The 55 touch points you could be overlooking as opportunities to get feedback

Suppose you wanted to know what you customers and employees think about your business all of the time. Certainly more often than an annual survey allows, and without requiring customers to make a transaction or a support call to trigger your request for their input.

How could you invite this insight without being obtrusive or over demanding, especially when 66% of customers prefer to give feedback by actively reaching out than by being surveyed?

Passive feedback invitations may be the missing ingredient in your customer and employee engagement strategy.

A passive feedback invitation is a means by which someone can give you feedback at any time, without being specifically asked. To be effective your invitation needs to convey that your business is always open to feedback, and explain the easiest ways to provide it.

You might be surprised how many existing touch points are overlooked as everyday opportunities to make passive feedback requests.

Below are 55 typical customer and employee touch points that most businesses will have, and another 10 that are more specific to Hospitality. Similar to Hospitality, each industry will have a set of touch points that are unique to them.

Writing an effective passive feedback request

So what does an effective passive feedback request look like? It should be short, memorable, and inspire action rather than being a take it or leave it platitude.

"Feel free to leave feedback" almost guarantees a poor response whereas something more compelling will get significantly better results.

For example:

  How can we improve? Email feedbackid@paycompliment.com We're listening.

  Could we do better? We want your feedback at url.com/feedbackID

  Your feedback has influence. Share it with us at feedbackid@paycompliment.com 

Of course, you should only ask for feedback if you are prepared to act on it.

Each response to a feedback request should be rapidly acknowledged, additionally any actions taken as a result of feedback should be communicated back to close the loop with the original contributor and show there was an outcome.

Doing these 2 simple things will put you in the top echelon of companies when it comes to handling any feedback received. Unfortunately it is still all too common that feedback is received, auto-acknowledged and not responded to. 

The bottom line is that engagement matters.

Recent market analysis has shown that fully engaged customers are worth 52% more in sales than simply satisfied ones. 

At the same time Bain & Company state that 80% of CEOs believe they deliver a superior customer experience but only 8% of their customers agree.

There is perception gap to bridge and being open to hearing the voice of the customer and the voice of the employee, on their terms, is vital to closing the gap between the business we aspire to be, and the business we are seen to be.

If converting a passive stakeholder (customer or employee) into an active stakeholder is your aim, then seizing every opportunity for interaction will go a long way toward achieving it.

The feedback platform www.paycompliment.com can be used to feedback enable any touch point by using a Feedback ID™ that points to your feedback profile.