How does Bywater use your feedback to improve our training courses?
We so often hear ‘your feedback is important to us’ that it can be easy to become a little cynical about just how much notice an organisation takes of its customers’ views.
Here’s why Bywater takes feedback seriously, how we proactively seek out customer views and ratings, and what we do with what we learn.
Why feedback matters
At the heart of our business is the commitment to ‘continuous improvement’. It’s a strategy that we teach on many of our training courses, and it’s about raising customer satisfaction by finding ways in which we can do what we do better.
How we gather feedback
When you’ve completed one of our training courses you’ll receive an email from us with a quick questionnaire.
The questions are geared to finding out what did and didn’t meet or exceed your expectations. We invite your comment about the:
- training venue or Virtual Classroom
- booking and administration process
- skill and knowledge of the tutor
- training course content, and
- any other aspect that affects your experience.
As well as verbal feedback, we use an approach called the Net Promoter Score (NPS). This helps us to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty.
NPS is based on one key question: ‘How likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?’ Customers can answer on a scale from 0 to 10, which gives us a valuable insight into how our services are being received, and where we might make improvements.
What changes do we make?
We commit to reading every piece of feedback we receive. Each Monday our teams meet to consider how we can respond to suggestions for change within our organisation. We also send feedback to our tutors on a monthly basis to ensure they have the opportunity to make adjustments to their courses and delivery.
Change is possible because we create our services with flexibility in mind. That worked well for us and our customers during the pandemic as we were able to rapidly move to online training in a Virtual Classroom from disrupted traditional venue-based training.
This same flexibility means that we can make both small and large changes to improve our customers’ experience.
We’ve changed venues for our public courses when customers said their expectations weren’t being satisfied. We’ve also limited the number of delegates on some courses where attendees felt there were too many people.
We’re working with course bookers to help them create a supportive learning environment for in-company courses. That includes providing bookers with a list of tips for setting up training rooms and preparing delegates for the course.
We also aim to help delegates be as ready as possible to get maximum value from their course. For example, we now attach delegate instructions to their booking emails, so they have all the information they need in one place. And we give them the option of printed or electronic materials that they’ll be using during the course.
We continue to support our tutors too, and we’ve recently run tutor-specific training on ‘reading the room’ and inclusivity.
The full effect of feedback
Overall our feedback process helps everyone improve – Bywater, our tutors, our printing company, our venues, and our customer bookers.
If you’d like to read some of the feedback comments we have received, you can visit the Reviews section of our website.