Key Points:
• Autopsy approach - what it is and why you shouldn't use it
• What the best time is to ask for feedback
• Using a Survey Conversation as the better alternative
• Why the timing of your questions encourages others to give their feedback more freely

Takeaways:

• Why your old professor had it right: results are only interpretable if you have high response rate.

• Our gut feeling about surveys is correct - we’re only hearing from the extremes.  Here’s how to avoid this.

• Use customer feedback in ways you would normally never consider.

• Your results are meaningless without key components.

Doc Champagne gives us a deeper look at just 2 of his 5 principles to help us get the most beneficial feedback . He explains the how and the why to help you get exactly the type of information you were seeking.

Takeaways:

• Some people are good at giving feedback and some aren’t, so learn the tools to help get the most useful results.

• How you ask the question is one of the most important ways to get useful feedback.

• Learn how to guide others with your questions to get more meaningful answers.

• Why should others give up their valuable time to help you? Give a specific reason why!

• Always let others know what’s in it for them.

Takeaways:

• The technology has long existed to easily do this, so why aren’t you doing it?

• There is a right and wrong way to close-the-loop, but it is far more forgiving than violating other Principles of Customer Feedback

• Your audience will feel more engaged and connected with your organization even though they are simply filling out an online survey!

• Closing-the-Loop makes your audience WANT to respond to your questions again and again.

Takeaways:

• Create SYSTEMS to achieve goals – don’t create goals without systems
• When you set goals, you are failure every day until you reach your goal – why would you want to live this way?
• Follow the system and “the score takes care of itself”
• “Even the very wise cannot see all ends” – stop pressuring yourself with lifetime goals
• Use triggers, personal dashboards, and create a system to achieve all you want out of life

Takeaways:

• There is real “medicine” out there in the form of psychological principles that have been tested and demonstrated over decades. Take the medicine because it works.

• There are far more people selling banana-jalapeno-cinnamon milkshakes because it worked for their particular case one time so they mistakenly think it will work for other people in other situations. Huge mistake!

• Even ideas that are totally bogus will work sometimes just by coincidence. So when a tool or gizmo or method doesn’t work for you, don’t waste time re-studying the method and thinking about what YOU did wrong.  If you were sold on “it works for me it will work for you” then it’s not you – it’s the tool that doesn’t work!

Takeaways:

• As it is popularly used, this practice suffers from methodological errors and violates principles of psychological measurement with the predictable result of lower response rates and uninterpretable results.

• We like to think we are complex and have many layers to us, so don’t then assume others can be simply described by one and only one category.  Use surveys to extract the full depth and complexity of those you want to pull into your orbit.

• As I’ve preached before, treat prospects as you would a first date.  Would you ask your date a single question (“Are you adventurous, creative, reserved or intelligent?  You can only pick one!”) and then design the evening around that bucket?  Not unless you want your date to run away, and that’s what your customers are doing.

Takeaways:

• Of the 3 billion people coming onto the internet in the upcoming years, many of those will be building products and services.  Some just like yours!  Your competitors have just multiplied exponentially!

• It is no longer enough to just “satisfy” customers in this competitive field.  You need LIFERS.  You need them focused on you and not looking to the next shiny new object.

• Entrepreneurs must continually and accurately gather customer feedback and act on it in a meaningful and transparent way to Keep their Customers Forever.