Giving yourself a moment’s time to think through the objectives of your customer feedback strategy will reap rewards with the end result. The questions you ask, when you ask them and how should be determined by exactly what you want to find out. Feedback at its best delivers a true snapshot of opinion which provides new insight to those analysing it. Non-descript or random results are almost always down to a badly planned and executed feedback programme.
Your feedback objectives
Sum up what you want to achieve by framing the overall objective in a single sentence. The objectives you choose should describe an action, state, or occurrence. Feedback programmes might look to analyse, identify, determine, establish or monitor. Here are some example objectives you could consider –
- To analyse visitor perceptions about key areas of the instore environment by end of May 2017.
- To identify areas of weakness within a customer journey in peak season
- To establish a pattern between customer satisfaction and the time of day throughout Q1.
- To monitor changes in employee satisfaction in 2017.
Evaluating your feedback objectives
You could ask yourself these questions
- Does the objective support your business strategy?
- How will the data collected enable you to make decisions or feed in to a wider decision making process?
- Will it provide fresh insights or develop existing insight? Although feedback can often back up what you think you know, any new data capture should aim to bring in fresh insight not captured elsewhere.
Once you have your objectives set, it is time to ensure you have everything in place to help you to achieve them. We would encourage you to think about –
- What you will do with the feedback when you have it. How will you use it to drive change, make improvements, etc.?
- Do you have senior management buy-in? Is there organisational commitment to make change in response to feedback gained? What do you need to do to ensure this commitment is in place?
- Who are your organisational stakeholders? Who in your organisation will have an interest in the feedback and what will their interest be? E.g. are they likely to be backers or blockers? How can you get your stakeholders on board and engaged before you start the feedback capture process?
As with writing any objectives, try to remember to make your feedback objectives SMART! Here is a reminder:
- Specific – state exactly what you need to achieve
- Measurable – include a quality or quantity measure
- Agreed – get buy-in internally what the feedback will be used for
- Realistic – can be challenging but must be achievable
- Timebound – have a clear end date or timescale.
