To have a more effective organization, you need to have the pulse of your customer’s perceptions of the products and services you provide. To bring next level service, you also need to have the pulse of your employees who are the ones in charge of bringing great service and representing your brand. In a business environment where perceptions and expectations are constantly changing, having access to real time feedback is vital to making quick improvements to your customer and employee experiences. In a world with increasing demands on the time of individuals, having a simple and effective way of collecting feedback will be needed to increase the accuracy of the data received and the effectiveness of the action taken based on this collected data.
Make it simple for your customers and employees
Time and resources continue to become more valued in our society. By making customer and employee feedback simple and easy, your organization will show that it values both the opinion and the time of those who provide you feedback. Long surveys are nice to have and can be used to understand the customer perception of your organization. However, as individuals are being inundated with surveys, advertisements, and questionnaires, they are continuing to shift their attention away from spending their personal time on feedback. As a result, many businesses resort to giving away prizes or the chance of prizes to induce customer opinions.
Your organization can make it simple and easy for the individual by capturing feedback while a person is IN the experience. Having a person respond to a feedback question while they are in the experience will be more appreciated than taking away personal time later when they are off task. It also allows an individual to respond immediately to a positive or negative experience.
Make it effective for your organization
By having a simple and easy way for your customers and employees to provide feedback, you increase the amount and validity of the feedback provided. This larger and more accurate set of data will increase the effectiveness of the decisions you make on the data you receive. Instead of providing feedback to get a prize or a chance for a prize, the customer or employee is focusing solely on the feedback question they are asked and the perception and opinion that they provide. Increasing the amount of questions for individuals comes at a cost. The cost is the energy and time provided by the customer and employee to give this information. Does a customer or employee want to give this energy and time away when these resources are becoming more valuable? Another cost is the quality of the data received. Since most individuals do not want to spend their time and energy on long surveys and questionnaires, the amount of feedback received is lowered and the true perception of a wide range of customers and employees does not get captured.
Make it real time feedback
With constant changes in perceptions and expectations, having real time feedback will continue to become the norm for organizations to become more effective and competitive. Real time feedback brings higher validity to the feedback because it captures a perception while a person feels a particular emotion or incurs a certain thought. By having the feedback while a person is IN the experience, your organization captures a positive or negative response instantly. This allows your organization to share the successes or turn around the negative responses faster. These quick turnaround actions provide customers and employees certainty that your organization is making positive changes that matter to them.
By not having real time feedback and asking for feedback days or weeks later is disadvantageous in a number of ways. The delayed response of asking for feedback requires that you ask a person to recount an emotion or thought at a specific point in time when they originally experienced it at your business. This requires a person to being aware of separating their current emotion to the past emotion. It also requires an accurate self-assessment and memory of how they felt back at this time. A lot happens to an individual between the experience and when and if a person fills out a survey or questionnaire. The goal is to obtain the most accurate assessment of how a person feels while they are in the experience at your business. Another disadvantage of not having real time feedback is the lost time between the experience and when feedback is received. During this time frame, negative responses are not being immediately addressed and successes are not being replicated and shared.
Concluding with challenges and SmileyAnswers
Capturing what a customer or an employee is truly thinking is a challenge for all organizations. Making the process simple, effective, and in real time is important so your organization can collect the appropriate data to provide quick and positive solutions. Below you will find a list of a few challenges (in bold type) and a countering Smiley Answer to help your organization provide better experiences for your customers and employees:
- Customers and employees will continue to put more importance on the time they have which will be a challenge for organizations to capture their thoughts and emotions. Counter this by making the feedback simple, quick, and easy so a person can go back into their individual goal orientated tasks. Show your customers and employees that you value their time and opinion by making the feedback time efficient for them.
- Organizations need good data to improve the service they provide. Counter this challenge by asking targeted questions with a simple and easy way for the customer and employee to give feedback. With a simple and quick way for a customer or employee to answer while they are still in the task, your organization will have more data with a larger amount of perceptions captured. This wider range of perceptions will help your organization discover more pain points to make the necessary and positive changes.
- Perceptions and Expectations are constantly changing. Counter this challenge by having real time feedback and capturing customer and employee perceptions all year round. With real time data, your organization will have a pulse of how your customers and employees are interpreting the experiences around them. You will also be able to respond to changing perceptions and expectations at a faster pace.
- Competition increasing for customers and employees. A counter to this challenge is changing the culture to raise the bar on the customer and employee experiences you provide. By having more feedback and engagement with a focus on every person and every interaction, your organization will have a better pulse on what is important to the individuals you serve. This human experience focus will build more trust and loyalty to your organization.
- Challenge of capturing simple, effective, and real time feedback. An effective way to capture simple, effective, and real time feedback is by utilizing the four Smiley’s by HappyOrNot®. SmileyAnswers can help your organization by using the right combination of these four Smiley’s to help you capture this feedback in real time to make positive changes to the culture of your organization. Learn how SmileyAnswers can help you measure, follow, and improve experiences with a Smiley Touch, a Smiley Terminal, a Web Smiley, or a Smiley Wall.
With constant change being thrown at customers, employees, and organizations, there will be a continued rise of uncertainty. This rise in uncertainty will increase the desire of individuals for certainty in the actions they take to purchase the goods and services they buy and the places they prefer to work. Your organization can increase certainty and value to all stake holders with a positive cultural shift to show that your brand is the answer to which customers and employees seek to be a part of. Add value to your customers and employees by giving them a voice in what matters most to them by having constant real time feedback. This constant engagement will help separate your organization apart from others with the certainty you provide to your customers and employees along with the resulting trust and loyalty your organization will receive.
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