Worst thing about

What’s the worst thing about your product/service?
What’s the worst thing about your website?
What’s the worst thing about your team?

When you seek feedback from people in superlative term, it works. People answer more openly. If you ask “Name two things that can be improved in our product?”, it gives the impression that you are trying to be defensive or you created this questionnaire just because your manager asked you to.

Create a contest amongst your customer support executives on what’s the worst thing about your product/service. Results will surprise you.
Create a contest amongst your Beta testers on what’s the worst thing about your mobile app.
Create a contest amongst your newly hires on what’s the worst thing in hiring and onboarding process.
Create a contest amongst your employees on what’s the worst thing about your company's intranet portal.

Contests are better than surveys. People willing to give feedback will answer in both the cases but certain set of people tend to act when there is a carrot on the other side.
When you start finding worst thing en route you’ll find nearly all the flaws.
Creating great stuff means you need to go to great lengths.

What’s the worst thing about this blog?

Just one concern

At times, you get some concern from just one team member, from just one client or from just one customer. Your first thought will be ‘exceptions are always there. Ignore it’ or ‘this guy is finicky’.
Nope.
In this diplomatic world of ours not everyone complains. Not everyone is courageous enough to raise a concern. The concern from that one person can be concern of many more but others just prefer to ignore it. Most people, even if they encounter some problem/hassle don’t report it. That doesn't mean that concern went unnoticed. The feeling of discontent might simmer in people or remain in their subconscious for long. These people will give wrong feedback to others in their area of influence or at worst they might ditch your product/services.
Discontent leads to bad vibes and people with bad vibes spread cooked up information which leads to rumors. And Rumors are failure of leadership.
Concern from one person might also be a premonition. That person might be the first one to experience it and reporting it proactively. If you listen to the first one promptly then you can avoid big time issues/discomfort.


Understand concern from every single source, especially exceptions, and address it. And then broadcast that message to bigger audience who, you feel, might have been impacted. Address the concern. Broadcast it categorically. This will kills rumors and give people a sense of importance that their concern gets addressed. This is a small gesture but this can have huge impact.


Exceptions are not meant to be ignored.

Feedback

Last week I happened to visit a hospital’s waiting room. There TV was not working. Everybody in the room was clueless whom to contact. It seems to lie outside everyone’s domain of responsibility. Nurses, housekeeping staff, electrician et al were either nonchalant or busy with their daily chores. How great it would have been if some trigger\feedback was sent to maintenance folks automatically!


Feedback is necessary and does add value. Either we act on received feedback or not but one should actively seek feedback so that we are aware of diverse opinions. We generally tend to leave it to people (either our customer or client) to give feedback. But as nearly all of us are in crunch of time not many people takes out time to give feedback. People are more inclined in finding other option than mending the existing option. We can’t depend entirely on willingness of people to get feedback. Create processes that either automate feedback capture or prods people to give feedback. When ATM machines stops working some trigger should tell maintenance folks to act on it. Historic trend (per hour or, better, every ten minutes) can be collected for every specific machine based on its usage. Once that’s historic usage trend is violated system should flag that as discrepancy and highlight this to maintenance folks. They can validate whether it’s real discrepancy or just a blip. It will lead to decreased maintenance turnaround time and will lead to increased availability of machine hence enhanced customer experience. For how long banks will depend on security guard at ATM or unhappy customer to report ATM's malfunctioning to bank?


Any machine that can capture data should be used as feedback mechanism. The machines that don’t capture data should be modified to capture data and send it to right people for their processing.

If you are dealing with people then don’t rely on people proactively giving feedback. Make processes so that process prods people to give feedback. Like don’t let your waiters to decide whether to take feedback from customers or not. They might shirk from their responsibility many a times. Make this a process that every time some customer is billed, waiter has to mandatorily collect feedback while giving the bill to customer.

Right interpretation of feedback is also very important. Sometimes if you coerce people into giving feedback they won’t tell you the right thing but they will tell you the thing that is easiest\fastest for them. So do give leeway to people whether they want to give feedback or not. Always look for dissenters\outliers while analyzing feedback. Dissenters are the folks who will give you different feedback. Whatever that may be, right or wrong, but you will get different feedback from them. In this world of ‘schedule adherers’ or ‘people blabbering niceties’ or ‘intentionally vague people’ dissenters are rare breed so they must be appreciated for their thinking.
Actively collect feedback, improve, collect feedback, improve……..