3 Steps to Organize Customer Feedback in a Small Business Workflow

This might just be a me thing, but anytime I hear the phrase thank you for that feedback, I think about those boxes in general stores. Have you ever seen these? They look like voting boxes where you put something in the top. And they're cute, they're wooden. They usually have a big sign saying, put your feedback here. And when you write your feedback and you put it on a little piece of paper and put it through the slit in the top of the box, you guys probably know what happens. That little note that you put in falls all the way down through the box and into a trash can. Yeah. And every time I hear a customer support agent, a retail worker, a vendor tell me, thank you for that feedback, I can't help but picture that direct to trash can feedback loop that is the norm in many small business operations. Now, it's not to say that people are purposely trying to ignore feedback. Maybe in the case of those general stores with those, those trash things. Yeah, maybe. But for most of us, we're not intending to shut down the conversation when we say thanks for your feedback, but we do. At least for me, I hear that phrase. I think, okay, you're not going to do anything with this information. I've got better uses for my time. So how do we go about fixing that problem? Well, it probably doesn't surprise you that the CEO of ProcessDriven is going to suggest that a process might help us here. But indeed, a process is the solution. So today, what I'm going to go through are the three steps any business can follow in order to start to set up a. A circular feedback loop process. And by circular, I mean you do things, you get feedback, you process that feedback and it informs how you do things as opposed to you do things, you get feedback, you throw them in the trash. The way we have people turn feedback into meaningful actions and insights is by three simple steps. First, we make sure we have a spot where we can collect feedback. Then we make sure people know when and how to give us that feedback using that system we created in step one. And ultimately, we have a method for processing that feedback. You know, I'm using process in the word process, but all it means here is put it somewhere and make sure that someone is responsible for that. Now, for the rest of this video, I'm going to break down each of those three steps in detail. But before I do, I just want to remind you guys watching here that this process that I'm about to show you is an entry level process, perfect for the small business or small team. If you're operating between 0 and 9 million in revenue, this is pretty probably going to be suitable for you. However, if you are a larger business, you're going to want to take this and then maybe amp it up a few notches, use some dedicated software, make it a bit fancier, but understand this is just the baseline and definitely something you'll want to build on for those larger teams out there. So without further ado, let's start off with step number one which is creating an intake or collection structure. Now step one we want to have some kind of way of gathering the information. If you are a very small early stage business, this may be as simple as having an email address called Feedback and anytime you receive feedback you forward those emails into that alias email address. You can use the same method we talk about in this video to build a group on Google or maybe a missive inbox in order to organize all that feedback together. However, if you're someone who likes to have a little bit of a cleaner layout, or if you're dealing with more volume than say a dozen entries a month, you might be better served by creating a form just like email. A form will allow us to centralize all of our feedback and make it really easy to gather. But unlike email, you can have a lot more structured data than just a body a to a subject line. With a form such as a Google Form, Cognito form, or the form from your favorite work management software of choice like ClickUp, SmartSuite, or Monday, you can drag and drop fields into the form to customize exactly for the questions you care about most. Plus you can rearrange and make things look pretty so you can specifically ask how the way you'd like the question to be asked. For example, here I am in a Google form and I could choose to have all sorts of different options here and rephrase the question for whatever it is. I'd like to make sure I say upfront before collecting that feedback. Whether you use an email account or a formal form of some kind, you have the choice of either having this be internal or external. Internal means only your team members will know about this form, only they will have the link, only they will have the email address, and basically anytime your team stumbles upon feedback, they would forward it in or create an entry. External facing feedback forms are very similar except rather than having to go through your team as the middleman, your customer can directly provide that feedback and put it directly in that email account or form or so on. There really is no right or wrong when it comes to where you want your feedback form to go. But if you're just getting started, I would focus on starting internal first. This will make sure you cover the most basic needs of feedback collection, meaning feedback from your team. And you can always add an external facing option later on, usually with a little bit more detail. And once you know the system's working properly, the last thing you want is to build a new form and have a bunch of errors on it and have it facing your clients before it really works. I would rather use my team as the guinea pigs. Sorry, guys. I would rather use them. And so I would start internally first. Once you have some kind of method of collecting information, whether it's email, forms, whatever, you are ready to move on to step two, which is raising awareness about that medium. The fact is, the reason those gag feedback boxes I talked about at the beginning, those wooden boxes that go right into the trash, the reason those work so well is because they're cute little wooden boxes. And we need to do the equivalent for your own feedback system, whether it's internal or external. The way we can do this is by making sure your feedback form or email address is located every single place that your team or your email end user might need to find it. For an internal team, some places to put that feedback form would be inside their favorites or bookmarks area, inside the team handbook, and inside the agenda for team meetings. Because I don't know about you, but feedback comes up a lot in meetings. Might as well make it convenient to add that into the right spot. By putting feedback reminders in areas that your team is frequently visiting, you'll make sure that it reminds them by seeing it that, hey, I should put that feedback there. It is. If you use some kind of collaborative email system, such as the one that we use up here in this video, putting it on the sidebar that you can customize with some reminders can also be really, really nice because then you make it even more in their face. Now that's how you can handle internal awareness. And for most of us, we are paying our team, so they're very much incentivized to help us with this work when it comes to external and getting our clients and outside stakeholders to help out with this feedback, well, it gets a little bit more tricky when it comes to external users. We can follow the same principles we do for internal, but we really want to kind of amp it up. We want to make it sexier, we wanted to make it more convenient, we want to make it more value led. So what does that look like? Well, when it comes to external users filling out your feedback form, you want to make sure you are telling them about it everywhere, like everywhere. So that might be having it as a PS on your emails, integrating it into your email signature, having a dedicated email during your onboarding sequence to invite them to give feedback, having it in the footer of your website, having it inside all of your invoices and contracts, I mean, anywhere that you are interacting with folks in your journey, it can be really nice to have a reminder of feedback. In our own membership platform here at ProcessDriven, we have an actual tab in our navigation bar that says give feedback like it's that important and we want to make that small super easy. I should also say when it comes to external facing forms, we should also focus on easiness from the customer or stakeholder's perspective too. For some people, seeing a form is going to be just too much overwhelm. They're not going to want to fill it out, they want to email you, they want to call you instead. In my view, feedback is so important and so valuable that you should really work with your customer to receive it in whatever way they are willing to give it. Feedback is a gift in every sense of the word. And so we want to make sure we've got, you know, all shipping avenues open to receive those deliveries. That's why I suggest starting with the internal process first, because as long as your internal team members can collect that feedback in whatever way it arrives, then you can get it into the right spot from there. All right, so once we have a way to collect feedback and we've made it clear that it's important to us now we need to live up to our word, right? We say feedback's important, we say feedback is something we're going to act on. So how are we going to act on it? Because if you just have a form or you have an email account, all you do is guarantee that you're going to collect things. And that's not the same as caring, that's not the same as acting on it. What we need to have now is a process here in step three for processing the feedback in our small business workflow. How we're going to do that is twofold. We're going to have a clear rhythm for when we review feedback and we're going to have a clear path for what we're going to do with that feedback. Now, if you are a one person show, here's what that might look like. It might look like a recurring monthly task inside whatever task management system you use, or maybe just on your calendar that says review all feedback. And when you go into that task for that given day, all you're going to do is read through that email inbox or read through those form submissions. And for every single entry you're going to ask yourself, is there anything I can do? Is there anything I should do? Does this inspire any change based on that? I want you to put those in whatever system you already use for tracking your tasks or tracking your ideas. If you don't have a great system for tracking tasks or ideas, head up to this video here. You can just skip steal ours and that'll help. All right. Now, if you are a team of more than one person, if you're a typical small team that we have here on the channel, you might want to go slightly further than what I just suggested. We still need to satisfy the same two requirements of a frequency and a plan of action. But it doesn't necessarily have to be the business owner doing this. In fact, what I would suggest is looking towards your customer support or your most customer facing positions and put them in charge of this flow. For a standard team of say 15, I would suggest you have one person responsible for checking all all feedback on a weekly cadence at the least every week. Have that person go into the feedback area again, whether that's an inbox or form response doesn't matter. And have that person read all of the submissions for that previous week. Have that person, just like we had the business owner in the last example, review those submissions for the same three things we asked before. If you do not already, even as a small team, make sure you have a clear spot to put ideas and to put things you need to do. Your team member, whoever's responsible for reviewing this feedback is going to need to have a clear understanding of where to put things. Our goal with this process is not to keep feedback in the feedback area, it's to review it, close it out and have actions ripple out off of that. Either a note on the task, it's referring to an idea for something we could do in the next sales campaign. A task for a bug we have to fix. Our goal is to have feedback generate other activities in the business and that's how the loop happens. Whoever you put in charge of this feedback processing process, it will be a really smart idea to make sure they are someone highly responsible and great at reading between the lines. They're going to need to be able to see trends between submissions, maybe hear things that weren't explicitly said. Whoever you Put in here, that's a very, very important role. And that customer support person may just be the perfect person for it. So that's how you can go about building out a small business workflow for collecting feedback. But before we go, I just want to show you one of ours here at ProcessDriven so you can get an idea of what this looks like. Here we have my email signature here at ProcessDriven. You'll notice that down here at the bottom we have a hyperlinked stars. These are just alt stars and when you click on these stars, it opens up a form. This form is asking you whether or not your email experience with ProcessDriven was helpful. The same signature element, the same link exists in every single email signature that all ProcessDriven team members have. On this form, people have the option to rank and leave feedback and once they do, they can click Submit Feedback to send it into our ClickUp account. Notice we're using a ClickUp form and ClickUp to manage this process, but by no means is that the only option out there. SmartSuite Monday Google forms Literally any form builder you have or any email inbox, you can do this just as fine. Whatever you have, just make sure it is something that you can actually see yourself using and isn't crazy expensive. Most of the tools that I've talked about on this example area so far are available on a free plan. As an internal team member, I can now go into the respective list in ClickUp and I can see that entry inside my ClickUp account. If I give it a click, you will see the exact entry that I had submitted on the form. From a client perspective. Notice this is just me connecting the form that faces the client and the internal processes processing structure. You'll also notice a little comment popped in here. Here we're asking Mariah to process this feedback and turn it into the relevant category. Once Mariah goes through that and processes it either as an idea feedback testimonial or an issue task from Sometimes, then she will close out this task, close out this piece of feedback and move on. This is just how we end up processing general email feedback on how well our emails were when it comes to things like our programs, our courses, our services. Our feedback forms tend to be a little bit more sophisticated, maybe five questions. And our processing process is generally a lot more complex. We have a lot more things that we do with those services. Feedback versus just feedback on how well we wrote an email. Now if you found this interesting or if you, like me, might have thought feedback was something that was kind of a black hole in the past. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter. Info is in the description area below. We send out digest emails about videos like this in every single week, and even if you're subscribed to our YouTube channel, there's no guarantee you'll get them unless you're on that email list. YouTube's algorithm is weird, so be sure to subscribe on here and in the newsletter. And if you found this video interesting, you're probably gonna enjoy this one. Next, if you're gonna have anybody, including yourself, responsible for processing feedback, odds are they're gonna have some decisions to make. And if you find decisions are hard to clarify, a decision tree can be a great guide. Anywho, thanks so much for watching this video, and until next time, enjoy the process. Thanks for watching.