Freelancefolder

How To Get and Use Customer Feedback

Posted November 17, 2008 in Business, How-To 10 Comments »

Customer Feedback – it’s that vital information from your clients that tells you how well you are doing at the tasks you perform for them.

There are many ways to use feedback to grow your business. You can use it to:

1. Discover what you are doing well.
2. Generate new ideas based on your client’s comments.
3. Learn new directions that your business could expand into.
4. Identify situations where you need to be more careful.
5. Determine areas where your skills need improvement.

There’s no denying that feedback is important to business success, but many freelancers don’t receive much of it from their clients. It’s all too common to send a project to a customer and not hear from them until they need your services again.

In a traditional corporate environment, employees normally get performance information in the form of a performance review. In most cases, they get also get feedback in the form of regular comments from their supervisors.

If you’re a freelancer, you need to be more aggressive about getting accurate feedback from your clients. While some clients are more than willing to volunteer their perspective on how well you are doing without any effort on your part, you will have to ask most clients to provide you with this information.

It’s easy to avoid asking for feedback and assume that if the client doesn’t make any performance-related comments then you must be doing well, but that might not be the case at all. How many times have you walked into a store or restaurant and received lousy service and thought to yourself “I’m never ever coming back here” even though you never complained to the management?

Even when the client is satisfied, it’s a good idea to find out if there is a way that you can improve your service to them. If you have a long-term relationship with a client from whom you receive regular projects, then it is well worth your effort to try to get some periodic input about your performance from that client. You can do this casually by simply asking the question, “how do you like what I’ve done so far?” Or, in some situations, you could design a specific survey for all of your major clients to complete.

Regardless of the method that you use to generate your feedback, there are a few key points to remember when you receive it:

1. Your client has taken time out of his or her busy day to provide you with this information so be sure to thank your client for their participation.
2. It’s possible that you will get some information that you don’t really want to hear — look at these comments as an opportunity to learn and improve.
3. Follow-through on the information that you receive with action steps. It’s one thing to get feedback — it’s another thing to respond to it appropriately.
4. Prioritize your response. If you receive a lot of feedback, then tackle the items in one-by-one, beginning with those areas that are most critical to your success.

I know that this sounds like a whole post on how we, as freelancers, can get something that most employees dread — a performance evaluation. In fact, you may have been looking at the lack of performance reviews as a “benefit” of freelancing.

But there’s a reason you should ignore that thought and continue to pursue feedback. Provider-client relations are critical to a successful freelancing career. In my business I’ve experienced firsthand the benefits of “seeing” my work from another’s perspective. This type of feedback can help every freelancer learn and grow.

About the author: Laura Spencer is a freelance writer from North Central Texas with over 19 years of professional business writing experience. If you liked this post, then you may also enjoy Laura’s blog about her freelance writing experiences, WritingThoughts