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

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.

PSMJ Circle of Excellence Conference – Sept. 23 & 24

DesignFacilitator’s Client Feedback Tool is a proud sponsor of PSMJ’s Circle of Excellence Conference in San Diego, September 23 & 24, 2010.  

DesignFacilitator’s Mike Phillips will be moderating today’s 2:30 Panel discussion
“Keeping Your Clients Happy and Loyal.”

Conference attendees can also visit the Client Feedback Tool table to learn more about the tool and what it can do to increase the prosperity of your A/E firm.

PSMJ’s Circle of Excellence represents the top 20% of firms participating in PSMJ’s Financial Performance Survey that achieve the best overall business performance in the A/E industry. This distinction is awarded based upon a combination of 13 performance benchmarks that measure business operations in terms of profitability, growth, cash flow, overhead control, business development, project performance, and employee satisfaction.

For more information on PSMJ, and their Circle of Excellence Awards and Conference visit PSMJ Resources, Inc.

Can I send a feedback survey on behalf of someone else?

Introduction

In our travels and workshops, we have seen that many professions share common difficulties. One widespread limitation many firms experience is that their members simply do not request feedback frequently enough. When we ask the firm members why they don’t send more surveys, the responses range from “I forget to send them.” to “I don’t have time— can’t my administrative assistant or accounting people do this for me, perhaps when they send invoices?”

The Client Feedback Tool Solution

Fortunately, DesignFacilitator’s Client Feedback Tool solves these problems with its ‘Send-on-behalf-of’ feature.  With this feature, a firm manager can designate one or more firm members to send surveys on behalf of other firm members. For example, let’s say your firm manager has designated Al, an administrative assistant, to send surveys for you and other firm members. Acting as a proxy sender, Al creates a survey invitation in your name. All emails, responses and reports associated with this survey invitation will identify you as the sender. In fact, once Al sends the survey invitation, he cannot even see the answer report or modify the survey– but you can.

How it works

To begin, the firm manager designates proxy sender(s):

1. Log in to www.DesignFacilitator.com
2. Click My Firm in the left navigation pane, and then click Manage Firm Members in the right pane.
3. In the 4th column, “Send On Behalf”, select the firm member(s) who will send surveys on behalf of other firm members.

In order to send a feedback request, a proxy sender must know which survey template to send, when to send it, to whom, what project it regards, and so on. The Client Feedback Tool provides a convenient PDF form for this purpose. In the example above, you would probably fill in the form and give it to Al, because Al is sending the survey on your behalf . To obtain the form, log in to www.DesignFacilitator.com, click Other Resources in the left navigation pane, and then click Feedback Collection Information Request Form. Simply print the form and write in the data.

Proxy senders follow the normal procedure for requesting feedback:

1. Log in to www.DesignFacilitator.com
2. Click My Feedback in the left navigation pane, then click ASK on the cycle graphic. Select Send a feedback survey
3. Proxy senders (only) see a Send Survey on Behalf of: selection box at the top of the screen. There, they select which firm member to designate as the sender; that is, whose name will show in the invitation emails, the survey, the reports, and so on.

Note:    The Client Feedback Tool identifies the proxy sender in only two places: the Answer Report and the Modify Survey Edit screen.

You probably want to know if someone sends a survey using your name. So if your firm will designate proxy senders, we recommend that you visit your Set Preferences page in www.DesignFacilitator.com and make sure the first checkbox, “Survey sent on my behalf” is selected.

With the Client Feedback Tool’s ‘Send-on-behalf-of’ feature, even the busiest professional in your organization can enjoy the many benefits of client feedback by delegating the survey-send task to an administrative or accounting assistant.

Improving Your Response Rate – Part II

Client Feedback Tool subscribers often ask what they can do to get people to respond to feedback requests. In this article, I offer some tips you can use to improve your response rate. In Part I, I addressed what you could do to prepare the recipient before you send the feedback request. In Part II, I will discuss techniques you can apply while creating and following up on the survey.

Many factors affect the likelihood of a recipient responding to your feedback requests. The factors include, but are not limited to, the recipient’s

·    Quantity of received email
·    Reaction to the email subject line
·    Perception of the time and effort required to reply
·    Perceived benefits of answering your request (Will it really make a difference?)
·    Ability to remember to complete the survey later if it cannot be finished now

Sending the Survey

·    Pick the right time

You might have looked at the list above and thought, “I cannot control the quantity of email my client receives.”  That is true; but you can control when your survey invitation arrives. Consider how much email, especially spam, you receive between Friday afternoon and Monday morning. On a busy Monday morning, is one of your priorities answering feedback requests in your inbox? Our most experienced and successful Client Feedback Tool subscribers confirm that although it is often easiest to send surveys on a Friday afternoon, surveys sent between Monday afternoon and Thursday morning result in significantly higher response rates.  We recommend sending surveys about 10 AM local time on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday.

·    Make it stand out

Your survey invitation subject line should be simple and clearly identify that this is important information. One very effective technique is to start the subject line with the name of the project. Few people will trash an unopened email if the subject is one of their projects.  The Client Feedback Tool makes this easy for you by automatically inserting the project name into the subject line of the survey invitation.

·    Make it personal

By default, The Client Feedback Tool’s survey invitation email states that the feedback is important. Of course, this cannot match the sincerity of a short personal statement from you explaining why the recipient’s feedback is important to you— that it really does matter. You might also mention that the survey only takes about two minutes to complete.

Follow up!

·    If the recipient does not reply

There are many reasons why a recipient may not initially reply. Misdirected mail, time constraints, forgetfulness, apprehension, the list goes on. What can you do about it? Follow Up! Let him know that his feedback really is important. Call or email him; or send him a reminder through the Client Feedback Tool. Chances are that after the first time, he will realize that his feedback really is an important part of your process.

·    If the recipient does reply

Ironically, the correct action if the recipient does reply is the same as above— Follow Up! Let him know that you appreciate his response. If his response identified an issue or concern, that is OK— you have learned how to improve your process and his perception of it. If the response praised your efforts, thank him for the feedback. In either case, you have reinforced to the recipient just how important the feedback was to you.

Conclusion

We all understand that an open, bidirectional flow of information is in your best interest and that of your clients. The Client Feedback Tool is an essential conduit through which that information flows. In order to enjoy the most successful exchange of information through that conduit, consider employing the tips we presented:

Prepare your recipient. Before you send the survey, explain to him  it that it will help you help him.
Send your feedback invitation mid-week. Use the project name in the subject line. Add a personal note.
Always follow up! This reinforces your sincerity, increases the likelihood of future responses, and most importantly, it helps you become his most understanding service provider.

The results are in…. You need feedback!

How often do you meet your clients’ expectations?  Or perhaps more importantly, how often to you fall short of their expectations?

DesignFacilitator has been helping subscribers exceed their clients’ expectations since 2004.  Even so, a recent strategic partnership with PSMJ Resources, Inc. has provided an entirely new look at how firms measure up to clients’ expectations.

Typically, a DesignFacilitator subscriber uses the Client Feedback Tool on an ongoing basis, regularly requesting feedback from his firm’s clients.  These subscribers belong to firms whose philosophies include a commitment to collecting feedback; and they use the Client Feedback Tool to enhance their relationships and delivery of services.  In the last two years, looking across all data collected, these firms have received scores below “Met Expectations” only three percent of the time.  We see then, that engaging clients to find out what they really want from you allows firms to best meet their clients’ needs.  These firms ultimately keep more of their clients, and build the healthiest, most prosperous relationships.

Unfortunately, many of you have not yet realized the prosperity and satisfaction resulting from client feedback collection. DesignFacilitator has collaborated with PSMJ Resources to offer you a unique opportunity to gather client feedback. Simply participate in PSMJ’s Premier Award for Client Satisfaction Award, and you can send a one-time feedback survey to as many as 40 clients. This simple, cost effective process can actually pay for itself— but more on that later.  The data collection period ends October 30, 2009. DesignFacilitator will then compile the data and PSMJ will present awards to those firms that have demonstrated the greatest success from their clients’ perspective.

Although the Premier Award participation period is still open, early results have already provided significant findings.  Notably, firms that have no history of regular feedback collection receive “Below Expectations” ratings over ten percent of the time! This is more than three times higher than firms who use feedback on a regular basis!

What this reveals is that most firms do not know what their clients need and expect. Moreover, the only way to correct that blind spot is to ASK for feedback as soon as possible – before your clients become someone else’s clients.   Additionally, collecting feedback does far more than just increase the health of your professional relationships and keep you aware of your clients’ expectations. It also reduces liability risk, staff turnover, and burned-out project managers.  In fact, DesignFacilitator has worked with professional liability insurers who determined that feedback collection is so important that they provide 10% premium credits to firms who consistently collect it. Often these savings alone more than pay for the cost of the Client Feedback Tool.

The quickest way to get client feedback is to sign up for PSMJ’s Premier Award right away.  Through the end of the year, firms that buy the $495 Premier Award package from PSMJ receive a full credit towards a one-year Client Feedback Tool subscription with DesignFacilitator.  With the combination of these two services, you will quickly understand where you stand with 40 of your most trusted clients and how your client satisfaction measures up to the profession overall. You will even be able to collect feedback for the next 12 months from all your clients, partners, consultants, vendors, and anyone else whose relationship you value.

Do not wait.  The numbers are in.  Ten percent of your clients may be considering taking their business elsewhere.  Can you afford to lose them?

Visit http://www.psmj.com/surveys/products.aspx?v=item&i=1443 or contact DesignFacilitator at 866-4-DES-FAC for more information.