6 Jun 2019
Learn how to write effective and valuable customer feedback. Discover tips for providing constructive criticism and understanding what makes feedback useful for both businesses and consumers.
Tips for businesses on how to write good and useful feedback, helping them identify valuable feedback worth highlighting publicly.
Polite, constructive, and detailed feedback is what proves most useful in practice. This applies whether the reader is a potential customer or a provider who can improve their business based on the opinions received.
Last week, we wrote about the reasons why a customer decides to leave feedback. Let's stay in the consumer's shoes for another week and look at how to write feedback so that it has value for the reader. After all, we are all customers and can follow these tips when we ourselves write feedback for a company we have been a customer of. For businesses, these tips help identify useful feedback amidst the sea of opinions received. They can be used to improve operations or for public recognition, thereby attracting new customers.
Good feedback should contain enough detail for the reader to understand what happened and what contributed to a good, neutral, or bad experience. Constructive feedback should also include more or less concrete suggestions on what the company can improve to provide an even better customer experience.
Feedback should cover the entire purchasing experience, with an emphasis on employees' interactions with customers. The reader should learn whether employees are trying to help and how they influence (or could improve) the customer's experience. If feedback only concerns the purchased product, it will affect product sales but not necessarily sales from the same provider.
There's no rule for how long good feedback should be. However, honest feedback that addresses specific issues and describes the situation in detail will be more useful to the reader. It will give them a good insight into the consumer's experience and allow them to imagine what the writer actually went through.
The presence of personal information in feedback can lead to delays in public publication. Even if it's praise that is welcome for an employee, they might be uncomfortable if their details are publicly exposed. Personal information should only be included in feedback if it is necessary and highly relevant.
Even in the case of a bad experience, it's important to remain calm and write objective feedback. Insults and hate speech obviously have no place in constructive feedback. Negative feedback is also much more credible if the writer expresses themselves appropriately and doesn't stoop to the level they allegedly experienced from the provider. The reader will form their own opinion if the experience is described correctly and honestly.
Sometimes we write in the heat of the moment, and the final feedback doesn't convey the intended message. Therefore, it's recommended that consumers reread their feedback after writing it and correct any mistakes. A good question to ask oneself is: “Will the reader correctly understand my purchasing experience after reading my feedback?”