3 Tips To Help You Give Better Feedback

When you want to move forward with a website build, you need helpful feedback from your client. Collecting it is easier said than done. The more you work with clients, the more you realize that you can get website feedback without getting any actionable information at all.

Most clients aren’t trying to take the easy way out. They want a stand-out website just as much as you. But the average client is a novice when it comes to the website creation process. Turning their thoughts into helpful feedback doesn’t come naturally, which means they need guidance from the pros.

Keep reading for three tips that you can pass on to new or struggling clients. These tips will help you get website feedback that moves your projects forward.

1. Helpful Feedback Is Constructive

If your clients don’t know how to provide constructive criticism, your agency can quickly get stuck in a negative feedback loop. When asked for feedback, many clients simply provide their first reaction. These reactions tend to be emotionally driven or poorly thought out, which gives your agency little to work with. Even if the feedback is positive, this isn’t helpful at all.

To get valuable client feedback, you can give your clients these four questions to ask themselves before they submit feedback:

• Does my feedback consider my target audience’s perspective?
• Is each piece of feedback focused on a specific website element or feature?
• Did I explain why I liked or didn’t like each feature I mentioned?
• Did I clarify what improvements I’m looking for?

When your clients take more time to gather and assess their thoughts, they’re less likely to send spur-of-the-moment thoughts. By the time they submit responses to your feedback tool, their comments will be constructed with solid context and explanations.

2. Pros and Cons Are Both Necessary

When clients are too polite or solely focused on the bad, you’re not getting helpful feedback. You want a complete understanding of your client’s perspective.

Explain to your clients that pros and cons are both crucial for you to successfully meet their needs. Positive feedback tells your agency what you’re doing right, so you don’t veer off the right path. Negative feedback, when constructive, gets you back on the right path when you accidentally veer off.

You can further offer clients past examples of great positive and negative feedback, and how each led to website improvements. A concrete example can demonstrate to clients how helpful feedback looks and works in practice.

One more way to get website feedback that’s more well rounded: Make it clear that there are no hard feelings when clients are dissatisfied.

3. Timeliness Is Key

Improving website feedback isn’t just about the content of your clients’ comments. Helpful feedback is also timely, and consistently so. When feedback isn’t on time, you’ll run into delays that make it hard (or impossible) to meet milestone requirements.

One tip you can give clients right at your kickoff meeting is to set deadlines in their calendars. These dates should be fairly concrete, so they’ll be able to set aside time for feedback. Expected deadlines can also help your clients avoid rushing through their review. Instead, they have time to fully think through their feedback and test out what you send them.

Give your clients tips for using your website feedback tools to avoid unnecessary delays. While everyone knows how to use email, clients can offer better feedback if they know what format you want it in.

Similarly, real-time feedback tools like those on our SimpleStage software are fairly intuitive. And they allow clients to mark up and comment straight on your website, so you get more context. But less tech savvy users may struggle to navigate this modern technology. With just a few tips (and perhaps a visual tutorial), you can help them provide high-quality feedback with strong visual context.

Get More Helpful Feedback With a Website Feedback Tool

When you want to get website feedback that doesn’t waste your time, you need to proactively guide clients in the right direction. To start, give your clients the tips listed above to help them provide more productive, complete, and timely feedback.

Implementing a website feedback tool can be your next step to getting better feedback. With SimpleStage, your clients can reference specific areas of your designs with markups or conversation threads. As long as you give them tips on using your feedback tool, your clients can provide more actionable feedback.