What does it mean to collect and analyze constituent feedback
Feedback from constituents is a fast, effective way to get a glimpse of what people experience when they use your services and products. This is one reason the Mass.gov website domain policy requires websites and web applications to collect feedback.
Feedback can come from many sources, such as:
- Web surveys, such as the one on the bottom of every Mass.gov page
- Social media
- Call centers
- Emails
- Constituent services offices
- Any event where you interact with the public
Once you’re collecting feedback, you’ll also need to set up processes to start using it. These include sharing it throughout your organization, extracting insights, and using what you learn to continuously improve.
Why do it
Having a strong feedback system helps teams stay connected to the people they serve. It shows you what the public thinks and experiences. It helps you learn what they do or don't understand and what they can and can’t do.
Teams that take advantage of feedback are more likely to address real constituent problems. Their products and information will be easier to find, understand, and use. When you respond to feedback, constituents notice. You'll build trust and improve access to your services.
Regularly reviewing and analyzing feedback can help you:
- Evaluate people’s experiences with your services to find ways to improve them
- Figure out which issues are most important to work on first
- Fix issues early before they become larger problems
- Make it more likely that people can self-serve with your web content. This means your teams spend less time on the phone.
- Build trust by showing that you’re listening to people who use your services
What you're aiming for
Your organization should treat feedback from constituents as a critical source of business data for services or products. This means you’re finding lots of ways to gather feedback from people you serve. You will:
- Look for many chances to gather feedback
- Have systems and tools to collect and store feedback
- Use different skills and methods to extract insights from feedback
- Share what you learn across teams at your organization
- Create processes so a diverse group of stakeholders can use the feedback
- Understand the people who use your services better
- Use insights to inform improvements and plans
What you need
To collect and analyze feedback, your organization needs:
- Sources of feedback, such as web feedback, social media, or community meetings
- Tools and systems to collect, store, and share it with analysts
- Ways to analyze the feedback and learn from what people tell you
- Ways to use it to improve your projects
Your staff don’t need special skills to start looking at feedback. Just reviewing what people say about their experience will produce opportunities to improve. However, real analysis and measuring experience does require new skills. It's important to have staff who specialize in customer experience, experience (or "user") research, and content strategy. Subject matter experts can also learn these skills to get deeper, more actionable insights from feedback.
You’ll also need program and product leads who know how to use these findings. Sometimes, this just means being open to hearing what constituents are saying. Other times, it might mean doing usability testing or interviews to better understand a problem or possible fix.
How to get started
To start collecting and analyzing feedback, you need:
- One or more sources of feedback
- A process for analyzing it
- A process for acting on what you learn
Sources of feedback
It’s not hard to begin collecting feedback. If you have content on Mass.gov, you’re already doing it: Every page has a web feedback form at the bottom. State organizations also get feedback from community meetings, call center staff, and social media. Even if you don’t have social media accounts, people are probably talking about your services online. Teams can look at these conversations to see if there’s anything that can shape your plans.
Processes for analyzing feedback
When you’re just starting, make regular analysis a priority, even if your methods are very simple. A team’s first process can be:
- Read the feedback
- See if there’s anything that can be acted on
You can then repeat this regularly with the same feedback source. As your teams get more experience, they may use specific methods that requires more rigor and effort. For example, you can track negative feedback volume over time to see if your fixes are working. You can also develop a set of themes you apply to feedback to measure what issues trouble people most.
Act on what you learn
Acting on what you learn means your team needs to be able to say, “Hey, we can fix that.”
As with analysis, you can start small. Many organizations reviewing their Mass.gov feedback for the first time find simple fixes. For example, they might fix broken links or change confusing page titles. One organization cut negative feedback in half simply by making a login link more prominent.
To really get started, project leads need to support the feedback process. In the worst-case scenarios, a project lead ignores feedback analysis because it conflicts with their existing priorities. Your organization may need leaders who believe that listening to the public's experiences is an important part of doing our jobs well.
Maturing your practice
Maturing means getting better in all 3 areas: collecting feedback, analyzing it, and acting on it. Here's what that can look like:
- Give people more chances to submit feedback or make better use of the ways you already have. Some organizations treat any role that works with the public as a way to gather feedback. You can also send surveys to newsletter subscribers, add quick surveys to your websites, or use reports from call centers.
- Treat feedback like important data. You’ll need to collect, store, track it, and report on it. You might begin with simple spreadsheets. Later, you might need more advanced tools and skills, like saving feedback in a database and making sure the right people can access it.
- Use more ways to analyze it. For example, you might do a thematic analysis of your feedback to better understand where people are having problems with your services.
- Respond to negative feedback in smarter ways. You might interview constituents or do usability tests to solve tough problems. Project leads can create and use feedback-based metrics to evaluate their work.
Guidance and resources
These resources can help you start collecting feedback and using it to improve your content:
- Downloading Mass.gov feedback: A guide on how to extract feedback from Mass.gov pages and compile it for review:A guide on how to extract feedback from Mass.gov pages and compile it for review
- Content Lab: Using Feedback to improve content. A slide deck and video on how to use feedback to improve your content