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Companies asking for feedback just feels relentless, doesn’t it? You finish a phone call and you’re asked to stay on the line to answer a ‘short’ survey, and THEN you get a follow up text message where you’re asked to rate the service you received. Or you walk out of a service station and you’re asked to push a button to ‘rate your experience,’ as if paying for a tank of petrol and a Mars bar has been the highlight, or the lowest point, of your day. Or there’s a message on the bottom of your fast-food receipt encouraging you to log on to a website to fill out a feedback survey, with the incentive of a free serve of fries or a cookie on your next visit. It feels like no matter what you do, or where you go, you’re asked to provide feedback on your experience.
But why? No one cares, right? What are you doing with my feedback, anyway? Doesn’t it just get stored on a dusty server somewhere in a back office, or, more likely, get sucked into a paper shredder that’s stored neatly below a ‘complaints’ box? And don’t get me started on the endless 5-star ratings that companies shove in your face. Who believes that a company consistently gets everything right? Customers like myself are cynical. We’ve been burnt before. There’s no such thing as a 5-star company.
Well, you’d be surprised. Frequently, our feedback directly impacts a product that a company offered. Your favourite burger might have had a sauce that was too spicy until consumer feedback toned it down. Your fridge might have been built with extra storage after customers complained about not being able to fit as much in it as they thought. Or your banking app is easier to use now because users left feedback about navigation. Feedback does get read and when it’s implemented it does make a difference.
Learner feedback is critical to the success of Kineo and our course library, so we’ve implemented the star-and-feedback system. On every course that you or your learners finish, we ask for a star rating out of 5 and we provide a textbox for written feedback. Every month we receive about 10,000 pieces of feedback in star ratings and text feedback combined.
Let me repeat that for those who haven’t finished their first coffee of the day: Ten. Thousand. Feedbacks.
And we go through each and every one of them.
And without a doubt that feedback goes on to improve our courses.
Here’s an example of the kind of useful feedback we have received:
- how some assessment questions can be difficult to interpret,
- how navigating through the course can sometimes be tricky,
- how some learners are using older technology that won’t integrate smoothly with our authoring tool for some reason, and
- how links and legislation can be out of date.
And if that isn’t impressive enough, our learners currently rate our courses at 4.5 stars out of 5. There’s no tricks, no deleted negative feedback, no inflated praise here – just an honest 4.5/5-star rating for our work. That’s impressive.
I get it – leaving feedback can be a hassle. Sometimes you just want to click past that next screen and get on with the next task in your list. But if you stop for even a minute, rate our course and leave some sound feedback – I guarantee you it is seen and it is used to improve our courses.
Now – how did I do? Leave your feedback below 😉
