How to get Great Feedback from your Users

What do your users have to say about you?

Quality feedback from your users can be invaluable, and it’s well worth your time to gather some.

We recently decided we wanted to know more about what our users were thinking and doing, so we identified one hundred of our most active users, those that were uploading the most music exercises for marking in the past couple of months.

To those 100 people we sent this simple email.

I hope you don’t mind me writing to you personally, but I was wondering if you felt able to share your music learning story with me and perhaps other Gigajam users.

It is great seeing your performances being uploaded to your portfolio and being the founder of Gigajam, I am always fascinated by those who choose us and why. I would welcome your thoughts on what works well, what you really enjoy about Gigajam and how you think we can improve it.

There is a modern day trend to send out surveys, but I prefer to get a more personal understanding of my clients.

I appreciate that you may well be very busy and have plenty of priorities, but if you do have a few spare moments to send me your valued thoughts I would love to hear them.

I would love to receive your thoughts and if you have a story about your music to share, then that would be great to hear.

Please do not feel obliged in any way to respond; only if you wish to.

With very best wishes,

Yours sincerely

Brian

We had some fantastic responses that have really helped us understand our users, as well as give us some stories to share with the rest of our user base, or to use as testimonials to attract new users.

Also there’s a huge impact on our team when we read how what we have created has impacted on other people lives. Here are two example responses.

“I recently wanted piano lessons again at the age of 64. I had only played for 9 months previously when I was 19 so was not very advanced. I joined Gigajam via the Telegraph and I really enjoy using ‘Xtractor’ and trying to get into the rhythm. I practise the piano daily but ‘Gigajam’ as a session when I hook up to my computer. It makes the music come alive and has given me incentive to keep at it. I also like the comments my tutor makes as it adds a nice personal touch and is encouraging. Thank you so much for your program, I tell all my friends about it.”

Thanks for the email, and let’s start with that. One of the really great things I have already experienced from Gigajam and particularly yourself is a wonderful understanding of the personal touch and how accomplishment is built on relationship. One of the most important precepts of the work I am involved in across many industries all over the world is that communication builds relationship which in turn supports accomplishment and I can see that you and Gigajam have that in abundance.

My experience of Gigajam is one that encompasses many learning styles, right from the written word to videos to practical application. It covers everyone’s preferences for learning and that is rare. I love that I can go to it whenever is convenient, I am not restricted to specific lesson times and I can carry on if I am in the zone or stop if I am tired or distracted. The flexibility is marvellous.

I love the structure and the simplicity of the learning process. I think I mentioned when we spoke that I first learned rhythm guitar from Harvey Vinson’s book. His process was very similar to yours in that it embedded the basics first and made you practice those important exercises over and over again so that your brain got it all connected properly. I have never forgotten that which is why Gigajam’s style is so resonant with me. You’ve got to get the basics imprinted first before you can start to do clever stuff.

The videos are wonderful and I am ready for the lessons (already playing the exercises) by the end of the video, but that is very much in tune with my learning preferences, watch it then try it while I’m watching it! Gigajam gives this option and I’m sure gives other people their preferred options of how to learn as well.

All in all, I love this way of learning a musical instrument and would recommend it to everyone. It’s not conventional but when did ‘conventional’ ever move the world forward?

Words like this bring a warm glow to us, as well as provide very powerful messages we can use in our marketing. It certainly beats making up testimonials!

So please take the time to question your users, ask them for their stories and share them with your community, everyone will be better off for it.