To incentivize employees to collect feedback, you need to bake the customer experience into your core values. That way, feedback collection becomes a top-down effort that aligns with both organization-wide and individual employee goals.
This is key, as your employees will be happier, work harder, and produce better results if they understand that they have a direct impact on a core business goal: providing an excellent experience.
If that isn’t clear, it may be difficult to incentivize your team to put as much energy into collecting feedback as they do their other tasks.
Once you explain your core values and get your team on board, the next step is to build strategic processes to empower them to leverage feedback to its maximum potential.
In this article, we’ll outline what those processes are and how to implement them.
Table of Contents
- Build and effectively communicate feedback collection policies
- Center the importance of customer feedback during onboarding and training
- Leverage a feedback system built specifically for MSPs
- Offer incentives for goal achievements
- Lead by example to build a collaborative and positive workplace culture
- Wrapping up
Build and effectively communicate feedback collection policies
Effective policies provide a roadmap for how your team should approach tasks. They act as guidance for decision-making and offer procedural instructions.
In essence, they help to ensure a seamless and consistent experience and help everyone stay on the same page.
But not all policies are created equal, so make sure yours are simple, short, easy to understand, fair, well-defined, and treated as a ‘living document’.
This way, you can (and may want to) update them as you analyze and refine processes and workflows. This also allows for team input, which makes your staff feel heard and empowers them to take a sense of ownership over their workflows.
After you create a policy, you need to ensure everybody understands it. Otherwise, all that hard work will go ignored or misunderstood. To avoid that, make sure to:
- Distribute your policy to every team member and outline exactly where it’s stored so that it’s easy to find (i.e. in X folder on X system)
- Hold a meeting about it to outline what it says as well as the most important aspects of it (e.g. how to properly escalate an issue) so that your team is crystal clear about your expectations
- Incorporate it into onboarding and training exercises so that it’s never overlooked and that every new team member understands the protocols and has the opportunity to ask questions before they develop incorrect habits
- Review it often, as changes in your procedures and processes are inevitable, and you must reflect those in your policy to ensure it’s up to date (and that your staff is briefed on the updates so that everybody is on the same page at all times)
Center the importance of customer feedback during onboarding and training
The more that an employee can emotionally connect with your mission, the more likely they are to adopt it as their own. This is why it’s critical to explain your core values, why they are important, and how they connect to the client experience at the start of employment.
Similar to how building trust with customers and clients engenders loyalty, building meaningful relationships with employees helps to boost productivity and satisfaction.
Tell them:
- What your company stands for
- What promises you make to customers
- The importance of the client experience
- Your SLAs
- Your expectations
- What they will receive in return for their hard work
This way, they can align their mindset and workflow with your vision and expectations.
For example, if your team knows that you communicate to clients that feedback will be responded to within two hours, that’s much more powerful than simply telling them “please respond to feedback within two hours.”
It’s the same exact message, but instead of it coming across as an internal rule, it is presented as a client expectation. And if pleasing the client is something that they get rewarded for, they’ll want to do everything in their power to meet the mark.
Most importantly, explain why feedback is so important in the first place—and get specific.
Dive into how and why Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys help to improve the customer experience and client relationship on the whole. Show them the materials you send to clients on these survey types so that they fully understand their perspective (e.g. survey collection helps us to provide a better service to them).
Leverage a feedback system built specifically for MSPs
The best way to get your employees jazzed about collecting feedback is to use a customer feedback system that’s designed specifically for MSPs—like SmileBack.
A tool that is made for service desks will integrate seamlessly with your system. And seamless tools are easier to learn, use, and provide fewer barriers to success.
Still, it’s important to intentionally build your feedback system into your workflows to ensure key steps aren’t missed or overlooked.
Then, automate as many actions as you can to free your team up from needing to complete repetitive manual tasks (which often leads to decreased productivity and job satisfaction).
For example, with SmileBack automations, you can set up workflows to automatically change a ticket status when a certain rule applies. This might look like automatically reopening a resolved ticket to ensure the right team member follows up to see if everything has been handled correctly and the problem is truly resolved.
Saving your team valuable time will help them latch onto, rather than shy away from, your feedback tool.
Offer incentives for goal achievements
It’s no secret that incentive structures are a large motivator for top-performing employees. Giving employees compensation in exchange for a job well done can have a very positive impact on performance.
It’s generally better to focus on overall compensation than individual rewards. You want your client’s success, your business’s success, and your employees’ success to all be integrated.
That means building a foundation of performance incentives tied to a measurable customer experience. This way, when the larger goals are achieved, everyone wins—be that through praise and recognition in regular performance reviews and/or an award in the form of quarterly or annual bonuses.
This is generally a more successful long-term strategy than gamifying feedback collection. You don’t want individual gifts and rewards to be the only reason why employees devote time and energy to collecting customer survey responses. That’s because the excitement from rewards fizzles out rather quickly and holds less meaning over time.
In other words, once the novelty of receiving rewards wears off, if there’s no other foundational driver, performance may dwindle, too.
Instead, make sure any rewards are simply one cog in a bigger wheel. Better yet, a critical piece in a larger system designed to help your clients—and as a result, your business and your employees—succeed.
What metrics and KPIs should you tie to incentives?
A great practice to help support this is to enshrine certain weekly, monthly or quarterly metrics as key performance indicators or scorecard metrics for your teams.
You can benchmark performance and set goals across a number of industry standards, including:
- Net CSAT Score
- NPS Score
- Number of tickets closed
- Mean Time to First Response
- Mean Time to Resolution
- Number of social proofs posted
- Number of tickets properly escalated
One way to keep the most important metrics front-and-center and have some fun along the way is to display your CSAT and NPS metrics (both individual and team-wide) publicly in your office (or in a company-wide digital platform).
This way, your employees can check in on their performance and progress and (ideally) feel motivated to hit their goals. They’ll also feel a sense of pride around their work and naturally challenge one another to continue to perform at their best both individually and collectively.
Lead by example to build a collaborative and positive workplace culture
The best way to get your employees excited about a tool is to engage with it yourself. This way, they know that you truly care about using it to its fullest potential and believe that collecting feedback is business-critical.
For example, with SmileBack, you can set up automation for ConnectWise Manage to perform an action every time a specific event or trigger takes place. A great way to use this is to trigger email notifications every time a neutral or negative review is received.
This way, you can stay on top of any problems and chat to your team about why the issue occurred in the first place (i.e. training, security breakdown, procedural breakdown, misunderstanding, etc.) and fix it.
Done right, your team will feel supported, heard, and like their opinion matters. However, be careful not to only talk to your employees about feedback when it’s negative or neutral. Go out of your way to positively reinforce a job well done.
This goes beyond material rewards and delves into recognition and appreciation for caring, following policies and procedures, and making your MSP look great in the process.
Wrapping up
Your feedback tool is only as powerful as the team administering it. To incentivize employees to collect feedback, make sure to:
- Explain why feedback is important in the first place and how it helps your MSP to provide a better service
- Create detailed policies on how your feedback system works and update them early and often so that everybody stays on the same page
- Bake your policies, mission, and values into your onboarding and training processes so that new team members adopt an aligned mindset
- Leverage a feedback system like SmileBack that is built specifically for MSPs and integrates seamlessly into your systems
- Offer incentives for goal achievements, but make sure to focus on overall compensation as opposed to individual rewards
- Lead by example to show your staff that you practice what you preach
If you want to chat with us more about feedback, book a follow-up call with our team for implementation support and further consultation.
