Feedback loops are a valuable part of the CX toolkit. We’ve explored them in detail in our blog, but today we want to shine a light on one essential aspect of feedback loop design: avoiding common problems that make feedback loops less effective.

Like anything related to collecting and analyzing data, feedback loops require thoughtful design. If you’ve implemented feedback loops without much success – or if you’re planning on setting up feedback loops soon – be aware of the following potential (and common) mistakes.

#1 Getting the timing wrong

There are three ways you could get the timing wrong on a feedback loop:

1. Requesting feedback at the wrong time. Most survey designers know not to ask for feedback in the middle of the process. But are you waiting too long to gather feedback from your customers? If there’s too much of a gap between the action and the feedback, important details could be missed.

2. Not respecting the customer’s time. Keep the information you collect from the customer firmly relevant to the interaction they’ve just completed – and only that interaction. Long, time-consuming forms have the highest rates of abandonment.

3. Making the loop too long. Suppose a feedback loop is designed for months to pass between when information is collected and when action is taken. By the time it’s clear what action needs to be taken, the situation may have changed. As a rule of thumb, we design feedback loops to close in 2 weeks or less.

Timing tip: If it’s taking a long time to see results from your feedback loop, investigate the loop length and the timing of your feedback requests.

#2 Not capturing the right data

While you don’t want to collect irrelevant information from your customers, you also don’t want to ignore necessary details in favor of speed. Never underestimate the importance of context – situational, behavioral, and emotional. Sometimes it's the indirect data that highlights the problem area.

Data tip #1: Before you design your feedback loop, review your customer journey map to ensure you understand what kind of data should be collected and its context. If it’s been a few months since you’ve had frontstage workers validate the map, you may want to invite them to join this exercise.

#3 Ignoring quality control

However you collect it, feedback data is full of missing and mistaken information. So borrow a step from your data analyst friends and spend some time cleaning and checking the data before you analyze it. This can keep poor-quality data from contaminating your results.

Data tip #2: Approach feedback survey design carefully. Think about how you’ll collect the data you need and how customers will input that data. It’s always good to have someone outside the CX team proofread your questions; they can flag anything that’s confusing, missing, or irrelevant.

Finally, don’t forget to close your feedback loop. Check out this HBR article (which we’ve included in the Around the web section) for suggestions on how to do that.