Look at Feedback Cycles – Growing Your Business (Part 3)

Part 3 – 'Drive Change' and 'Communicate Back'

In part 1, we addressed “Explore”, creating a survey that focuses on ideas that can drive change and grow your business. Then we 'Uncover' the key results, and clarified the the way forward by “Clear your head'. In part 3, we are going to 'Drive Change' and perhaps most importantly 'Communicate back'.

Driving change is what the process is all about. If you don't action the plans from the feedback then getting the feedback was a waste of time for your clients and you. Take the extra information gained from 'Clear your head' and break the implementation into achievable chunks. Set yourself a realistic timeframe to make the changes so that it is not too shocking for involved parties.

Then finally, once you've decided on how you're going to change, 'Communicate back' and tell your clients, contacts, staff and suppliers. This action has several benefits:

• They know you have listened and will be more likely to participate next time.
• Referrals are great marketing and sales tools. Empowering your existing clients to share, enables them to better describe how you can benefit others.
• Those who didn't provide feedback will know you are acting on the feedback and will be influenced to get to know you better.

Build the feedback cycle into your business calendar so it happens automatically. It can be twice a year, annually or once every two years, depending on your clients and business.

When you develop the next survey incorporate some of the ideas from the open response question by incorporating into your closed response questions (where the answers are given by you in the survey to rate or select). It is generally known that something mentioned in an open response question would be ten times greater in a closed response question.

What are you waiting for? Get out there and get to know your tribe.

About the author

Kate Tribe is a quantitative market and social researcher. Tribe Research enables business, non-profit and government to grow from a better understanding of their tribe (clients, members, staff and stakeholders). Services include: custom research (survey design; online, postal and telephone data collection; analysis and reporting), education, and Tribal Tool-Kit.
Tribe Research www.triberesearch.com.au