using supplied answers as well as open-ended questions.

Let’s look at how to use electronic 360-feedback surveys.

Crafting the Electronic Survey

One of the easiest and most effective ways to craft a 360-feedback survey is to do it electronically using an online survey software. You can also use the system to help you categorize and compile your results.

As with all surveys, don’t overwhelm your staff with survey questions. Think about what you’d exactly like to learn and only ask the questions you’ll use.

If you’d like to get started developing your own 360-feedback survey, here are some areas to concentrate on. Be careful, and don’t concentrate on all the areas at once.

Ask too many questions, and you’ll lose the concentration of your survey respondents. You might find they carefully consider the first questions and just start clicking buttons if it’s too long.

Here are some ideas for your 360-electronic feedback survey:

Ask questions about leadership skills such as delegation, listening, approach-ability, communication, coaching, decision making and management.
Pose questions about communication skills that include how the staff member listens, how clear they are, and their speaking and networking skills. Don’t neglect to ask about their non-verbal behavior, their ability to give and receive feedback and how they handle constructive criticism.
Another area to concentrate on is team skills including their ability to work as part of group, listen to others and their openness to the ideas of others.
Ask about organizational skills – can they handle projects, multi-tasking, logistics and fine details?
You also want to know about their problem-solving skills – how do they identify problems? Are they creative in solving them? Can they brainstorm and come up with solutions?
When helping employees grow, other good questions surround their interpersonal skills and include empathy, confidence, stress management, how positive they are, their negotiation skills, enthusiasm and personal appearance.

Final Thoughts

The 360-feedback review is valuable for companies and employees.

The review provides a chance to address core competencies and provide opportunities for developmental progress.

The 360-feedback survey allows employees a chance to see how they measure up in the areas of work as well as interpersonal skills.

This feedback review isn’t about their performance, but how they can grow as people and as workers.

You’ll find that the 360-feedback review allows managers to help their employees grow so they are the most productive employees possible.

Today’s workers appreciate this type of feedback. It helps them learn more about their strengths and weaknesses while justifying training and development opportunities.

You’ll find that 360-degree feedback reviews are important to your company as whole as well as employees and managers.

Managers benefit because they get feedback from multiple sources, and they can improve their leadership skills and fine-tune their strengths
Employees benefit because as we mentioned earlier, they want to improve.
Your organization benefits with a more productive workforce and a culture that welcomes feedback and continual improvement.

Give the 360-feedback review a try in your company and learn how to help your employees reach their full potential.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

Images: Paolo Candelo