What's the difference between a survey and feedback?

Survey vs feedback

Surveys are often utilized for gauging overall customer satisfaction, as compared to considering specific potential pain points. For this reason, if one facet of your service is awful, and everything else is fine, instead of seeing a particular area that stands out as needing improvement, you are far more likely to wind up with a vague score, with no actual insight into how to improve your customer’s satisfaction.

Conversely, customer feedback through services such as Suggested is far more direct and present in such a way to treat customers as individuals. This makes them feel as if the company cares about their opinion and wants to utilize the feedback to improve their business, and not just aggregating into a score. Through proper customer insights, a business can far more effectively build an accurate analysis of the customer experience.

Remember, surveys exist to capture feedback from a single moment in time. To expect a survey to become applicable in a dynamic state is a fool’s errand. Regardless of what type of business this feedback is collected for, resulting in data tends to be wildly inaccurate.

Once challenges have been reported through a survey or review, the chance to fix it has long passed, and the unsatisfied customer has already moved on, likely telling others about their experience in the process. Although a business is dynamic, a survey is truly static. This creates inaccurate representations of a company. As any successful business owner can tell you, there are terrible pitfalls to making business decisions based on surveys.

Response rates

Additionally, response rates to surveys are generally meager. If it’s a paper survey in the mail, by the time it reaches the customer, they are already severely disengaged. Impressions and details fade over time. This results in polls that are inaccurate and vague.

Feedback, in contrast, is an ongoing process and can be collected as soon as an event occurs, whether it be a phone call, a product sale, an in-person visit, or anything that can be measurable. As it is a continuous process, feedback provides data that is very current. The feedback model is idealistic for improvements and monitoring customer satisfaction levels, and goes a long way towards mapping customer experiences.

Ongoing feedback vs one-off surveys

But how does feedback work? Feedback is captured not just once but on an ongoing basis. It provides a highly accurate representation of a business. This includes both the low points and high points and allows companies to make sound decisions based on data.

Feedback instruments are deployed instantly and return far more responses than surveys do. Also, as they are implemented close to the actual event, feedback captures far more accurate, usable, and descriptive data. When provided with an opportunity to provide input solicited based on specific experiences, customers tend to do so.