Quick Micro Feedback with a Well-Crafted Voice of Customer Survey

Gathering timely and actionable feedback is crucial for social impact leaders striving to meet the needs of their stakeholders and continuously innovate and improve. Yet gathering feedback is a time-consuming process. With limited time for regular in-depth interviews or conversations, you might consider starting with a voice of customer survey to start collecting insights quickly. The issue is that surveys, if not done thoughtfully, can create unclear, . However, as her initial responses pour in, Linda discovers that the data is noisy and varied, making it difficult to identify clear patterns. The lack of prioritization in the feedback leaves her uncertain about which areas require immediate attention, ultimately impacting the academy's ability to enhance its offerings and better serve its community. To address this issue, implementing the targeted strategies below can help ensure that your survey yields actionable micro feedback. This will provide valuable insights that enhance your performance and impact.

Caveat: I’m not a survey scientist nor do you need to be to do the below. The goal of micro feedback surveys isn’t to produce the most precise and generalizable results, like a survey scientist might want to do for an election poll. Rather, the goal is to help you prioritize from a larger list of options quickly and increase your confidence in actionable hypotheses for new innovations and improvements. These will then have to be validated with additional methods like interviews, sales, and customer success process.

Organizations find it challenging to prioritize feedback effectively, leading to inaction on critical issues. As a result, leaders may focus on less critical issues while neglecting those that could drive significant improvements. Consider these three strategies to overcome this issue: (1) Utilize a Scale to Rate Needs, Priorities, or Challenges Implement a rating scale allows respondents to express the importance of each issue clearly. Here’s an example in Google Forms asking respondents to rate needs requiring more help or improvement.

I typically suggest a 1-4 scale, which removes the “neutral” midpoint of a 3 in a 5 point scale, and 4 radio buttons look look less overwhelming than 5 on a screen. (2) Ask for their top issue In case you’ve missed items in your initial list, I recommend you also ask the respondent to share items. The latter question is especially helpful if they choose too many “4’s” in the 1-4 scale example above.

(3) Ask to prioritize solutions Also try asking respondents to rate an initial solution set, using the multiple choice grid again. This helps you start testing the riskiest or least clear aspects of your solution, such as value propositions, solution formats (eg: guide vs workshop vs mobile app), features (eg: dashboard, in-app notetaking), or requirements (eg: HIPAA compliance, access control, etc). The below shows an example testing different solution formats.

While I strongly believe that innovation doesn’t happen by “asking” people what they want, there is a give and take. For instance, let’s say you find your target segment consistently dislikes workshops, but is really into newsletters. It might be due to hidden costs with workshops that you didn’t think about. These are excellent things to dive into during the interview process or in a follow up question (if you have the space).

Surveys often fail to capture the underlying reasons behind respondents' opinions, leaving organizations without critical insights behind the “root causes” behind customer needs or challenges. At the same time, open-ended questions have significant issues. While they can provide rich qualitative data, they often lead to vague responses that are difficult to analyze and interpret. To address these issues: (1) Provide Opportunities for Open Feedback After Your Rating Scale After respondents have rated a list of existing needs, allow them to dig deeper into their top issue by asking open ended questions.

(2) Stress Test the Clarity and Concision of Open-Ended Questions Before deploying the survey, review your questions to ensure they are clear and concise. Try a conversational AI tool like GPT to get quick, extra feedback

(3) Conduct Follow-Up Interviews for Deeper Insights While the survey allows you to triage and prioritize major issues, nothing beats an interview to go deeper into prioritized issues and get richer data about why folks are or are not interested making a meaningful commitment. To for tips on those interviews, check out the other two articles in the series

Finally, surveys often yield noisy answers, making it difficult for organizations to see clear patterns in the data collected. A common solution is to use direct questions or limit response options; however, this does not address the underlying reasons for noisy or incoherent responses. To manage noisy feedback effectively: (1) Segment by Background and Verify Identity The lowest hanging fruit is to start with your existing network to gather initial feedback, ensuring responses come from familiar and relevant sources. If you expand beyond your immediate network, use additional verification to confirm respondents match your target audience profile. This background information enables you to segment responses by sub-segments to better make sense of varied responses. (2) Randomize Question Order Another quick win to reduce bias is randomizing the order of questions. This can help respondents provide more thoughtful answers without being influenced by previous questions. (3) Do phased rollouts to get feedback and iterate, catching issues Despite your best efforts, your survey may still be unclear or it may produce unintended answers. To prevent burning through all of your respondents at once, do a phased rollout, where you divide your audience into multiple groups. Release the survey to each group sequentially and making iterations based on feedback after each round. As responses come in, begin analyzing and synthesizing the data right away rather than waiting until the survey period ends. You’ll seeing how people answer your questions and some will even ask clarifications, indicating potential areas of ambiguity. With that in mind you can shift your questions and then send a more polished survey for the next batch. This proactive approach allows you to identify trends and urgent issues quickly, enabling them to act on pressing matters with fewer delays caused by the survey analysis period.

Social impact leaders face several key challenges when utilizing voice of customer surveys, including noisy responses, difficulties in prioritizing actionable insights, and the need to uncover underlying issues that impact decision-making processes within their organizations. To address these challenges, implementing targeted strategies is essential. This includes segmenting respondents, using structured rating scales while being mindful of survey frequency, and encouraging open-ended feedback opportunities. By adopting these strategies in their voice of customer surveys, social impact leaders can significantly enhance their ability to collect meaningful data. This data not only informs decision-making but also enhances impact through effective micro feedback and continuous improvement.