Paper Feedback Forms vs Feedback Forms on Tablets

Collecting customer feedbacks is an essential part of running a healthy service-oriented business. It is the one activity that results in actionable insights for the business, letting the managers know which parts of their service demands correction and which parts need to be promoted and set as an example for boosting employee morale and establishing benchmarks. Hence, any business serious about improving their customer service must collect as many feedbacks from their customers as possible, and supplement this with thorough and accurate data analysis.

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When choosing the proper mechanism for collecting feedback from customers, business managers must keep the above in mind. The popular channels for feedback collection are – paper and digital (through tablets). Here are the advantages that are present only in the digital feedback collection mode:

Novelty

Let’s face it. Paper based feedback forms are passé. Presenting a shiny new tablet to your customer for collecting their feedback provides a novel new way of capturing their attention. Not only will they feel that you really care about their opinion (hence the investment on tablets), they will also feel a lot more encouraged in voicing out their opinion, letting you collect far more feedbacks, yielding much more actionable insights for your business, compared to paper forms sitting quietly in a corner.

Ease of maintenance

Paper based forms are much more “permanent” in nature in the sense that once printed, they cannot be modified very often. In fact, one has to wait till they run out (which can be quite a while since they are not filled that regularly!). In contrast, a feedback survey designed on a tablet is virtual in nature; it can be modified at the click of a button.

Data security

Feedback forms filled out on paper run the risk of getting lost, or worse, being tampered with. But all feedbacks collected on a tablet will get stored securely in cloud servers, accessible only through a password decided by a manager. The business manager can also decide which participants get what kinds of access – including what they view and how much can they modify.

Reporting

Reporting- Analyzing the vast data collected via paper-based data collection forms can be excruciatingly tedious. But when you add the processing capabilities of even a modest modern-day computer, analyzing reports becomes a pleasure that managers will look forward to. The collected data is presented in the form of interactive graphs and charts showing trends at a glance and telling the business owners what they need to do to improve their performance.

Instant alerts

Any digital feedback collection tool that is worth its salt has the feature to send in automatic SMS alerts on negative feedbacks to the manager-in-charge. This can help them solve the issue then and there, ensuring all customers go back happy and satisfied

Continuity of Reports 

The tremendous effort involved in carrying forward reports from paper-based forms from one period (month/ year) to another almost makes it a fruitless exercise. With digitally recorded information, it is done by default. Managers can view their reports carried forward since the beginning of the business and ascertain the trend created by their actions. The reports get updated as soon as the data is captured, maintaining the latest data trends.

Intelligent Insights 

Services are rated on many parameters- price, timeliness, politeness of the server and of course the quality delivered. Each of these may have a different impact on the overall “score” thus calculated. Few of these parameters may even have conflicting results, e.g. price versus quality. With interactive reports, managers can control for the effect of one particular parameter while keeping all other constant, and slowly narrow down to the “real” problem a business may be facing.

Multi-location

Electronic forms are particularly suited for chain franchises. Collecting and analyzing data collected on paper is tedious enough for a single location, leave alone a large chain with 100+ locations around the world (or even in a city for that matter). But with automatic, real-time updating of data of electronically collected data, analyzing location-wise reports becomes simplified to an extent one can’t stress enough.

Easy access to reports 

The reports are store on a cloud based server and can be accessed from any device having a web browser – a smartphone, computer or tablet. Managers can view their reports even while on-the-go.

Performance 

When servers know they will be rated on their politeness and speed, they will make efforts to ensure the same. There is also a metric to determine the number of responses collected by a server, thus incentivizing more data collection and hence, better performance.

Ambience

Last but certainly not the least. Not only does the presence of a tablet in vastly improves the ambience, it also tells the customers something about the company – it’s dynamic and changes with the times. This conveys the message of modernity to the customers and raises the morale of the employees.

That is quite a long list to be ignored. The point here is clear – feedbacks collected on tablets offer advantages that paper-based forms cannot match. It is in the best interest of a business to extract the maximum value out of digital forms before its competitors do.