So You’ve Gathered Feedback Data. What’s Next?
You’ve committed to gathering feedback from your residents, their families, and your employees to help guide the next moves in your senior living community. That’s a great first step! But it’s only a first step. Now it’s time to go beyond simply cheering the plaudits and bemoaning the jeers.
After all, gathering feedback can certainly be a worthwhile exercise, but it’s what you do with that information that will determine the true value of your effort. How are you going to analyze the data? What actions are you going to take based on that analysis? And how is your senior living community going to benefit from those actions?
The good news: you don’t have to be a data scientist to make impactful data-driven decisions. In this piece, we’ll show you how to make the most of the feedback you’ve collected – and make sure your stakeholders know their voices have been heard.
1. Choose the Right Data Analysis Tools
The first step in moving from feedback to action is analyzing the data you’ve collected. And the data analysis tools you choose can make a big difference in how effective your response to that stakeholder input will be. Because if you can’t make sense of the feedback you’ve received, it probably wasn’t worth collecting in the first place.
That’s why it’s so important to seek out data analysis tools that are easy to use and easy to understand. The goal should be to get clear, actionable insights from your data thanks to intuitive features such as…
- A dashboard with color-coded breakdowns of responses to give you a clear, easy-to-digest overview of where respondents stand on different topics.
- A flagging system to highlight areas of intense negative or positive responses to show you which areas might require the most immediate attention.
- A convenient way to sort through user comments to make sure you don’t miss out on helpful ideas that may not be reflected in the quantitative data.
The key to any good tool should be ease of use. You shouldn’t need an advanced knowledge of data analysis to be able to interpret – and ultimately act upon – the feedback that you’ve received.
2. Determine How Feedback Can Help Improve Your Operations
Once you figure out the best way to sort through the feedback you’ve received, the next step is to decide what to do with these insights. While opinions will vary and will likely focus on different aspects of your senior living community, each of these three main categories of feedback is worth scrutinizing:
- Resident feedback, which reflects the direct experience of your senior living community and can serve a vital gauge of your day-to-day service offering.
- Family feedback, which provides the perspective of a key influencer group – whose trust and enthusiasm is so important – to both the resident community and beyond.
- Staff feedback, which can show where your employees are happy and engaged in their work and where things may be lacking – key information for retaining your best and brightest.
Gathering feedback from all three of these groups can be valuable for honing your service offering and improving their respective senior living experiences. That’s why it’s so important to act on the information they’ve provided by determining…
- What is most important to each group.
- Which areas are most realistic to address immediately and which need more time.
- Which actions you can take right now that will have the greatest impact.
Also worth noting in this process is just how counterproductive inaction can be. Asking for feedback and then doing nothing with it is almost worse than never asking in the first place. Your residents, families, and staff members want to see tangible evidence that their opinions matter!
3. Use AI To Help Build Your Feedback Roadmap
Your decision-makers – those who know your community best – will be a good source of general recommendations for how best to turn the feedback you receive into meaningful action. But any discussion like this can use additional input, which is where AI comes in.
AI makes it easier to get the most out of your data, regardless of your level of tech expertise. For example, senior living technology like Smart Aging™ AI can help turn feedback into concrete steps to improve your community experience by…
- Spotting trends in the data to identify areas of high interest.
- Providing ideas for how to capitalize on positive notes or improve areas garnering negative feedback.
- Mapping out a plan for how and when to roll out different initiatives.
Just as in any team discussion, not every idea that AI comes up with will be a perfect fit for your community. But the goal here should be to get as many workable ideas on the table as possible – with all of their pros and cons – so you have plenty of options to work with.
Don’t Let Good Data Go To Waste
Gathering stakeholder feedback shouldn’t be an end goal. Instead, think of it as a first step toward addressing stakeholder concerns and taking meaningful action in your senior living community. The key to making it more than a nice exercise is to do something with the data your residents, their families, and your staff members have given you.
It’s important that these stakeholders know you’re listening to them, of course, but it’s just as important that they know you’ve really heard them. And with the right technology, you can take their valuable feedback and turn it into something even more valuable – a richer and more engaging senior living experience.
Get in touch to find out how we can help.