People invest their time in answering surveys and leaving a qualitative message about how they see the company or how they feel about it.
Since they are making this effort, if they do not receive an appropriate response, they may think things like:
- "What am I participating for, if they don't bother to respond to me, next time I won't write."
- "But there is someone behind the tool or it's just a bot".
That is why it is highly recommended to respond to all messages, both positive and negative, and to do so in the most natural and individualized way you can, this will undoubtedly make participation not decrease but increase from these people.
But there are times when you can't respond to every comment the way you'd like to, so here are some tips to manage all the feedback you receive.
Distribute the work
If you are several people in the team, you can create some system for giving feedback, for example:
-
By time.
Each period, one person is in charge of responding to the feedback. -
By theme.
Each person is in charge of x topics, so if feedback related to work-life balance arrives, the same person always answers it. -
By level of relevance.
Critical feedback is always answered by the same person, minor feedback by another person.
Adjust expectations
If you don't have time right now to respond to all the messages in a timely manner, you can commit to the team to respond later.
In this way, you will be able to save some time and organize better in your calendar to manage all feedback messages by communicating to the team via an official channel that you will respond to all feedback messages in XX days/hours. People will know that their messages are read and that they will be responded to.
Example communication:
Hello team,
first of all, thank you for participating in Nailted.
We are receiving a large number of anonymous messages, and we want to read each one carefully and respond one by one.
You will receive a response within ---- hours/days.
Once again, thank you very much for participating.
Thank you, the "------" team
Use the appropriate channel
If feedback is very sensitive, perhaps Nailted is not the best way, then it may be a good time to propose to the person to try to deal with their comment in a 1:1 meeting.
Identify the feedback
Because of the way people write, because you have many of the same responses in a short period of time, or simply because you may already know your team, there may be situations where you have several negative messages from the same person.
If you have clearly identified this case, perhaps you can urge that person to a meeting to discuss all these issues. In this way, you may both save time and come to an understanding more quickly.
Create several templates
This is not the ideal solution, but we understand that there are certain occasions when we can create sets of "template" responses to answer only very repetitive queries.
We leave you a template so you can generate your own answers.
Be careful how many times you use the templates, because if you overuse them, people may think that there is no one handling the feedback that they have bothered to write.