Feedback Matters

GuestInsight/Database Sciences

Welcome to Feedback Matters, the podcast dedicated to the art and science of listening to your guests/customers. Join us as we break down: Consumer Behavior: Exploring the intersection of loyalty, guest/customer experience, and the power of online reviews. Survey Design: Best practices for gathering high-quality, actionable data. Data Analytics: Modern strategies to turn feedback into meaningful insights. Master the art of listening to your guests/customers—one episode at a time.

  1. -5 ч

    So Close To Nailing It!

    Can a simple haircut follow-up survey teach us something about customer feedback? Absolutely. In this episode of So You Want My Feedback, we step outside the hospitality industry to review the follow-up email and survey from a regional hair salon. While the business isn’t a hotel or restaurant, the customer experience principles are exactly the same. Jeff and Rich walk through the entire feedback journey—from the email invitation to the private survey and review request—and discuss what works, what could be improved, and why even well-designed feedback programs often miss opportunities because of small details. Among the topics we discuss: * The difference between public reviews and private feedback * Why wording matters in survey invitations * How businesses unintentionally reduce survey participation * The importance of signing follow-up emails and making them feel personal * Missed opportunities to promote mobile apps * A clean, responsive survey interface that gets many things right * Why the feedback loop often receives less attention than other parts of the customer experience Whether you work in hospitality, retail, personal services, healthcare, or any customer-facing business, this episode offers practical ideas you can apply to your own feedback process. If you enjoy these real-world critiques, be sure to subscribe for more episodes of Feedback Matters and So You Want My Feedback, where we review actual customer surveys and feedback requests to help businesses create better customer experiences.

    24 мин.
  2. Don't do this to your guests. - So You Want My Feedback Episode 18

    3 апр.

    Don't do this to your guests. - So You Want My Feedback Episode 18

    When Guest Surveys Go Wrong: A Masterclass in "Worst Practices" What happens when one of the world’s biggest hotel brands sends a guest survey that is confusing, repetitive, and mathematically impossible? In this episode of "So You Want My Feedback", Jeff and Rich break down a recent post-stay survey from a major global hotel flagship that misses the mark at nearly every turn.In this episode, we discuss: The "Zero Percent" Paradox: How a survey can tell you you've completed 0% of the task after you’ve already provided your primary rating. The Yes/No Rating Trap: Why asking a guest to "rate" a binary event (like whether they were recognized as a loyalty member) is a fundamental design flaw. The Missing Middle: The dangers of using a four-point scale that forces guests to be either positive or negative, with no room for a neutral middle ground. Survey Fatigue & Redirection: The frustrating experience of being redirected to a second, unannounced "brand survey" just when you thought you were finished. Jeff also shares his experience using the hotel's digital key—one of the few highlights of the stay—and how the survey failed to capture that nuance effectively. Key Takeaway: A survey is an extension of the guest experience. If the survey is "mailing it in," the guest feels it. Chapters: 0:00 - Introduction: A stay at a major global flagship 1:30 - The Email: Missing signatures and "Very Poor" scales 5:10 - The 0% Completion Metric frustration 9:20 - Rating a Yes/No question? 14:00 - The $2 Water Bottle Dilemma 18:30 - The "Secret" Second Survey 22:00 - Why Midpoints Matter in Scale Design 26:00 - Final Verdict: A "Shocking" Lack of Best Practices   About the Podcast: Feedback Matters by GuestInsight explores the world of guest experience, survey design, and actionable feedback. Hosted by Jeff Robbins and Rich Raffel, we draw on 25+ years of experience to help businesses elevate the guest journey. About the Series: So You Want My Feedback is our ongoing look at how hotels and other hospitality brands handle guest feedback — from post-stay survey critique to full hotel survey review. Each episode breaks down real examples, highlighting what works, what doesn’t, and what these choices reveal about guest feedback analysis, survey design, and the overall guest experience. And while hospitality is our focus, we occasionally review customer experience surveys from non-hospitality businesses as a point of comparison — because the contrast is often just as illuminating.

    28 мин.
  3. 10.10.2025

    What's up Doc?

    In this episode, we take a look at something new for Feedback Matters — a patient feedback survey from a large medical practice. At first glance, the request feels solid: it’s respectful, professional, and checks many of the right boxes. The email sets expectations clearly and frames the purpose as learning “what we do well and what we can do better.” But as we walk through the actual survey, things start to break down. The process is long, redundant, and oddly impersonal — from the clunky date-of-birth validation to a request for the respondent’s name at the end. The wording throughout feels clinical rather than patient-friendly, and the survey’s 5-point scale (ranging from “very poor” to “very good”) is surprisingly unbalanced. And then there’s the kicker: the “likelihood to recommend” question — a version of the Net Promoter Score — shoehorned into the middle of a medical visit survey, using labels that don’t even fit the question. It’s an eye-opening example of how even well-intentioned feedback efforts can fall short when execution doesn’t match purpose — and when the survey experience itself starts to undermine the credibility of the data being collected. Want to know what we think about your feedback loop? Book a free discovery call to find out! 👉 https://www.guestinsight.com/book-a-free-discovery-session    Music licensed via Epidemic Sound: https://www.epidemicsound.com/ #PatientExperience #FeedbackMatters #SurveyDesign #CustomerExperience #HealthcareFeedback #PatientSatisfaction #CXStrategy #OnlineSurveys #NetPromoterScore #GuestInsight

    27 мин.

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Welcome to Feedback Matters, the podcast dedicated to the art and science of listening to your guests/customers. Join us as we break down: Consumer Behavior: Exploring the intersection of loyalty, guest/customer experience, and the power of online reviews. Survey Design: Best practices for gathering high-quality, actionable data. Data Analytics: Modern strategies to turn feedback into meaningful insights. Master the art of listening to your guests/customers—one episode at a time.