experiences - good or bad

In life we have good and bad experiences, things which improve our day and things which spoil it. These don’t necessarily have to be big things either. The tone of someone’s voice can affect your mood and opinions of that person or organisation they represent.

So, let’s say you’ve just been on the phone to the helpdesk of a large organisation and experienced extremely good customer service, the kind of service which improves your day and improves your opinions of that organisation. What do you do next? Probably nothing.

Now, let’s say you’ve just had the opposite experience. You’re angry, fed-up, surprised, hurt, confused and sad. You do not expect to be treated like this - you’re the customer. What do you do next? Probably tell everyone you speak to for the rest of the day about your awful experience with this organisation. In fact you’ll probably still be telling people about this for months afterwards.

There is an imbalance here. The impact of a negative experience is massive and goes beyond the individual. The impact of a positive experience is slight and internalised. Why is this?

I think there are many reasons for this and here are few of them:

1) Emotions. Emotionally we are much better at coping with positive emotions than negative emotions on our own.
2) Protection. We want to stop our “network” (friends, colleagues, etc.) from having the same bad experience.
3) Venting. It helps us deal with our emotions if we talk about it. “A problem shared” etc.
4) Revenge. We want to hurt the people who hurt us.
5) Apology. We want the people who hurt us to apologies. If enough people hear about our bad treatment then maybe the person who wronged us will hear and then apologies.
6) Sympathy. We want someone validation that we were in the right and the other party was in the wrong.

Now let’s spin this round.

You are the CEO of the company whose helpdesk staff are creating these experiences. What would you like to happen in each circumstance? Do you want the person whose experienced fantastic service to stay quiet and do you want the person whose experienced terrible service to shout it from the roof tops? Probably not!

So what is the solution?

I believe the solution lies in creating a feedback loop which allows people to record their “experience” with your organisation.

The mechanism needs to be simple, available and straightforward. It also has to be sympathetic to the fact that people may want to remain anonymous. There’s no point in making the name field mandatory and yes, I know it’s frustrating to not know who these people are.

Providing this feedback loop has many benefits:

1) It addresses many of the reasons highlighted above mainly around venting, revenge, apology and sympathy.
2) It allows an organisation in many cases to “fix” the problem or reinforce the delight.
3) Provides a barometer of public feeling about your organisation.
4) Creates a great source of “success stories” which can be used in future marketing collateral.

I call this mechanism for providing feedback an Experience Feedback System (it clearly needed a TLA style name to sound important!).

My recommendation is that you implement it using a web page, a text number, an email address and a 0800 number.

Note: Only provide the 0800 number if you have someone properly qualified to deal with both the delighted and the extremely angry. If you do not have this person, do not provide a 0800 number. Pointing an angry person at an unqualified member of staff will just make the situation worse!

You should collect as much information about the experience as possible but make none of it mandatory. I’ve listed some examples below:

- Feedback type - positive or negative (only mandatory item)
- Name
- Preferred contact method and contact details
- Description of the experience
- Department involved in this experience (sales, helpdesk, CEO!)
- Emotion created (calm, enjoyment, loving, interested, energised, open or angry, sad, fearful, surprise, hurt, confusion, disgust, shame, tiredness, passive aggressive)
- Name of person who caused this emotion or identifying details (satisfies the revenge need)
- Suggested remedy (negative only)
- Publicity release (positive only)

The penultimate step is to think about what you are going to do when you receive this feedback. Who is going to see it and what action will you take. This needs careful thought starting with what your immediate reply is once the feedback has been submitted. What does the text reply say, what does the “submission successful” webpage say, etc.

You obviously next need to decide what you are going to do when you receive some feedback from Mr (or Mrs) Angry, what are you going to do with Mr (or Mrs) Delighted. You may or may not have their contact details so what do you do in each case? How are you going to handle feedback from Mr (or Mrs) Angry which points the finger at a member of staff? What aggregate reports do you want to generate and on what frequency? Who within the organisation can see this information?

The final step is to promote your EFS in all communications; written and spoken. Ask for feedback in your marketing materials, during the hold music for your helpdesk and at the end of each interaction/conversation. Encourage your staff to ask for feedback and highlight the ways people can provide it. Make it clear that both positive and negative feedback is important to your organisation and both will help you serve you customers better in the future.

Finally plus one, don’t forget to reward staff who consistently get positive feedback and provide more training staff who get negative feedback.

If you have found this article interesting and would like some help to implement an Experience Feedback System within your organisation please get in touch. We would only be too pleased to help.

If you have enjoyed this article please let us know and if you have hated it we’d like to hear about that too. We can all only get better through feedback.