What is the best way to collect customer feedback?

Question:

What do you think are the best ways to get feedback from your customers?

Answer:

Technology has expanded the options and also the response and processing time for gathering feedback. Gathering and sharing customer feedback helps employees to understand the “why” they are doing what they are doing. Matching feedback with the analytics and data that you have at your fingertips will give you a much clearer picture of what’s going on. And if you know what’s going on, you can most likely fix it, if you hear something negative.

When soliciting feedback from your customers, think about what you really want to know. Having a sense of what you want to measure will help to narrow and focus the feedback. Broad questions will yield broad responses, which can be good if you’re fishing for ideas, but may not answer your question.

Keep in mind, if you’re asking customers to answer a survey or submit comments to your feedback box online, consider providing some incentive for participating, and always respond to all feedback. 

—Jim Korner
Special Assistant to the Senior Vice President for Finance and Business
Penn State University Outreach and Online Education