Whether it’s data from product reviews or employee-satisfaction surveys, companies and organizations thrive on high-quality feedback. There’s so much you can do with feedback, from training employees to bringing new products to your customers. We live in an era of feedback culture, as discussed at length here at Pulse For Good.

How do you get that high-quality data? And if you’re getting it, how do you get more? How do you increase the quality of your feedback? In this two-part article, we’ll discuss ways to feed your organization with more (and better) feedback—three tips in the first part and three more in the second part.

Electronic feedback kiosks

A feedback kiosk is an electronic device (usually equipped with a touch-screen) configured to easily and quickly collect feedback from a certain kind of targeted person, such as employees, clients, the public at large, or attendees at an event. Kiosks allow you to get the feedback immediately, rather than hoping your target user will log on later and complete your survey. With a kiosk, your target user need not even unpocket their own smartphones—the data-collection instrument is right there, booted up, and ready to go.

The device used for a kiosk may be an electronic tablet, laptop, smartphone, and even a purpose-built device. The kiosk is configured to easily serve one function—the survey or poll. The survey may be as complex or simple as required, and it can collect qualitative data (e.g., comments, and thoughts) or quantitative data (e.g., ratings, demographic data). It may ask a dozen poll questions or only one or two. Feedback kiosks can be staffed by personnel to encourage its use and proper completion of the survey, but a kiosk may also be left unattended, which has the benefit of allowing the feedback process to occur with a measure of privacy and anonymity.  

Kiosks can be situated at a desk or table, or it can be affixed to a booth or at a counter with privacy screening. Kiosks can be mounted to a wall or unattached to anything—an attendant can hand it to a participant and then retrieve it when the feedback has been collected. Having a ready supply of numerous kiosk devices may be necessary when dealing with large groups—part of the point of using a device is to eliminate the need for your target user to wait around.

When deciding where to locate your feedback kiosk and how to configure it, first determine the experience you’re attempting to furnish to the user and the data you wish to collect. If you’re attempting to collect candid or anonymous feedback, consider situating an unattended kiosk in a place where users can input their feedback more or less unobserved (but consider security, too). If you’d like every single person at an event to leave feedback upon exit, set up your event so that most or all of your guests must pass by the kiosk(s), and maybe assign a staff member to usher users to participate. If only one or two points of data are to be collected from each user, an attendant can be responsible for the input. 

If you’re wondering if feedback kiosk devices may help with your feedback-gathering efforts, contact Pulse For Good. Our products and services will not only give you a leg-up in the process, we’ll be on call to help you improve, manage, and analyze the feedback you receive. 

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Online exit surveys

If your organization has a website that your clients or customers use to order products, schedule services, or receive assistance, a quick online exit survey can be effective in collecting feedback from them. This kind of feedback collection will typically take the form of a final page or a pop-up that appears when your customer is finished using the website. Note, the feedback need not be related to the online function the client has just completed. It can ask about virtually anything, such as demographics or their perception of your organization.  

While the exit survey is an effective feedback-gathering tool, make sure you don’t tax your customers’ patience or ask too much. Not everyone will be inclined to take a survey at the moment they’re ready to log-off, but adding incentives (a coupon or discount, for example) may entice customers to stick around for an extra minute or two. 

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Online review sites

Although not all consumers are keen to leave reviews for every service and company they patronize, we all know that some people are very much inclined to do so. Google, Yelp, Facebook, Glassdoor, Amazon, Bing, Angi, Consumer Reports, and many other mega-review sites offer a place for consumers to leave reviews. This is feedback that you don’t even have to ask for, and there are review sites that specialize in practically every kind of service and product. If you’re ready to hear from the brutally frank customers of the world, it’s important that your organization or company has a presence on those sites. It’s even more important to pay attention to the reviews and respond to them when appropriate. It’s been shown over and over that customers who complain about services or products really just want to be heard. An apology, explanation, refund, or other favorable treatment can transform a disgruntled online detractor into a satisfied return customer who’ll recommend you to friends and family.

Please read the second part of this article, in which we’ll outline three more ways to collect more and better feedback for your organization. 

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