Feedback Manager
The Feedback Manager collects comments visitors leave on your content.
Overview
The Feedback Manager is a Mass.gov authoring tool that helps you track and analyze user feedback on your content. This feedback comes from the survey at the bottom of every Mass.gov page:
Visitors see this survey at the bottom of every Mass.gov page.
Another way to review feedback is by using the "Pages with high negative feedback" report, found under the General Reports section of the "Reports" tab on the main navigation bar in the CMS. This report helps you identify which content is getting the most negative feedback.
How it works
The Feedback Manager is embedded in the CMS. It includes user feedback from any page on Mass.gov. You can customize the way visitors leave feedback from your Organization page.
You can also tag your content’s user feedback. Tagging feedback helps train our machine learning program on how your feedback should be organized and labeled. In the future, we’ll be able to use machine learning to automatically tag user feedback for you.
How to use it
Step 1: Find the Feedback Manager in the CMS
Step 2: Filter your results
There are several ways to filter the feedback you see on this screen. You can cast a large net with the Organization filter, you can focus on only your content with the Author filter, or you can look up an individual page with the Content filter. You can also filter by Page label, Feedback tag, and Specific text.
Limit the time range of your results by using the Start Date and End Date filters.
Select an organization
You can choose multiple organizations at a time.
Select an author
You can choose multiple authors at a time.
Select a single page to see the feedback it has received
Note: You can also access feedback about an individual page by accessing the Feedback tab while editing a page.
Select a group of pages by page label
This lets you to review feedback across a group of related content that shares the same page label. This saves time rather than reviewing feedback on individual pages.
Search feedback for specific text
Filter feedback by entering 1 or more terms, separated by commas, to discover verbatim comments on your content that include specific terms or phrases.
You can search by general terms, such as “tax” or “2021,” or zoom in on more specific ones, such as “tax refund.”
You can also use Feedback Manager to:
Choose a category of feedback in the Filter by tag drop-down. (If you haven’t yet tagged any of a page’s feedback, this filter will return no results. See Step #4 for how to add or remove tags.)
Sort the data by newest or oldest at the top
Choose to view only “Yes” or only “No” responses to the “Did you find…” prompt, or view both at once
Choose to view only “Yes” or only “No” responses to the “Requires Response” prompt, or view both at once
Filter by watched pages only (this is enabled by default)
It is also possible to filter only by “Did you find” status, or “Requires Response.” To do this, leave the Organization, Author, Content, Page label, Feedback tag, and Specific text filters blank, and pick at least one option from Filter by “Did you find?” status, or Filter by “Requires Response.”
Step 3: View feedback
Once you’ve finished picking your filters, you can begin reading your content’s feedback. From left to right, each row contains:
Date: The date feedback was received
Did You Find: Whether the user responded “yes” or “no” to the “Did you find what you were looking for on this webpage?” survey
Source Page: The page the feedback is from
Feedback Text: The user’s verbatim feedback
Requires Response: Whether the user responded “yes” or “no” to the “Would you like a response from [your organization]?” prompt
Survey: Whether the user chose to provide additional feedback about their overall Mass.gov experience
Tags: Any tag that’s been applied to the feedback so far
Viewing in-page feedback
To see any page’s verbatim feedback, find the page in the CMS and click the “Feedback” tab in the right corner (next to the Analytics tab).
This page will look a lot like the full Feedback Manager.
Note: Currently, you can’t filter or tag feedback here so you’ll have to visit the Feedback Manager for that.
Export feedback
You can export the feedback from a specific page by clicking the "Download CSV Export" button in the bottom left corner of the page. Your export will be limited to 15,000 rows of feedback. If you need to see more rows, you can use the filters in the Feedback Manager to split the feedback into smaller segments. You also can ask for a download with more than 15,000 rows of feedback through a ServiceNow request.
Learn more about exporting feedback from the CMS.
Step 4: Add or remove tags
To add a tag, click the “Add tag” button:
A tag dropdown will appear. Select the tag you think best fits from this menu. For example, you might tag “senior lifetime pass” with “Adult and Senior Care,” and “how much is parking” could be tagged “Location Information.”
After you’ve added a tag, it will appear in the Feedback Manager next to the response:
Items can have up to 3 tags:
To remove a tag, click the “Remove tag” link next to each:
If you want to request a new tag, request it through ServiceNow.
Step 5: Export feedback (optional)
You can export lists of filtered results from the Feedback Manager into a comma-separated values (CSV) file (or Excel spreadsheet). This can be helpful if you’re tracking feedback you’ve responded to or plan to respond to, making content improvements based on specific feedback, or sharing feedback with colleagues or supervisors.
Your export is limited to 15,000 rows of results. If you need to download more rows of feedback, please use ServiceNow to request help.
Step 6: Respond to feedback (if a response is requested)
If you’ve chosen to collect contact information along with feedback, you are expected to reach out to visitors who have left their contact information within a reasonable time frame. If a visitor has requested you respond to them, you will see their contact information in the “Requires Response” column.
How does tagging feedback benefit you?
There are 2 reasons to tag your feedback. First, it’s practical: On heavily-trafficked pages with a lot of feedback, tagging helps you organize that feedback, and to identify patterns in what users say. Then, you can make informed decisions about how to improve your content based on your user data.
Second, in the future, we plan to take advantage of machine learning to automatically tag feedback. This means that we can teach a machine learning program to identify patterns and to associate labels with those patterns. Our machine learning program will eventually be able to identify what kind of feedback should be tagged with “Contact information,” “Document Upload and Management,” “Compliment,” and so on.
The more data we give our machine learning program, the better it will be at recognizing which tags are appropriate for which types of feedback. Similarly, the more feedback you tag, the better it will be at learning how your feedback should be categorized.
What if the tag you need isn’t there?
Request a new one through ServiceNow.
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