The importance of giving feedback (and the BEST 5 minutes you can give your small business friends).
My good friend just got her certification to administer Birkman assessments (think behavior and strengths test), and she needed a few guinea pigs to take the test and have her deliver and interpret their results. A recent conversation went something like this…
Her: So to complete the certification, I need a couple…
Me: OH MY GOD, ME ME ME!
Her: …people to take to the assessment. Ok, are you sure? You’d need…
Me: YES! A THOUSAND TIMES YES! I LOVE A QUIZ.
Her: …ok, cool. So you’ll take an online test and I’ll go over your results with you and…
Me: I LOVE BEING ASSESSED. THIS IS THE BEST.
Her: (probably quiet but thinking “you are so weird”)
Me: OMG THIS IS THE BEST DAY EVER… (likely still talking…)
So, yeah, I’ll admit that maybe part of this weird affinity for assessments is my general quirkiness as well as my love of observing personalities and people and emotion and how we all do our authentic thing in the world. But I also suspect that my jump at the opportunity to be evaluated is deeply connected to something else that many of us, especially creative entrepreneur types, crave… feedback.
In the usual roundabout way that I like to get to the point (see: title of this post), there is nothing, and I mean nothing, more meaningful to me than honest feedback. And from here forward, I’m talking about feedback about my work.
Sharing your experience by giving a small business review after you work with someone is like icing on the cake for them. Think about it. Most of the time you work with a business, you buy the thing you’re buying or get the service you purchased, and then it’s just over. You move on to the next thing. Often we don’t close the feedback loop.
I know I speak for a lot of us when I say, we are not done yet. We are WAITING. We are tapping our fingernails on the desk (or biting our fingernails, if you’re me, ugh), waiting to hear something. Anything. Do they like their photos? Were they happy? Did all of their prints come? Will they ever hire me again or am I the WORST PHOTOGRAPHER EVER? I don’t know. I just don’t know. Maybe that’s a little dramatic. Every once in a blue moon, I’m a little dramatic.
But, if you don’t tell us what the experience was like, we will never know. (Of course as a good business owner, we should be checking in with you, asking for that feedback.) If you have a less-than-stellar experience, you’ve gotta tell us! I haven’t experienced a bad review yet, but gosh, I can’t imagine hearing about it online. I want you to tell me if something went differently than you expected, so I can make it right. I need to hear what’s really in your heart. “Man, I wish she’d taken a few more photos of our middle kid.” Ok, that was a joke. I love a middle kid and I have a bad habit of giving them a lot of my attention.
But, truly… I need to hear if you absolutely loved your framed prints (heck, I want to see a picture of your new gallery wall, please and thank you). I need to know if you got a slightly damaged print shipped to you (umm, no way, let’s fix that asap). I need direct feedback (just a good ol’ email or text works), and also feedback I can share with the public (reviews). Not only does it help me to improve the experience for my clients, but it also helps me to communicate to new clients what working with me is like. Because I actually have no idea… only you do.
I get tons of requests for feedback and evaluation, from doctors visits to oil changes, and it’s so easy to skip them, assuming someone else will take care of it. But now that I’m a small business owner, I get it. I get the need to know what it was like to be on the other side of the experience. And now I try my best to complete every one of those requests.
The feedback benefits list goes on and on. Reviews help us to provide testimonials for our website, they help streamline the type of clients that come to us, and they give a potential client an honest idea of what they’re in for when working with us. They give words to your experience. (And I hate to jump to the online marketing benefits, but it’s a real thing… Google reviews are gold. They boost SEO, which my smart friends tell me is really good, and they help the right people to find us.)
Small business owners are juggling doing our actual job as well as all of the support roles that go with it. Marketing is a huge one, and so many of us feel the least connection with that part. So next time you see a request for a review, think about who is on the other side of that ask. It’s someone who wants to know how they can help boost your next experience from average or fine or lacking… to great.
Let them know. Taking five minutes to share your experience is the most generous thing you can do.