Feedback is critical to growth
Feedback is an essential part of any business transaction. You always want it to go smoothly, but you also want to know where you can improve for the next time. Trying to finagle feedback from a client can be arduous. Even if you get feedback, it may not be particularly helpful. Here’s a good way to get assist you in getting more information from your clients, with less effort.
Both you and your client want the same thing: a successful project. This could happen a lot sooner, if you did not have to interpret bad feedback to get there. For example, let’s say you send a project to client for a new web design. They send it back and ask you to move one button to the right, another a little more to left and on top of these requests, they’ve already tried to edit this code themselves and undone all of your work.
Rather than search for what they have changed and wonder whether they meant move that button to the far right or just a few inches, sending a feedback guideline, like the one Wonderful Feedback has suggested, can save you time and money. Granted, this guideline may need to be tweaked to suit your particular client or field, but it is a pretty good starting point for knowing what to ask of your clients in regards to feedback.
Wonderful Feedback suggests that you include a copy of their guidelines as part of your communication packet to ensure that both parties expectations are met. If nothing else, I think this will open up the lines of communication to help get the necessary and useful feedback freelancers need to do their jobs more effectively; and when the freelancer is doing their job more effectively the client gets their work done quickly and with less revisions. Again, there may be things you need to change, but at least this will get your creative juices flowing in the right direction.
Jennifer Walpole is a Senior Staff Writer at The American Genius and holds a Master's degree in English from the University of Oklahoma. She is a science fiction fanatic and enjoys writing way more than she should. She dreams of being a screenwriter and seeing her work on the big screen in Hollywood one day.