Imagine that you build a community that provides you continuous feedback on your community activities, on your product or services. What a help! You don't have to spend plenty of time ideating, designing and optimizing new activities, you just need to listen to your community, prioritize and implement what can be meaningful for your community purpose and business. This is the power of collecting feedback from your tenants, from people who know your business the best and more importantly who care about the community and business. Everyone wants to have their voices heard, and collecting feedback allows just that. You are showing your community members that you care. This is a win-win situation for both you and your community.
Collecting feedback especially when your community is not established yet and when the engagement rate is low could be a little bit tricky. How many community members have to provide you the feedback? What percentage of community members can you consider as the voice of the community? How to balance the needs of individuals and of the whole community? These questions have not one correct answer. The answers are hidden in your community strategy.
Community feedback has become one of the primary drivers of long-term growth. Present-day organizations jump at every opportunity to talk to the community members or learn about them. There are hundreds of ways to collect feedback from your tenants let's have a look at some of them.
Types of feedback
First, it is crucial to develop a clear picture of why you are collecting feedback. The reasons are probably two – to see where your community is on the way towards community goals or to make some particular improvements. Once you have the end goals clear, answer the question: how do I collect feedback and what will be the frequency? There probably are some activities that are repetitive or there are some questions you would like to be answered on a regular basis, so, think about frequency as well.
The last thing before you start collecting feedback is to think about what’s the plan for the data you collect. If you don't react to the feedback from your members and if you don't incorporate feedback into new activities, you are jeopardizing the trust of your community members.
Online surveys
Online surveys save a lot of time. Their big advantage is that they can immediately evaluate and visualize the collected data.
Examples of survey platforms:
Type of questions:
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Yes/no questions
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Open questions (limited words)
- Multiple choice
- Opinion Scale / Likert scale
- Rating
- Net Promoter Score, or NPS
Net Promoter Score, or NPS, measures customer experience and predicts business growth. This proven metric transformed the business world and now provides the core measurement for customer experience management programs globally. It’s the simplest question you can ask your community: ”how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?”. Here, you can find out more about how to measure NPS.
In-person surveys
No doubt that in-person surveys bring the best qualitative data. For those who manage a community in a space can be very easy to reach out to your tenants and ask them for help. Sometimes you don't have to schedule a meeting for collecting feedback, you can just ask your members at some event or at the coffee machine in the kitchen. Obviously, there is a difference between 1:1 chats and chats in groups, where people can influence each other, so be cautious about that.
Phone calls
Phone calls are very effective, they typically do not last more than five minutes. And there is a high probability that you find answers you are seeking. Especially these days when a lot of people are working remotely, phone calls can help a lot with making a quick overview of what your community members need and how they are doing.
Tenant experience platforms
If you run a community in space you probably use some community or tenant experience platform which enables you to collect feedback. At Spaceflow, we realize how important collecting feedback is, that's why we strive to collect feedback continuously in all possible ways and support our clients to do the same. We use a feedback loop to regularly gather insights from tenants and keep track of its development.
One quick and easy way to ask for opinions is to poll, whether it’s to find out a preferable time for yoga classes or more sophisticated feedback regarding tenants satisfaction. Find out more about Spaceflow's capability to collect feedback and engage occupiers.
If you would like to learn more about what to measure in your community, read this article here.
