As a business owner, customer feedback is likely to be very important for your business’s continual improvement and success. If you would like to receive feedback from customers or third parties about your business or a particular product or service, you should strongly consider implementing a participant agreement. This will set out the terms and conditions of the focus group or feedback session and ownership of any feedback you receive. This article sets out the legal considerations you should contemplate when organising feedback sessions with third parties.
What is Feedback?
Feedback is any idea, suggestion, improvement or recommendation you receive from customers or third parties (collectively referred to in this article as ‘participant’). Feedback is often used to:
- develop new products or services;
- enhance existing products or services; or
- generally to understand a participant’s overall experience with your business.
A business’s ability to effectively implement feedback can be a valuable indicator of its success. Accordingly, this is why surveys and other feedback forms are so common after a customer interacts with a business.
How Should I Receive Feedback From Participants?
You can receive feedback about your business in multiple ways. For example, some businesses organise formal focus groups. These can be conducted in person or via video call. Alternatively, others prefer written feedback in the form of an email or via a survey or feedback session. Regardless of how you choose to receive feedback, you should have a solid participant agreement in place. This should outline the terms and conditions of the feedback session. Your participants should read and accept the participant agreement before sharing any feedback.
Continue reading this article below the formWhat Should I Include in My Participant Agreement?
There are several key clauses you should include in your participant agreement.
1. Ownership of Feedback
Your business should own all rights to the feedback you receive in the course of a feedback session. This includes intellectual property rights. Complete ownership of feedback allows you to use it in any way you see fit. For example, you may use it to develop new products or services or improve existing offerings.
If your participant agreement does not include a clear ownership clause, a participant may:
- claim that you are breaching their rights by using their feedback; or
- claim entitlement to revenue from products or services you create or improve as a result of their feedback.
An ownership clause should clarify that participants have no right to inspect or approve any product or service you create from their feedback. This makes it abundantly clear that ownership in the feedback vests in your business and not in the participant.
2. Benefit to Participants
Some businesses offer participants merchandise or a gift voucher as gratitude for participating in the feedback session. While offering a gift is a commercial decision for you, your participant agreement should clarify that participants will not receive payment or additional benefits for sharing feedback with you.
3. Confidential Information
You will likely share commercially sensitive and secretive information during your feedback sessions with participants. This is especially the case if the product or service is awaiting release to the public. As such, a confidentiality clause is essential as it provides recourse should a participant disclose confidential information to unauthorised third parties. Additionally, you can include a time period for which the confidentiality obligations will continue. Ideally, this should be until you release the product or service into the market.
4. Privacy and Personal Information
If you are conducting a group feedback session, you may want to include a clause which requires each participant to maintain the privacy of the other participants.
Further, your agreement should include a Privacy Collection Notice if you are collecting personal information from participants. This should outline:
- why you are collecting the participant’s personal information;
- how you will use it; and
- who you will disclose it to.
Before buying a business, it is important to undertake due diligence, to verify the information supplied by the seller. This guide will walk you through the due diligence process.
Key Takeaways
In summary, feedback is an invaluable tool for your business. Accordingly, if you are collecting feedback from participants, it is important that you own all rights in the feedback to ensure that you can implement it in your business and in a particular product or service. You can do this by sharing a clear participant agreement with participants before they share feedback with you.
If you need help drafting a participant agreement for your feedback session, our experienced contract lawyers can assist as part of our LegalVision membership. For a low monthly fee, you will have unlimited access to lawyers to answer your questions and draft and review your documents. Call us today on 1300 544 755 or visit our membership page.
Frequently Asked Questions
A feedback session refers to a survey from customers or third parties regarding a product or service that a company provides.
Your business may run a feedback session on an existing product or service to assess customer satisfaction with the product or service and how you can improve it. Similarly, you may run a feedback session on a product or service that you have yet to release to the public to identify potential issues.
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