Nobody loves criticism, but feedback is a necessary part of growth in any area of life, and especially in business. Whether you’re someone who seeks out feedback on a regular basis, constantly looking for ways to improve, or someone who would rather simply be validated by those around them, chances are you could use some fine-tuning in the way you go about soliciting and receiving feedback.
The reason feedback is so valuable is because it allows you to adjust the way you approach a situation in specific ways. And while not all feedback is valuable, adopting the right mindset and listening well can help you determine what’s worthwhile and what isn’t.
In my own business, Hennessey Digital, we’ve implemented a survey system to receive feedback from our employees and our clients that’s been tremendously helpful in discovering areas for improvement, not just for creating better employee and customer experiences, but also for how we run the business as a whole.
We send out a simple survey a couple times a year, and it only takes a couple minutes to fill out. There are plenty of tools available to help you do this, such as the popular Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey, which is what we use at Hennessey Digital. Whatever tool you use, I recommend surveying somewhat regularly, at least once a year, in order to continuously receive valuable feedback. For more regular feedback, you can send out surveys once a month and stagger who receives them so you get feedback every month but no individual is asked to fill the survey out more than once or twice a year.
Adopt the right attitude
Your attitude in regard to feedback will determine how it affects you and whether you take it seriously. The right attitude requires a balance of self-awareness, not taking things personally or as an insult, and also weighing feedback carefully for value.
Honestly evaluate yourself for how well you receive feedback. This can be difficult to do, so it’s sometimes beneficial to ask people who know you well how they think you receive constructive criticism. When doing this, keep in mind that if you don’t take feedback well, they may be hesitant to be honest. Then, when you are given feedback, keep your typical response in mind and be willing to take a step back and reframe the criticism to look for the value it may contain.
Survey employees and clients
Both your employees and your clients can tell you a lot about your business that you may not even be aware of. Clients can tell you a great deal about their customer experience, and employees can tell you not just about the workplace culture but also about specific issues that may be causing problems.
These two groups are both vital to your organization, and their opinion of your business matters. They have the ability to affect your revenue, whether that’s in choosing to do business with you or through the myriad ways that employees contribute.
Ask the right questions
A survey is only as good as the questions it asks. Before you write your questions, ask yourself what the purpose of those questions is and then craft the questions to draw out the best possible information. The more detail you can get from respondents, the better.
Your questions should also be easy to answer to respect the respondent’s time. People are more likely to fill out a survey if it respects their time.
Hennessey Digital uses just two main questions in our survey:
- On a scale of 1-10, how enthusiastic would you be to recommend our business to a friend, family member, or colleague?
- If you didn’t score a 10, what could we do to score a 10 in your eyes?
These questions are a great place to start, and if you want feedback on a particular aspect of your business, you can craft questions targeted at that topic.
Embrace feedback and nonperfect scores
This is where I see many businesses use surveys wrong: they survey a customer after an interaction, and anything less than a perfect score is considered undesirable. The survey is sometimes used as a metric to record a customer service representative’s performance.
This isn’t particularly useful, and can even be harmful in the long run. The point of a survey is actually those nonperfect scores. Perfect scores tell you next to nothing. While it’s nice to receive a 10, I’m always looking for lower scores because they give me information I can use to improve. The second question—“What could we do to score a 10 in your eyes?”—is the real point of the survey. That’s where the gold lies—real feedback that can be turned into actionable changes to improve your business.
Follow up and measure outcomes
This survey method has allowed us at Hennessey Digital to significantly improve our services and our business as a whole by applying feedback. Applying feedback doesn’t mean just taking suggestions and implementing them—it’s about searching for the root cause of problems and finding solutions for them.
For example, if a client responds that their email got lost and they didn’t hear back from us for weeks, that’s a problem we likely wouldn’t have known about without that feedback. With that knowledge, we can build a system to ensure every email is addressed by changing the structure of our email support.
Sometimes a solution to the problems brought up in feedback isn’t clear, and it can take a while to investigate and piece together solutions, but by asking the right questions and listening for their answers, you arm yourself with information from both the employee and client sides of your business to systematically improve one step at a time.
