I had previously spent some time going through our Customer survey responses. Our survey is like many others: it asks a variety of questions about our performance, provides an opportunity for written commentary, and is summed up with a question similar to "how likely are you to recommend?". In addition to the quantitative scores, the survey team performed of sentiment analysis to summarize the intent of the comments.
My reactions were (unsurprisingly) varied: happiness & pride coupled with nearly equal measures of dissatisfaction and regret.
I revisited the survey results this week and the activity triggered personal reflection on the nature of feedback. And how different feedback mechanisms have varied impacts.
Take a stroll through some photos on your phone. While they are primarily remembrance, they also provide feedback about ourselves and others, exactly as we looked in a certain time and place. While they are precise and objective, they are perfectly still and quiet. This allows our minds to use our memories to fill in the rest of the scene.
Video provides richer feedback, with movement and sound to augment the visual scene. Which means video is also prone to more cringe-inducing moments than photos. The viewer simply cannot gloss over the video's objective recollection of the event.
The feedback from comments is fundamentally different. Even when quantified, it's subjective. Even at it's most comprehensive, it's incomplete. And it frequently lacks enough context for the recipient to fill in the gaps. Further, it's delivered unilaterally, preventing real-time questions and answers.
These differences from other types of feedback do not invalidate the feedback in comments. However, comments do require contextualization to gain the most value from them. That is, working to place the comments back in the context from which they originated allows one to understand their cause.
Failing to do so makes it easy for us to make excuses for our behavior, actions and words -- or lack of the same -- and prevents us from getting true value from the comments.
It's often said that feedback is a gift. I think this statement is true in a deeper sense than it's typically said: Like a gift, we need to take the effort to unpack feedback in order to get the true value that rests within.
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