Paper Comment Cards – What Could Go Wrong?
Comment Card Design Errors
The 12 Most Frequent Flaws
and How to Avoid Them.
Paper comment cards are flawed in process and design.
There are at least a dozen frequent mistakes.
And many defective comment card templates.
To avoid these, use a digital comment card instead.
FOUR GROUPS OF ERRORS
Bad Questions
Cannot deliver insight.
Incorrect Rating
Useless scoring method.
Delivers incorrect info.
Too Personal
Decreases response rates.
Poor Execution
Staff & Customer interference.
BAD QUESTIONS
Ambiguous – What does ‘Service’ or ‘Professionalism’ mean?
Compound question – Which one should be answered?…..It means the answer given is always a compromise or dilution of the truth.
Imprecise question – impossible to answer without guidelines…so the answer is meaningless.
No value questions – What action would the business take based on the response? ….And impossible to analyze.
INCORRECT RATING
Leading introduction – Implies that the rating should be high.
Biased rating scale – Two positive, one average, but only ONE negative. Means the answers will skew higher than they should. Use a balanced 5 point rating scale instead.
Simplistic scale – The gap is too big to record adaquate differences in responses.
No numeric scale – Now open to interpretation what descriptors mean. Will vary by person.
TOO PERSONAL
Insistence on name – Not needed. Data collection and rectification is first priority. Customer recovery via the name is secondary ONLY if the customer agrees to give their name.
Additional user personal info requests – Not necessary and a disincentive to give any information.
No consent requested – Suggests future spamming
Operating fields – High error rate. Should be captured automatically without reliance on memory.
Irrelavent questions – Feedback being used as a catch-all, without prioritizing data needed. Low value info captured.
Poor EXECUTION
Spelling mistake– Means the business is not serious about feedback, process, or user experience.
Postage requested – A huge issue. Why should the customer pay to give their own opinions? Postage – even if actually mailed will mean the business does not see any negative data until too late.
Feedback via staff – A negative review will be read and discarded – never to inform management.
Too many questions – Anything over 90 seconds to complete will not be documented or remembered accurately.
Confusing layout – Hard to read, too much effort means polarized views and low response rates.
Paper comment cards have been used by many businesses for decades for customer feedback. Developed using a comment card template, they may look pretty, but are ineffective in delivering actionable customer insight. In fact, comment card design errors are common.
Churn and defection is crippling many businesses so the comment card is not working.
There are at least a dozen common errors that we see within the templates and the same with how they are used by the business. Whilst these can be corrected – they still do neither provide the customer a convenient feedback method, nor deliver an immediate opportunity for the business to fix the issue or connect with the unhappy customer.
Better to use a digital comment card instead, to overcome the comment cards template and design issues and deliver actionable customer feedback to the business.
TO Remove these issues, use a digital comment card
Feedback via the Customer’s Cell Phone
Locations
Satisfied Clients
States Deployed
Inputs
On location signage requests feedback,
Questions delivered via SMS, QR, Web or Voice,
Without error,
Answered in under 2 minutes,
Analyzed immediately – Delivers Insight and Action
