Why is Member Feedback Important?
When it comes to member satisfaction, engagement and retention - member feedback is an important tool. Member feedback can help your association understand your members’ needs, wants and pain points so that you can improve your products and services accordingly.
Specifically, member feedback helps you:
- Measure member satisfaction
- Understand your members’ likes, dislikes and pain points
- Make members feel engaged and connected with your association and your products/services
- Allows you to make more informed and strategic decisions to improve products & services
- And (hopefully!) increase member retention, revenue and overall satisfaction
Ways to Collect Member Feedback
Please note: In this article, we will focus on broad and generic ways to collect feedback from your membership. However, you may want to tailor your audience and correlating methods around different member types and occasions (post-event, post-launch, etc.).
So now that we know how important member feedback can be, how do we collect it?
There are two main types of feedback: prompted (i.e., you asking for feedback) vs. unprompted (i.e., you not asking - but getting it anyway). In this section, we’ll focus on prompted feedback and provide some suggestions for receiving it.
Prompted Feedback
- Surveys: One of the most common ways to collect feedback is to send out a customer satisfaction survey (whether quarterly, annually, etc.).We recommend sending these out via email. You can also make surveys easily accessible on your member’s online portal via your website. Though deciphering which questions you should ask would require a seperate blog post, make sure that your questions focus on why your member joined or is still a member.
- In-the-Moment Feedback
- Pop-Up Surveys: Pop-up forms can be set up throughout your website to collect feedback from members after key events or actions or around a specific timeframe. For example, you may want to add a feedback pop-up to appear after a member chatted with a chat agent on your website, or marked a certain action as “completed”. Unlike surveys (which often require more time and effort to complete), pop-ups should be quick and simple for members to submit. We recommend keeping it to (1) a star rating, (2) one or two multiple choice questions (if needed) and (3) an optional, additional comments section.
- During Conversations: One of the most traditional ways to collect feedback is to ask your members for their opinions during a meeting or when you are talking to them. After training or an annual membership review meeting, be sure to ask your clients how you did! Pro Tip: Come to the meeting prepared with a couple of questions that you would normally ask in your customer satisfaction survey. You can pepper these questions in at some point during the meeting. That way, you’ll get the answers that you need in the moment. You won’t have to wait for members to respond or send a ton of follow up emails, and you’ll limit the amount of “asks” you’re requesting. Once you collect this information, you can fill out and submit the customer feedback survey on their behalf so that it is quantifiable.
- Review Websites: An important part of online reputation management in today’s day and age involves staying abreast of what’s being said about your association. You’ll need to check various review and social media websites. Instead of simply responding and forgetting about the feedback received across these platforms, be sure to collect and take note of both the positive and the negative feedback received across these platforms.
What We’re Doing at Euclid Technology
At Euclid, your feedback is important to us! In order for us to improve the overall client experience and the support that we provide, we have created a mini feedback survey using ClearVantage Association Management Software. This survey pops up when you mark an action item as “Ready to Close”.
With this new feature, you can now provide feedback on each and every action item! The data that we collect here is vital for improving our customer service and support, and we encourage you to fill it out - whether your experience was positive or negative.
The pop-up was created to be quick and painless for clients to fill out. As shown below, the pop-up includes one required section (the star rating) and an optional comment box to provide any further details.
We hope that this article helps in gathering more feedback from your members. And we would love to get your feedback too!
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