Now feedback can be inserted and gathered from both services

FRP’s feedback systems primarily gather from an individual and deliver to an individual instantly.

There may be times you would like to share the feedback with the wider community, such as those on Facebook or Twitter. Of course, not all the time!

Also, you may wish to gather feedback from particular groups, and integrate this within your own feedback reports.

FRP’s Social Connect Module does just this. So for example, excellent feedback from a customer can instantly be posted on either social network at the click of a mouse.

The value? First of all your get the opportunity to share good news with a massively wider community, and secondly, even if feedback isn’t so good, you can actively promote your response.

rapid360 was launched to fill the gap and specifically designed to give clents the opportunity to set up and deploy appraisals in the minimum amount of time and cost.

Clients simply supply a list of questions and the participants, and rapid360 does the rest. It handles all the setup, administration and reports to deliver rapid answers to 360 surveys.

The Government’s Equality Strategy ‘Building a fairer Britain’ is underpinned by the two principles of equal treatment and equal opportunity. For the NHS, this means making it more accountable to the patients it serves and tackling discrimination in the work place. The Equality Delivery System (EDS) is the vehicle through which all NHS organisations have to account for the fair delivery of services across their organisation.

Whilst many health authorities are in their early implementation plans for EDS, the healthfeedback system has already deployed a flexible framework for providing end to end rapid EDS measuring and reporting solutions.

The flexible solution gives organisations the freedom to choose how they gather insight (cards, tablets, web-enabled devices such as PDAs and smartphones, call centre). All the acquisition, processing and reporting is handled by the healthfeedback system. There is complete flexibility as to how data is displayed for the 4 EDS objectives, so different reports can be produced for the different types of reader.

For example, a ‘star’ configuration can easily be used to capture data whilst displayed as a colour-code polar chart to highlight priorities:

So for example, the EDS survey can be offered to patient as feedback cards and processed by the included Freepost service. Alternatively, patients or staff may visit a web portal which takes them directly to the survey. The portal works on virtually any type of device, so collection may be on smartphones such as Blackberries or iPhones, iPads, laptops or virtually any web-enabled mobile device.

Watch a 5 minute presentation on the EDS Solution

For more information, contact Martin Kentish, martin@freerangepeople.co.uk or 0788 7778181.

The system uses innovative smartphone technology to deliver student or parent feedback instantly to the classroom. Students for example, can have their say on any issue or answer any question posed by the teacher.

The benefit is staff can quickly feel the pulse of how things are going, or what people think on a particular subject.

For more information, visit www.fedoo.co.uk

Most people have a innate understanding that feedback is important and can have a direct impact on an organisations performance. Yet in order to commission any feedback project it is important to understand the real value to the company.

Here we will look at a simple example of how a simple feedback program can be tied into profitability.

One the most accepted and most powerful tools to increase profitability is a personal recommendation. We will look at a simple example here to emphasise the point.

If a company turns over £1m and 50% of those sales are directly related to a personal recommendation, we can easily attached a value to that recommendation of £500k. The cost of those new sales is approximately zero, as customers do not need to be paid to make that recommendation.

If the percentage of active recommenders dropped for some reason to say, 10%, then we can easily see £400k of new sales are being lossed.

Therefore each 10% swing equates to a £100k of additional or lost sales.

So as recommenders decrease, spend on traditional methods (e.g. advertising) to gain customers needs to go up in order just to maintain the same turnover. As recommenders go up, less spend is needed on these traditional methods.

There are a multitude of questions you could ask about a customer’s satisfaction, relating to the transactions a customer went through to become a customer. However, the easiest question to ask relates to the outcome of their experience. The best indicator of this is their enthusiasm to recommend.

So Where do you start?

First, find out what percentage of people who are current customers do so as a result of a recommendation. This could already be known from existing sales data which could serve as a starting point. As in the example above, the value of those recommendations can easily be calculated.

Secondly, find out how enthusiastic they would be to recommend you after they have been a customer. This is easily done on a 0-10 scale.

Lastly, ask why they scored the way they did. This would help you understand what particular experiences were the main factors in their enthusiasm to recommend you.

As we are not demanding the customer answers dozens of questions, just two, it’s a relatively easy for a customer to participate in a survey to give you the answers.

How to gather the answers

If you know who the customer is, it’s a relatively easy thing to ask them the necessary questions. Customers could for example

• Complete a web survey which is sent to them via email after a transaction or at a given point.
• Call a call centre or complete a phone survey after a telephone transaction.
• Receive a feedback card with a product or handed to customers after receiving a service, sent back through Freepost.
• Use their mobile phone to complete an electronic survey.

If you do not know who the customer is, more effort is required to communicate and engage with them and get them to respond. E.g. customers may be willing to tell you what they think or require some incentive to respond (e.g. vouchers off next purchase)

Given the simple nature of the results, customer responses can either be stored in an electronic database (best) or an Excel table during the data gathering phase. At the end of that phase, the data can be brought together for analysis.

Examining the Data & Calculating a baseline.

From above, we have two elements of data. One is the score (0-10) and the other is the verbatim comment.

We can break the respondents down into three groups:

• Promoters (those who score 9 or 10)
• Passives or neutrals (7 or 8 )
• Detractors (0-6)

Promoters are active recommenders of your products and services. They are highly likely to encourage friends and colleagues to purchase from you. People who are neutral, still consider you well, but not so well as to risk their personal reputation to recommend you. Lastly, detractors are people who would put others off from using you. The lower their score, the more likely they will be actively discouraging other potential customers.

The baseline can be calculated simply by taking the percentage of active recommenders less those who are active detractors. i.e. the net promoter score (NPS) is:

%Promoters – %Detractors

So if you have equal percentages of both, the net promoter score is 0. I.e. the positive impact of people who recommend you is balanced by the number of people who discourage others. So the net gain in sales as a result of the recommending activity is zero.

What to do with the data?

Any data that is collected should guide necessary actions that improve the score, and therefore referrals. When you look at the verbatim comments attached to each group of people, it usually says what you are doing well that stimulates referrals, and what is going wrong that detracts from it.

So a simple action plan could be to gather the appropriate staff, praise them for what’s going well (encouraging more of it) and look at ways how to fix the problems highlighted in the feedback.

Better still, you could deliver the insight instantly to the appropriate person so they can address the issues in the shortest amount of time. By tracking their actions you add value to the regular management meetings: you will be looking at what has been done rather than what needs to be done.

By continuously monitoring a customers desire to recommend you, and putting in place a framework to help them say, you are in a far better position to continuously improve referrals and profitability. By looking at the NPS score on a regular basis, you can attached this value to the revenue derived from recommendation.

END

Lets be honest. We know feedback is good for us but there is a little bit of trepidation as to what we might discover about ourselves.

This is a personal issue. Feedback reflects upon us as individuals. The good stuff is warmly welcomed but the bad stuff isn’t as anticipated with such glee.

In our personal lives this may highlight there is some improvement needed. We could be a better spouse, friend or volunteer for example. In our work lives, it may suggest we could do a better job.

Often a corporate response to this issue would be to set up a complaints system (an often misplaced activity in my humble opinion). Surprise surprise, the result of doin g so is nothing but complaints. I don’t know about you, if all I get is moans I can easily get dispirited about doing anything about them.

Yet if I get both the good and the bad, i can see dealing with the bad is a good way of getting more of the good. And lets face it, we would all like more of the good stuff.

Think about training a dog. It works when the dog is rewarded and this creates the desire for more reward. People aren’t that different in that respect.

The fear of receiving bad news is the biggest barrier doing anything to find out at all. This may be the fear of being accountable to do something about it, or the fear of what it says about your ability to perform your particular function.

There are also a whole load of excuses that could be used to do nothing. It may be questionning the methodology, response rates, it may be an attitude that says ‘If someone has something to say they’d say it to me’. There are truths in both these statements, but it rarely takes into account that beneath these are other issues to consider.

For example. Customers don’t like to make a fuss, feeling uncomfortable expressing their views face to face. It may be the staff lack of understanding that other methodologies (e.g. mystery shopping) don’t convey the breadth and diversity of people’s day to day experience.

It may be the failure to recognise that most people can’t be bothered to say or go through the hurdles of existing channels, so when you do hear something it could represent the views of many more customers. Anyone who has called a customer service hotline and gone through the frustrating automated menu system will fully understand.

Actually the answer to all this is surprisingly simple. In fact, the answer lies in making things simple for everyone concerned. Make it simple for people to air their views, make it simple for the right people to hear and act upon those views, and do so in a way that makes it quick to hear what you are doing well and what can be improved.

-Martin

When I was first asked to conduct some 360 appraisals for a commercial client, I had little idea what 360 surveys actually were. So like many, I Googled a few phrases and then looked to solution providers. For what appeared essentially very straight-forward, there seemed to be a fair amount of mysticism (and not to mention cost!) of actually doing it.

So what is a 360 Assessment?

Essentially, all this is a picture of someone’s performance based on a view of themselves, and many of the key people they interact with.  By combining these views, you receive a fuller ’360′ picture of that person’s performance. This picture is built up of their own view of their performance, people who manage that person, people who report to that person, and any peers who work alongside that person. This picture could also include other people like patients or even suppliers. For the purpose of simplicity of this article, we will just consider other members of staff who interact with a particular manager.

Why do it?

Good management performance is a key driver of effective organisations. Poor management performance is the most common reason for major problems within the workforce. This includes poor productivity, staff absenteism, poor profits and high staff turnover. Google ‘impact of poor management’ to discover a wealth of background information. So although people can see and feel the impact on a day to day basis, to reinforce areas of good performance or identify areas of improvement, some basic metrics are needed. This is where the 360 comes in: it gives you a clear picture of how management is performing.

What do you need to start?

There are only 3 requirements:

1. A set of questions that are a good indicator of performance.

2. A set of people who will give you some answers.

3. Some tools to gather and present the data.

1 Questions

This is often the most time consuming part: agreeing on what you need to ask in the first place. In my experience, most of the questions you need to ask have already been used in other 360s conducted. In Healthcare for example, a good starting point is the Royal College of Physicians “Colleague multi-source feedback questionnaire” (will open in a new window).

We will use this as a template to demonstrate the steps needed.

2 People

360s contain two types of people. People who are being assessed and people who are doing the assessing. For self completions, these are the same person.

For the sake of demonstration, I have created a simple imaginary ‘practice’ where two doctors Dr H Corbett and Dr T Smith are receiving a 360 appraisal. Please note it does not reflect any particular organisational structure, just to illustrate a point. Here’s how it might look. This is pretty much a common structure in any organisation, so feel free to replace with CEO, MD, departmental managers etc.

So you can see there are 6 people in the organisation. Only the 2 people receive a full 360. Sue manages the two doctors. The two doctors are peers of one another. Jo, Sam and Dave all report to the appropriate doctor. So when it comes to getting data from the people, here’s a full list of the completions required.

So you can see, in order to conduct a full 360, 9 surveys require completion.

3. Tools to Collect and Present the Data

If you Google ’360 appraisal software’ you will discover many excellent vendors. However, when I looked into many in order to use for a client piece of work, I discovered how bewildering and costly many of them were. Given that data collection, or surveying, is actually a simple process, I wrote our own rapid360.co.uk system to simplify it. As easy as it would be to plug our own system, I would highly recommend people to research all the products before making any decision who to use.

The key elements you require are:

• A way of presenting the 360 survey to the right members of staff.
• A way of collecting the responses into an appropriate database.
• A way to track who has completed, including the generation of reminders.
• A way of viewing the results that are appropriate to your needs.

What a survey may look like.

Using the Royal College of Physicians as a template, and the above staff configuration for the demonstration, I have plugged this data into rapid360 to create the following survey. One of the concerns people have is anonymity. Although people’s names are required by rapid360, this is only for tracking purposes and names are not used in the reports.

The survey may be too small to see the detail, but click on the image to take you to the actual survey hosted on rapid360.co.uk.Reporting

Most 360 appraisal software comes with a suite of reporting tools and administrative functions. Essentially these are to support the appraisal process (e.g. track responses and generate reminders) and produce  360 reports. It is usually client requirements that determine how a particular report looks, but the contents fall into two types:

• Displaying the values of the tickbox questions, broken down into average, self, manage, peer and reports.
• Verbatim comments and any textual analysis.

So the tickboxes clearly display the results, and the verbatim comments explain why those results were given. One particularly useful function of these graphs is to highlight the descrepency between how staff see themselves compared to how other staff see them. Comments are particularly helpful as it highlights specific positive behaviours and specific areas for improvement. Where there is a difference in perception about a particular manager’s performance, the text often explains why.

Here are some dummy examples:

Here the manager feels they are weak in a particular area, a view shared by their peers. However, people who manage this manager and people who report to them, both score them highly. What is interesting here is it demonstrates that this particular manager may not have relished the idea of the 360, yet the results would be encouraging to highlight how they are performing better then they think!

If this question was on empathy and respect, it clearly displays a member who does so well with higher managers, yet people below them do not receive such grace. It may be characteristic of an ‘upwardly looking’ member of staff.

In either of these two examples, a quick look at the comments will yield a good explanation.

Some Questions

This article was designed to be a brief introduction to 360 surveying within healthcare. Usually when we are approached, the most common questions are, how long and how much?

The first one is quite easy if we use rapid360 as an example. A survey like the one included in this article takes a couple of hours to set up, which includes all the configuration and reporting. Generally, you will see results within a few hours of the surveys going live and the process is complete usually between 2 days and a week. This depends on the responsiveness of staff and the amount you want to remind them to complete the survey.

Cost is not quite so easy to establish as it depends on particular requirements and how much you need help. However, rapid360 is a fixed cost for a particular project once we have established the requirements the cost remains fixed. Each vendor may have a different pricing model, an alternative is setup cost + per response.

One more question frequently asked is response rates. Rapid360 usually delivers a 40% response rate within 48 hours, and 90%+ within two weeks. For the sake of most projects, an 8 week project window is usually sufficient. The largest delay is not in the system provision/operation, but usually in agreeing the questions to be asked.

Summary

360 surveying in healthcare will provide an excellent way of understanding management performance in the any organisations. Importantly, effective systems will also provide a rapid way of improving performance. The major stumbling block rarely is a system itself, but rather the culture which may not desire to find out the answers.

For more informaton.

Contact Martin Kentish, MD of Free Range People Ltd, designer of rapid360 & many other appraisal systems. Email martin@freerangepeople.co.uk or call 0845 6893624, or mobile 0788 7778181

The Basics

NPS measures outcomes. It is a single number that goes from -100% (meaning everything is awful) to +100% (everything is marvellous).

The heart of NPS is to establish what people would say to others about you. The higher the score, the more likely they are to speak highly of you and recommend you to others.

How to Gather NPS Feedback

The core of the question you need to ask is “How enthusiastically would you recommend us?” on intuitive 0-10 scale. If you ask a second question, “Why?” people will explain the main reasons why they gave that score. Due to the simplicity, NPS data can easily be collected through SMS text messaging, email, web forms, feedback cards or through call centres.

Calculating NPS – Promoters and Detractors

People who score 9 or 10 are called promoters (these are people who would talk highly of you). People who score 6 or less are called detractors (these are the people likely to speak badly of you). To calculate NPS simply take the percentage of people who are promoters less the percentage of people who are detractors. People who score 7 or 8 are called ‘passives’ or ‘neutrals’ and aren’t taken into consideration when calculating the NPS score.

How is it displayed?

It can be displayed as a simple number, but also graphically displayed like this:

What would an NPS questionnaire and report look like?

Here’s a simple feedback card and a colour-coded report which displays the results and comments for each promoter, neutral or detractor.

So in this example, one tickbox for the 0-10 score and area for comment is all that is required. In the report, the NPS, average, score breakdown and comments are instantly available as a real-time report.

Why you should consider NPS over traditional satisfaction metrics?

• It’s a much easier metric to understand by anyone. People ‘get it’ easily.
• It can be quickly deployed anywhere, in hospitals or in the community.
• When used it quickly drives improvements.
• Being simple, it’s easier to engage patients and hear their voice.

The down side of NPS

Well, it’s upside is its simplicity. The downside is its simplicity. It is never designed to provide complex analytics without performing textual analysis on the comments. So if you need lots of metrics, NPS is not suitable and you should rather go for a satisfaction survey instead. Also, if the object is to collect lots and lots of data, it’s easier to analyse questionnaires with lots of questions rather than one or two. If however, you need actionable insight, NPS is worth considering.

Feedback is important because it tells you how well you are doing in the eyes of the people who are important to you (e.g. your customers or staff)

Without it, you may often be blind to what people really think. In that cartoon above, do you think those customers will come back? They will undoubtedly share their experiences with their friends!

If you are blind to customer views, your profits, efficiency & retention may not be as good as they can be.

Obvious? Yes it is. But few organisations have a comprehensive feedback strategy.

Why? What are the barriers to gathering feedback?

The quick answer comes in four parts.

First of it is very common that fear gets in the way. This is a fear of what you might discover if you open the doors to listening to what people really think. In the cartoon, would the manager really want to know what those customers think?

Secondly, is a lack of engagement from staff and customers. Staff for example, may feel they are simply too busy maintaining the status quo to take on board something new.

Thirdly, a lack of actions reduces the effectiveness of gathering any feedback.

Lastly, a lack of understanding how to go about it: how to make feedback work in practice.

Overcoming these barriers.

Let’s look at fear. Nobody likes to hear bad news but knowing helps you know what you need to fix. Particularly comments, these clearly guide you to the actions. Secondly, feedback is often positive: it helps you understand and reinforce what you are doing right. Accountability is often a problem too. Someone in the organisation needs to be tasked with listening to what is said and being accountable to doing something with it.

Engaging staff and customers is not that difficult. If staff see feedback as tool to help improve and learn what’s going well, staff naturally will be more engaged to encourage more feedback. Customers may see your organisation as a ‘black hole’ so responding to the request for feedback may fall on deaf ears.  Overcoming this lack of engagement can be achieved by telling customers who receives their feedback, what happens with it, and some practical steps to acknowledge and respond to them as soon as you can.

Lastly, lack of actions. If feedback can be delivered in real time it is useful ‘fresh’ insight which naturally leads to the actions required. E.g. passing on praise, fixing a problem, looking into an idea. Equipped with insight, staff have some choices to make, so by looking at these choices creates a more healthy environment to take the appropriate actions. Of course, recording these actions is good to demonstrate things are happening.

Some practical issues.

Often feedback is limited by poor design. For example, expecting a busy customer to complete a 30 question satisfaction survey, find an envelope and pay the postage on a feedback card creates a practical barrier. So make feedback as simple and convenient as possible. This may include providing a relevant feedback channel such as a text message option, a Freepost feedback card, a web portal or a call centre method of feedback.

Secondly, deliver the feedback to the right person in as short a time as possible. This makes the data relevant to the recipient and easier to make the choices to act upon it.

Thirdly, it is good to deliver insight to the right person and give someone else (perhaps a higher tier of management) access to the same feedback. This creates a carrot and stick approach to feedback. The carrot is equipping staff with relevant information for them to act upon. The stick is if you don’t act upon it, someone else will see so and might ask some questions why.

Throughout this make sure the information is presented in a format that can be easily understood and provide necessary reporting to help understand what is being said.