Join us live each week at www.productivity.academy/live and get your questions answered by submitting them at any time right here: www.productivity.academy/questions. You can watch the video for the last episode recorded on June 27, 2019, above, or you can review the transcript below.
In this episode we talked about:
- How to ask for feedback from customers to make products and services better?
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Alright, Hey everybody, welcome to Episode 88 of the productivity Academy weekly q&a today’s 27th of June, man, summer is cranking along. And today we’re going to be talking about setting up an automated feedback loop for your business. So getting that customer feedback, and all sorts of different areas and doing this without having to spend a ton of time to isn’t to say that it has to be all automated or that we want to get the, you know, person or the human factor out of this.
But a lot of times we forget that, you know, sometimes people may not want want to always talk directly to us, or they may like to give some feedback at a time after they’ve interacted with you, whether it’s at your website or somewhere else. And that giving people those opportunities to kind of express things in their own words can be really, really helpful. Doesn’t matter if you’re a consultant, if you’re running a brick and mortar business, services, whatever it is.
So setting this up, can be really powerful and let you iterate and adapt and even create new products sometimes. So we’re going to talk about that I think that this is widely applicable, and something that we tend to overlook, or think that is too complicated and a little bit of automation, along with some, some planning and then some review on the back end can go a long, long ways for this.
So that is a scheduled thing I want to talk about. Of course, if you are in the real world productivity group, you can ask questions. If you’re not in if you’re watching the replay, you can find the link down below come join us in the free group if you’re into productivity, automation, time management, all that sort of good stuff. And that’s the place that you are want to be. Which reminds me if you are checking out the replay, that’s awesome. appreciate you watching.
If you have any questions, leave a comment, definitely get back to you. And please subscribe down below, hit the subscribe button stay up to date with these weekly Q and A’s as well as app reviews and updates. You can check out the channel and check out all the other videos and see if that’s your thing. And you’ll get notified of those. So with that said, let’s get into it. So like I said, I wanted to talk about something that I think is really important.
And whether it’s something I’ve done for or whether it’s something I have done for myself for consulting. It’s something I’ve done for the businesses I’m a part owner of it’s something I’ve helped people set up. And you know, there’s even entire books written about this about getting customer feedback and how you can use this to speed up processes to create better products to give a better customer experience can make your job as a business owner easier.
Instead of trying to guess you know, what people are feeling or what people want. One of the ones I’m most familiar with, I think that in the kind of the for me in the internet realm. Ryan Levesque, definitely his book ask, would did a lot to, to kind of popularize this in terms of setting a process out about how you can do this. And I think he’s got some great insights have read that book now a couple years ago, maybe years ago.
And there’s a lot to it. And I would suggest anyone who wants to really deep dive deep into this stuff should definitely go that path, because what I want to talk about is just getting something up and running. You know, I talked to a lot of people and their feedback process is, you know, if somebody submits a contact form, you know, I follow up with them, or maybe if they call or they refund, we reach out.
And there’s no really systematic way of getting feedback from customers on, you know, really important areas things like, you know, what do you like best about, you know, either the product or the brand? What do you not like, you know, if it’s ecommerce, you know, what almost stopped you from buying, or what did stop you from buying, you know, as there anything that you wish that we offered you that you know, you didn’t see, and you’re like, you know, this just felt like it was missing things like that.
Getting this feedback is is great, and just helps to make the experience better. So let me just lay this out, got it set up on the other monitor here. Let me go with the presentation mode. So this can be really pretty simple. This doesn’t have to be terribly complex. So just to kind of show this a little bit better about what I mean, you could have like an email go out, okay, let’s say you have a business with an email list.
And you could just send out an email says, Hey, you know, in order to better help, or better provide services, or whatever it is, again, you know, I would appreciate it if you take couple minutes to answer these questions. You know, I’m not trying to sell you anything, I just want to find out more about how I can help you. And so long as that’s true, people generally tend to respond, I do this with the productivity Academy.
And people answer that and send it out about once a month, it’s also part of new subscriber emails, because I do want to know, you know, I’m sure that there’s air is that will come in that I may not be aware of, or that people over time, it may change what they’re interested in, I definitely want to know about that. Another way you can do this, I said text messaging that may be more for feedback for like a service based business.
But this can be great for people like contractors or anything else, where you’re dealing mostly maybe with text updates, or you’re asking people for reviews, things like that. And this also could just be on your website could be like I’m familiar with hot jar, I think there’s other software where you can ask for feedback on the website, maybe through time to pop up or a little dialog box in the corner.
But basically, from that it goes into a survey. And again, I talked about this briefly, but the survey questions you want to ask are generally non leading, right? You don’t want to, you know, ask people of a you know, did you think my YouTube videos were the best thing ever? You’re probably going to get some not so great responses. But you know, if you want answers to a specific question, feel free to ask them.
And again, you know, I like seeing the service and I filled them out from time to time, if I like the brand, trying to think the last one I filled out was for time Mueller, I’m really enjoying their service and their product. So I want it, I want to help them I want them to make their product and their services and their content, you know, more meaningful for me or better. So I’m happy to fill this out.
So long as it doesn’t take, you know, more than a couple of minutes. So yeah, with the questions, I generally try to limit them. If this is kind of an initial contact point, I would really try to keep them to something you can answer in just a couple of minutes and maybe only have one or two free form answers, meaning plain text answers, and then keep the rest to maybe a checkbox or radio buttons, things like that.
If you need something to use for this, and you’re not sure where to get started, just use Google Forms, really easy to set up, you know, maybe not the prettiest thing, but it works. It’s free. And people are very familiar with the Google ecosystem. So it’s not, you know, I think asking too much good. Also, so embed Google forums on the other pages if you want to do that. Okay, from there, I like getting notifications, I see all these I have them put it into slack.
So that I can see when people respond to this and various businesses. And then we also put them into sheets, like a Google Sheet, and a mass those in there so that over time, we can look at these. And this is the a really important part is taking that not just seeing them and saying oh, okay, that’s what that person answer. But then using that information, to do something, right to update something to iterate and improve. And I think about this kind of like doing your daily review or a weekly review.
On this case. With these, I don’t know if that’s really needed. Again, it depends maybe on what exactly you’re doing and how many responses you’re getting. But I do this generally monthly, and we’ll go through and do like a word cloud and get all the survey data and for one single answer, get all the answers and maybe create a word cloud and see what are the really common things that people are saying.
And then just go through and do a scan through and see what specific things people are saying, again, if there’s something that could be improved if there’s something people really like, and then using that information to do something about. So really the only resources you need to get started with something like this. And again, as Google Forms, Zapier is generally going to be the best way, although with Google Forms, you could go you could have it embedded on a page, and then that would take care of the survey.
And then that can go automatically into a Google Sheet, then you would just need something to remind you to do this monthly. So you could get away without doing that. I prefer to have them piped in somewhere where I see them as they come in. I like getting that information and seeing that coming in and knowing what’s going on with people, whether it’s productivity Academy or other places.
And then I just put in here, email again, I think that that’s a really good one you can use and asking for this and other emails you send people, you don’t have to send just this one email saying, hey, please fill out a survey, right? You could include it maybe a weekly or maybe monthly, put it at the bottom say, Hey, you know, we’re really looking for your feedback. You know, we’d appreciate it. This has three questions, you know, take you two minutes, and you know, help us do x y&z better.
So hopefully, that’s helpful for you. That’s just a way to get started. There’s, of course more you can do with this. You know, the next one could be you could do kind of scoring on it by let’s say you have a Google Sheet and one of the answers, there’s a free form answer where you can type in there, maybe, you know, what did you like best about this service? People can type it in? Maybe you have been another column that counts the characters in that cell.
So let’s say someone answers and it’s if it’s over 100 characters, that means they typed, you know, a decent sentence, at least they didn’t just give a one word answer, a really short answer. So maybe you get an alert now based off of that, and you do a quick follow up, you email them back and say, you know, hey, you’re obviously you felt strongly about this? Is there anything else you’d like to share? Would you like to hop on a call? Things like that, there’s a lot you can do.
But that is just the overview for this. And I think like I said, really, any business can benefit from this. And you can set this up and, you know, 30 minutes, maybe an hour if you’ve never done it before, and start getting feedback right away from your customers or your clients. And it’s really, really helpful. So with that, I’m going to check and see if we have any other questions. I don’t see anything else right now.
So I guess it’d be a short one for this week, we’ll go ahead and wrap it up. Real quick. If you haven’t joined the real world productivity group, you can find the link below if you’re watching this outside of the group. If you’re checking out on YouTube, hit subscribe, stay up to date with productivity Academy. I do these weekly, Q and A’s as well as app reviews, methods, strategies, anything to do with productivity, time management, automation, team building, all that sort of good stuff. So thanks for watching, and I’ll be back next week.