New alerting to help you use feedback for change

Reblogged with permission from Patient Opinion UK.

Like any half-decent feedback platform, we send you an email alert when we publish new feedback you're interested in (filtered, for example, by provider, place, tag, condition, and so on). And, if you want, we also send you an alert when we publish a new response.

But you may not know that we can also alert you about some other important things, like your response being found un/helpful, forgetting to read serious feedback, or nobody responding to feedback after some time has passed.

A while back I gave a few examples of how to use these "smart alerts" to ensure the timeliness and quality of your organisation's engagement.

In this post I want you let you know about two more alerts we've added, in response to subscriber requests.

Stories where we should be making changes

You might consider that some stories should clearly lead to action of some kind, which is communicated back to the author. An obvious example would be stories which are strongly critical, or worse.

You might want to know if a story like that hasn't led to any change, after some period of time. Our new "no change planned or made" alert can let you know:

With that, you can be sure we'll inform you if there's strongly critical feedback which no evident change after two weeks.

If we plan a change, do we follow through?

Equally, you might feel that if you plan to make a change, you should post an update when you have made it. This enables everyone to see that you follow through on a commitment. But what if you forget?

Again, that's easy to fix: just create the right smart alert, like this:

If you plan to make a change, but fail to follow up after 3 months (or the interval you set), we'll let you know.

Monitoring what others are doing

It may not be obvious from the examples above, but smart alerts aren't restricted to keeping you informed about just your own organisation.

You can also ask for alerts when, for example, none of the relevant providers are reading stories, responding, making a change, or following through. That sort of alert might be very relevant to a monitoring organisation such as a commissioner, a regulator or a local healthwatch.

How do I find out more?

If your organisation or team subscribes already, you can contact our support team for help and advice.

If you don't subscribe but you're interested in knowing more, feel free to contact us for more information.

Or, as always, you can post any comments or questions below