Determine Why You're Collecting Feedback
How can customer feedback help your agency?
The three most common reasons to collect customer feedback are to:
- Understand your customer;
- Consider the customer when adding or changing service offerings; and
- Establish customer service performance metrics and goals.
Understand your customer
To understand your customers, start with conducting an audience analysis. Understand customer preferences and identify customer service issues before they become large-scale problems.
You can use open-ended, detailed feedback from focus groups or comment cards to investigate customer service issues. Online surveys can provide early warning signs of problem areas that might need further investigation.
Let's not forget about the role of social media and using online tools to engage and listen to your customers.
Consider the customer when adding or changing service offerings
Assess the customer response to service changes, such as opening a new office, or changing contact center hours. This type of market research is common in the commercial sector before introducing a new product or service.
Focus groups can help you assess new service offerings. Usability testing will give you feedback on your website, both during site design and development, and on an ongoing basis, to continually improve your website. For most agencies, both focus groups and user testing would likely be covered under the five-day fast-track PRA approval process.
Establish customer service performance metrics and goals
Establish customer service performance metrics to help your agency set customer performance goals and service standards, typically by either comparison with internal benchmarks, or with other agencies, organizations, or functions.
Monitor these metrics to gauge your performance, and identify areas for improvement. This type of customer feedback is often collected via an online survey or phone survey, with a large number of respondents and a rigorous survey design process. Work with a survey expert to ensure appropriate survey and question design, if your survey will be used to measure performance metrics. This type of survey is not likely to fall under the five-day fast-track PRA approval process.
Back to How to Collect Customer Feedback
Content Lead:
Alycia Piazza
Page Reviewed/Updated: July 16, 2012
