Romi Mahajan recently opined aloud, as he usually does, about the need for context when it comes to feedback. His two main points of contention were temporal (when) and situational (where). While I agree, both these pieces of metadata are extremely relevant while embarking on a feedback initiative, I think he is missing the elephant in the room: operational context.
Consider this: An airline decides to collect feedback across the board. Flyers, QR codes, email invitations, iPad based physical surveys. The full court press. All data is collected and tagged with both timestamps and location identifiers. The piece that will complete this picture is customer identifiers. Business or Casual customer? Route information. Plane size. All these attributes provide operational context.
Let’s consider another example: A software company, collecting feedback over the web. Cross-linking data from surveys to customer tiers. What about length of the customers overall experience with the company? The company has deep website behavioral data with Omniture or Google Analytics. So what about combining the two and running regression analysis or developing customer persona’s using CHAID analysis?
While there are no “turnkey” solutions other than paying Medallia, Attensity or Satmetrix $125k (and yes – they can do it all for that price point) – simple things like appending custom variables to surveys can get you 80% of what you need at 1/10 the price. (OK, maybe 1/5.)
Point being, when collecting feedback, think about the customer’s context.
On a related note – my company is working through a project for the Washington State Ferries, here in Seattle, where we are planning to put QR codes (with routing information encoded) on all the ferries that the Department of Transportation operates here. This will give us the operational context, beyond than time and location, for users to give feedback. The location component becomes intrinsic to the data collection process because we plan on using smart phones to collect the feedback.
If you have a project, like the WSDOT and would like for to collaborate, please feel free to email me – vivek[dot]bhaskaran
[at] surveyanalytics [dot] com.
About Vivek Bhaskaran
