Getting feedback — a lesson from my voice assistant
Marketers and C-Suite love to rely on the numbers. But making it easy to leave feedback is often not enough to gather this kind of data. However, my voice assistant got me thinking. It tricked me into leaving my feedback when I least expected it. And I wasn’t even mad about it.
Not even a week ago I went around my home as usual. I’m home is a command that starts playing nice jazz music in my apartment. And turns on the table light. If it’s dark, that is. And after a while, I decided to stop the music and continue on in silence. So, the usual Ok, Google, stop took place. However, the voice assistant decided to seize the opportunity and add the comment (paraphrased):
Thank you for listening. How happy are you with our service, if 1 is not satisfied at all and 5 is extremely satisfied?
I told them it was 4. The Voice assistant thanked me again. But it got me thinking: why have I told them about my experience anyway? It’s not like I am very keen on giving this kind of feedback.
What are my alternatives?
You see, I am the kind of voice assistant user who hates leaving my poor assistant hanging. If it’s actively listening, I want to make sure I am in control of the commands. So activating it and then waiting for the time to run out in order to deactivate the listening mode — not my thing.
So when it asked me about my satisfaction, I had two options: stating the score or saying cancel. And I went for the feedback.
Why did I do it? I could say cancel or leave the assistant waiting until it turned off. See, because the question was unexpected, it was more exhausting to think of the cancel word than to think of the score. So I used the easier way out.
What about the wait? Well, it is simply not my thing. I have to complete the action with the voice assistant. And I like simple, natural actions. I bet I am not the only one who acts that way.
So, my lesson about getting a lot of quality feedback is very simple:
It doesn’t have to be simple — it just has to be easier than the alternative.
