Feedback – Is Your Goal High Scores, or Better Service?

Getting rave reviews from your clients feels great!  We all enjoy positive feedback, particularly from those you work with closely.  However, when designing a feedback process to stay in tune with your clients, too many organizations make the mistake of seeking high scores, rather than actionable information.

If 90% of your feedback comes with top ratings, you may have some great marketing statistics.   But, you really haven’t collected data that lets you improve.  If almost all your scores are at the top of the scale, you have no way to differentiate which clients are most loyal, and place the highest value on your services.  You have no means to capture when something worked especially well, compared to your typical (and still effective) process.

With our Client Feedback Tool, we invested years of research into our patent-pending answering system, based on a self-centering “Met Expectations” sliding scale.  While our system provides the same percentage of “low” scores (~4%), only 16% of results fall in the top score category.  It’s this downward shift that gives you 400% more information with which to make decisions and improvements.  In the cases where you receive “Exceptional” feedback, you can now identify clients that valued your services much more than normal.  You can begin to see trends about what sets these situations apart.  Once you identify the contributors to these high scores, you can work them into your “typical” processes, enhancing value for all clients.

Suddenly, your high scores give you an opportunity to improve, just as much as your low scores do.

90% thumbs up feels good, but dramatically reduces the useful information you have.  

To learn more about our answer scale and how it works, contact us to schedule a demonstration.

Client Feedback Tool Testimonial – Cara Phillips

We interviewed Cara Phillips of Phillips Architecture about her use of the Client Feedback Tool.  Cara is Principal and COO, and has been using the Feedback Tool for four years.

Client Feedback Tool – New Features!

On January 23, 2011 the Client Feedback Tool received an update with several substantial new features and enhancements.

• New, high-security encryption.  The Client Feedback Tool is now secured by 128-bit SSL (https); the same level of encryption used by online banks and merchants.
• All reports now include extensive filtering options (previously this was limited just to Advanced Reports).
• Project Manager Role has been added.  PM’s are added to individual projects, and can see all feedback for that project.  This allows much more granular sharing of feedback than the current Team Manager role.
• When viewing results from a survey, you may click on the name of the respondent to quickly see a summary of that respondent’s past feedback.
• Projects may now be assigned to more than one team.
• New report – Response Details.  View responses to many different surveys in one consolidated report.  Allows you to quickly see all the feedback from a selected person; for selected project(s); etc.
• Enhanced “Export to Excel” capability.
• Enhanced importing capabilities.
• Dozens of other minor tweaks, enhancements, and fixes

ZweigWhite Press Release – Interview with Mike Phillips

ZweigWhite just issued a press release including comments from an interview with DesignFacilitator President Mike Phillips.

http://blog.zweigwhite.com/news/know-your-clients/

ZweigWhite is a leader in enhancing business performance for architecture, engineering, planning, and environmental consulting firms.  They, like many other experts in the A/E/C industry continue encouraging firms to gather feedback effectively, in order to improve service delivery and long term prosperity.

New Features!

DesignFacilitator is pleased to announce a new release with several new features and enhancements, available to all subscribers immediately.

1. Enterprise Integration Kit – Use a third party software to initiate a survey.
2. Reply to a respondent and log as follow-up – Now, when reviewing a survey response, you can reply directly to the respondent, and store the reply as part of your “follow-up” to the feedback.
3. Collect feedback via phone, other methods – Once you specify the required inputs to send a survey, you may select the “Send and Reply” button.  You will immediately be shown the survey, and can log the responses on behalf of the respondent.  You can, at this point, call and collect the feedback; or if you have already gotten the feedback via a printed survey, you may log the responses.  The feedback collected will be noted as being self-entered.
4. Tagging – When sending a survey, create/assign one or more “tags” to the survey.  This will allow you to categorize every survey with a parameter you can then report on.  This allows for virtually unlimited reporting flexibility.
5. Import Teams, Companies – You may now import lists of teams and/or companies when setting up your firm.
6. 40 other minor enhancements and fixes

Doing Feedback – Really

It’s not enough to talk about feedback.  You need a plan.

Feedback is perhaps the simplest, most effective way to dramatically enhance the quality of your firm’s projects and client relationships.  But “doing feedback” seems to be so hard to make happen.

Mel Lester, at The Business Edge, blogged about the “Knowing-Doing” gap over at his excellent E-Quip blog.  Take the 5 minutes to read that post, then come back to join us.

Mel pinpoints several reasons why firms fail to affect change in their organizations, and actually improve strategic areas (like client relationships).  Knowing that feedback is important isn’t enough.  You have to make doing feedback something everyone in your firm does.

A simple and powerful tool like our Client Feedback Tool provides an easy way to track feedback, measure results, and make sure feedback is happening.  But having a tool and keeping it in the toolbox doesn’t help.   Possessing a wrench doesn’t make you a mechanic.  Fixing a car does.

Fortunately, doing feedback doesn’t have to be as hard as rebuilding an engine.  The Client Feedback Tool allows anyone to get feedback, from anyone, any time.  Focus first on creating a positive feedback environment, and build a cultural support for it.  There’s no such thing as bad feedback.  If you find people are fearful to ask for feedback from clients; or feel they don’t have access to clients – then focus instead on just getting feedback.

Set a goal.  Perhaps everyone should get feedback once a week.  Sound like a lot?  How many different people do your employees interact with in a year?  If they got feedback from peers, clients, vendors, managers, subordinates  - anyone they work with – they could probably find at least 25 different people in a year.  That’s asking each person only twice a year for feedback.

To get started, let them decide who to ask; just require that they do ask at a certain rate.  Track how often people ask for feedback – make that the measuring point starting out.  It’s easy to manage, clearly defined, and will give a broad dose of constructive input to each employee.

After several months of gathering feedback, your teams should be comfortable with the idea.  In fact, most will have experienced many successes.  Praise and reward these successes.  Support the challenges and make a safe environment for identifying areas to improve.

Now that you have a culture of feedback awareness, you can focus on more specific goals with your feedback program.  Direct more feedback towards clients in a systematic, phased approach.  Leverage feedback to identify training needs, or to promote effective leaders.  Incorporate feedback into more specific, broader quality assurance systems.  Whatever your long-range goals are, they’ll be easily achieved once you have the feedback engine running.

The point is to start with something easy to measure, that will quickly effect behavior.  Getting your team used to just asking is a great first step.

Feedback – The Best Return On Your Investment

Feedback provides incredible returns on investment.  Simply asking for an evaluation of how your processes work for a client takes two minutes – but the information provided gives you valuable data to assure effective, successful projects.

Adding this all up, a $10 million firm may see over $210,000 in value added or money saved from effectively leveraging client feedback.  Regardless of revenue, the typical firm will increase profits 13% applying these simple tools and strategies.

Feedback is easy with a simple and powerful system like The Client Feedback Tool.  Two minutes of use brings immediate and measurable results.

Hot Firm 2010 Conference in D.C. This Week

The Zweig Letter Hot Firm 2010 Conference and Awards Celebration, presented by ZweigWhite, will be held October 27 & 28 in Washington, D.C.

The Zweig Letter Hot Firm Conference is an annual, 2-day event for growing A/E firms that features top design and environmental industry executives, entrepreneurs, authors, and many others who gather to share strategies for success, learn tactics from their peers, and leave with renewed inspiration for another successful year.

If you’re attending this event, please join Mike Phillips for his brief session on Client Feedback on Thursday, October 28 at 9:45am, directly following Ed Friedrichs’ presentation, or stop by the Client Feedback Tool Sponsorship table and say hello.

For more information on the event visit http://www.zweigwhite.com/events/hotfirm/index.asp.

Succeeding Isn’t Cheating

Do you ever wish for an easy way to be better than the competition?  How about an ethical way to “cheat” your way to being the best?

I had a great conversation about client feedback with Lee Frederiksen, Managing Partner at Hinge Marketing.  Lee is a behavioral psychologist by education, and has helped many architects, engineers, and other professional services firms engage their clients to build their brand and markets.  During our conversation, he was reminded of a story where one group within an organization was accused of “cheating” because they kept winning performance awards.   You can read the whole story on Hinge’s Blog.  I’ve excerpted below:

As it turns out, [the winning group] had simply adopted the practice of handing out a rating form each time they performed a service and encouraging the recipient to fill it out. This simple practice had an amazing effect. It turned an intermittent system of feedback into one that provided almost continuous feedback to the professional providing the support. In short, they knew that each interaction counted. They suddenly became more “helpful” and it showed in their evaluation ratings.

What happened is a typical result of what we’ve seen with our clients who deploy our Client Feedback Tool within their organization.  By engaging everyone in the process of collecting feedback, everyone becomes more aware of their performance – knowing it will be measured.  By collecting feedback from clients during projects (not just after they’re done), those doing the work naturally begin to perform better for clients.

Feedback works to change performance. Decades of well-controlled behavioral research clearly shows that it does so under the right conditions. For example, feedback has to be frequent, timely, and objective.

So, how do you “cheat” and become better than your competitors in an unfair way?  It’s really pretty easy.  Collect feedback when you can do something about it (i.e., before the project is over).  Get feedback as soon as you’ve just performed some work, while memory of it is fresh.  Ask questions that are specific and focused on what was just delivered.  Most importantly, have the people doing the work ask for the feedback!  This is the quickest way to assure each person working for your clients is focused on the clients’ needs, and aware of his performance.

When you have an entire firm of client-focused professionals, working to meet each client’s specific needs, there will be no contest between you and the competition.

2010 Best Firms to Work For Summit

 The Best Firms to Work for Summit, presented by CE News, Structural Engineering & Design, The Zweig HR Letter and the Environmental Business Journal, is today, September 28 and Wednesday, September 29 at the Palazzo in Las Vegas.  This two-day conference will explore topics such as retaining top talent in tough times, workforce planning in an economic downturn, firm cultures that motivate and inspire commitment, retooling your current workforce, diversification strategies, staffing and cash flow, managing overhead, training and workforce development, benefits integration, legal issues, and best practices, as well as provide unlimited networking opportunities for all involved in the business of architecture, engineering, and environmental consulting.   

If you’re attending this event, please join Mike Phillips for his 4:00pm session today: Improve Your Firm by Improving Your Value to Clients or stop by the Client Feedback Tool Sponsorship table and say hello.   

For more information on the event visit http://www.bestfirmstoworkfor.com/index.html.