Customer feedback is an extremely important component of most businesses. Without an understanding of how consumers feel about the products or services they receive, businesses cannot hope to maintain, or even improve, the level of quality they provide. The importance of customer feedback is what drives most companies to issue surveys or conduct interviews about consumers’ experiences. Yet, collecting customer comments is only one part of understanding the consumer; companies must organize the information they receive from customers in a way that is actionable. It is with this organization of consumer feedback that Visual Mind Mapping can prove instrumental. With Visual Mind Maps, companies can organize and interpret feedback using an intuitive and spatially formatted method of diagramming. This method of diagramming also allows companies to make use of images and colors that strengthen conceptual understanding of the information. Visual Mind Maps, therefore, give companies a functional and creative way to better understand their consumers’ needs.
What are Visual Mind Maps and How Are They Created?
A Visual Mind Map is “a means of organizing information that allows individuals to create diagrams, pictures, and other graphic visuals in order to show the relationship between ideas or other types of information”. With a Visual Mind Map, the creator makes use of images and colors to construct the map and represent his or her ideas in a non-linear format. When creating a Visual Mind Map, the individual usually begins by showing the key concept or main idea of the information as a graphic image, located in the center of the map. Any themes surrounding the main idea are shown on “branches” that are attached to the central topic. Subsequent themes of less importance are then attached to these branches using “child branches”, and so on. The resulting diagram is a “map” of the ideas and information presented that includes the images, visual graphics, and colors the individual associates with each of the themes and ideas.
Creating a Visual Mind Map of Customer Feedback
Consider an example of a storeowner looking to improve her employees’ customer service to patrons. The owner of the business decides to issue mail-in postcards to customers as they leave her store asking them to rate their customer service experience during their visit. After collecting 20 postcards, the owner decides to begin organizing customer feedback using a Visual Mind Map. She begins her Mind Map by placing a creative graphic representing her store in the map’s center. On the attached “branches”, she divides her map into four different sections representing the different points of customer-employee contact consumers were asked to rate. She then attaches “child branches” labeled “positive” and “negative” to each “branch”. Lastly, the owner lists any positive or negative comments consumers had concerning these aspects on “twigs” attached to the “child branches”. Throughout the map, the owner uses several visual images and colors to make the map more associative and easy to process. The attached Visual Mind Map exhibits what the owner’s map might look like when constructed.
Using the Visual Mind Map to Make Changes Based on Customer Feedback
As a result of her Visual Mind Map, the storeowner is able to clearly see the areas in which her employees are strong or weak concerning their customer service. She can now make any necessary changes to her employees’ customer service practices based on the feedback she’s received. In addition, the owner can continue to update her Visual Mind Map over time, allowing her to assess the effect her changes are having on current customer feedback. With Visual Mind Mapping, the storeowner, thus, found that she has a convenient and efficient way to organize consumer opinions into actionable employee training.
Tags: business, consumer, customer, feedback, mind mapping, survey, track