I’ve created a little feedback form that I’m sending to clients once I’ve completed their job. Nothing fancy or formal, just an opportunity for me to get some feedback and for them to share anything they’d like me to know. I sent my first one last week.
Here is the e-mail:
Hi Joe–
In an effort to continually improve the service I provide to my clients, I send out this short questionnaire at the conclusion of a job. If you would be willing to take a couple of minutes to let me know how I did on your project, I would greatly appreciate it. Your honest feedback is requested.
Please provide a 1-5 rating (1 = bad, 5 = good) for the following areas along with any comments you’d like to share:
1. Overall satisfaction: (1-5)
2. Communication: (1-5)
3. Timeliness of deliverable: (1-5)
4. Technical competency: (1-5)
5. Quality of deliverable: (1-5)
6. Anything else you’d like to share about the project or my service overall:
Thank you,
–Alex King
I’ve tried to keep it short, sweet and relatively unstructured so that it isn’t a burden and the client has room to share anything they want to. I’m not completely sold on the format – is it too abrupt? Any suggestions or tips on how to improve this are welcome.
I hope that this does 2 things:
- Gives me feedback on areas I can improve.
- Tells the client that I care about the job I’ve done for them and that I’ll try to improve in any areas they felt were lacking.
I’d be interested in hearing from folks who have done this in the past and what the results were.
I understand that you’re trying to keep it short, but you might want to consider adding in some questions that will let you figure out the drivers behind their answers. For instance, if they rated number 5 as a 1, you would obviously want to know why, but they might not take the time to type it out or whatever. But maybe with an extra question or two you could at least speculate that the Quality was rated low because of “X”. (or that Quality was rated 5 because of “Z” so you want to do more of “Z” perhaps)
There’s a very good chance that this extra step is not needed in this instance, but it’s something to keep in mind in case you find yourself lacking actionable information from the results.
I’d like for them to append comments wherever they like:
However I had trouble figuring out how to word that succinctly. Perhaps doing it like this would be better:
or:
I like the 2nd option, although my comment above still stands to some extent. It’s just sort of nature of the beast, people that LOVED or HATED your work are probably going to be pretty word for you (depending on their level of love or hatred) You’re probably going to have a tough time correcting for the people on the deep end of the hatred pool (I really doubt you have many of those honestly, but I could be wrong). People that are anywhere in the middle are probably going to be less willing to go into an explanation because it’s not important enough to them either way, but they’re most likely the folks you could correct for.