What’s the best way to get customer and employee feedback?
There are two sides to this question. The first is about the mechanics of collecting feedback and the second side is about motivating people to give you feedback. To me the motivational aspect is much more important that the methods of collection.
Customers and staff will give you feedback if they perceive that the information they provide will ultimately be helpful to them. If you don’t have a relationship with a customer or you only have a poor relationship they are very unlikely to give you feedback. The main exception is when they believe you have really messed up and are not giving them the product/service that they expected. A tool to help is my RET factor approach. The higher the RET factor rating the better the feedback. (More on www.simpleplans.co.uk ). RET stands for Relationship, Expertise and Trust which I measure using a survey and produce simple numerical results. I have one client with a very high rating who gets 80% return whenever he asks his customers for feedback. Others with much lower RET rating are lucky to get 10% to respond. As a quick indicator simply ask yourself about how your customers feel about each of the RET factors (Relationship, Expertise & Trust) in dealing with your organisation. It will give you an indicator about what level of results to expect.
Finally to be helpful to the person giving you the feedback you must tell them upfront that you will share results with them. You then must share those results along with what you will do, or will not do, based on the results you have received. Organisations that don’t do this will get declining levels of feedback from staff and customers.