Feedback is a gift. (Surveys should respect that...)

Years ago, a former manager told me, "Feedback is a gift".

She was absolutely right. When someones takes the time to provide feedback, you're getting the gift of that person's time, experience, and perspective. It's why so many leadership courses recommend the first words you say when responding to someone providing you with constructive feedback is, "Thank you."

Companies often ask for your feedback in the form of surveys or questionnaires. (Sometimes they'll even show their appreciation by providing you with some tangible benefit for your time, such as bonus points for their loyalty program or a discount on your next visit.) A well-designed survey can help an organization discover minor process inefficiencies before they become major challenges, identify opportunities for innovation and improvement, and foster loyalty with valuable customers. ("They cared enough to follow-up and ensure everything was great!")

But a survey done poorly is a wasted opportunity, and sometimes worse than not having asked at all.
This weekend, my family and I went away on an overnight trip; I had earned a complimentary weekend-night stay as a loyalty program benefit, and my wife and I decided we should use it to take our children to see the Niagara Falls.

Be warned: this isn't a story about a horrible service experience. No creepy-crawlies found in the room. No food poisoning from the hotel restaurant. No inappropriate comments from any of the hotel staff. Nothing at all that ruined my family's getaway experience. Truth be told, my overall experience was good.

But it could have been better. I've been a member of their loyalty program for well over a decade, and I've stayed at many of their properties during that time. I've come to expect "excellent" from this hotel chain at every occasion, because historically that's what they've been able to deliver. That's the double-edged sword of "expectation", of course: the more frequently your expectations are exceeded, the higher the bar is set for "meets expectations" in the future... and the more easily it is to be disappointed.

I found an email from the hotel in my inbox this morning. The subject line read, "Thank you for staying with us. Tell us how we did by completing a short survey". While there was nothing about my experience that warranted immediate attention from the hotel during my stay -- I'm certainly not shy about asking for a manager and providing immediate feedback, both positive and constructive, when the situation warrants it -- there were definitely opportunities for improvement. And as a loyal customer of the hotel chain, I think it's in my best interests to provide feedback on my stay so things might be even better the next time I visit. So I began to complete the survey.

"Overall, how satisfied were you on your visit?"
"How likely are you to stay with us again if you're in the area?"
"How likely are you to recommend this hotel to family and friends?"
True to it's subject-header promise, it was indeed a "short survey"; there were fewer than ten questions in total, and none of them required more than a quick click on a scale. Unfortunately, none of the questions gave me the opportunity to explain my rating or provide further details. And that's a problem.

Because to smart people working at smart companies, the "why" matters.
Undoubtedly, open-ended questions are more work. Unlike those "pick a number" questions that can be automatically tabulated, sorted, and reported as averages, responses from open-ended feedback questions have to be read, manually classified, and (often) directly addressed. Sure, I responded "Yes" to the question asking, "Was the room and bathroom clean?" But this is a respectable, global hotel-chain... aren't clean rooms and bathrooms the absolute minimum to be expected? (And will the answer to that question do anything more than allow the Hotel Manger to point to an average score and say, "More than half of the people who stay here agree our rooms are clean!")

Feedback is a gift. Those open-ended questions are also more work for the respondents too, because they have to take the time to provide a more thoughtful answer. And if you have customers willing to provide you with feedback by completing a survey, shouldn't you give them the opportunity to give you something useful?


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