You’ve followed protocol and you’ve executed a well designed and informative client satisfaction survey. Now what do you do with all the feedback?  Understanding what the client has to say about your performance is only the first phase in effectively using your survey results. To get the most from the information, create conversations with stakeholders, engage in knowledge transfer and identify and target lessons learned to guide future projects.

Create Conversations With Stakeholders

Satisfaction surveys are great for assessing strengths and weaknesses, but the true meaning behind the feedback – both positive and negative – may not be so evident. In fact, depending on how detailed the survey, evaluations can be meaningless without further discussion. Creating conversations with stakeholders is the key to identifying what worked well and what didn’t work, but more importantly – Why?

Encouraging decision makers to expand on why certain strategies were more successful than others guides critical analysis and leads to better relationships in the future. Discussion may reveal problems you didn’t know existed. These are important for clarification and future relationships. Remember, there are a whole host of issues – difficulties assimilating to organizational culture, miscommunication, even personality conflicts – that can lead to negative feedback. Having conversations with stakeholders builds relationships while providing valuable insights.

Engage in Knowledge Transfer

The beauty of satisfaction surveys is twofold – the feedback benefits you as well as your client by creating shared learning and a platform for knowledge transfer. You and your  team benefit by gaining insight into your success and failure, but your client can also use this information to further their organizational goals. Critiquing your performance spotlights strategies that worked well under a set of unique conditions and is powerful information for benchmarking or enhancing best practices and methodologies that work well.

Lessons Learned

As they always say, hindsight is 20/20.  As a cost effective management tool, nothing is as useful as lessons learned. Feedback obtained from your client satisfaction survey is the perfect way to put together a comprehensive, accurate guide for future projects. Feedback from surveys captures efficiencies, highlights how these processes can turn into best practices and serves as a guideline for new employees unfamiliar with how the team works. Lessons learned can also reduce the negative effects of attrition and help us reflect on why we do things a certain way, avoiding the “we should have done it like this” conversation.

Make the most of the feedback you receive from a client satisfaction survey by making certain to use it to engage conversations with stakeholders and reveal the “why” behind both positive and negative evaluations.  After all, feedback is subjective, but how you choose to benefit from it is not.