Every business that has customers should have surveys as part of their strategy. They provide an opening into the minds of a customer base, helping businesses grow and adapt. They are also particularly important now, given the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the face of CX perhaps permanently. Customers have become more demanding and open to alternative channel experimentation, with these behaviours triggered by long lockdowns across the globe. And because these customer personas have evolved, it’s imperative companies keep up with a successful survey strategy so they can retain them.
With this in mind, CX Today welcomes Jamie MacSween, Director of Customer Success at Puzzel, to provide his tips for setting up a successful survey strategy and ensuring customers respond when asked for feedback.
“Businesses absolutely need to understand their customers,” MacSween says. “Otherwise you’re simply running a company blind.”
Strong words from MacSween, but spoken from a Puzzeler who recognises how important the customer is to any business. This is because customer interactions is at the heart of what Puzzel does. Yet MacSween also reminds us of the importance of gathering agent feedback too. Agent Experience (AX) has become all the more important during the pandemic, with business leaders acknowledging the link between agent engagement and customer satisfaction. A happy agent will of course naturally provide a better customer experience when they feel supported and comfortable in their role. AX surveys can also prevent a high staff turnover, which can be damaging for organisations.
MacSween adds:
“AX is part of the Puzzel culture. If those on the front line engaging with customers are not happy and not enjoying what they’re doing on a day-to-day basis then the customers will pick up on this”
But what types of surveys are on offer for companies to send to their customers? Post-call surveys are among the most popular ways of collecting customer feedback in a contact centre. Once an interaction ends, the customer is requested to score the conversation on a scale of 1-5 or 1-10, indicating their satisfaction. The organisation then evaluates the average response to understand how effectively an agent is handling customer interactions, as well as the average performance levels across the contact centre. Open-ended questions have a tendency to trigger a higher response rate, as customers tend to enjoy the freedom of being able to pen their thoughts. These types of surveys are typical of the ones sent out via email, while traditional post-call surveys are often sent out via SMS. The trick, MacSween explains, is not to ask too much of a customer in a survey. The same also goes for AX surveys.
“I’ve seen some surveys that I’ve really cringed at because of the long questions. Many customers get to the end of it and think ‘Well, to answer that question it’ll take me ten minutes, and it’s just not going to happen’.
“The best set of questions to ask are very simple and very easy for customers to answer. These are typically your NPS scores, asking whether customers would recommend the business to friends and family. These shorter questions don’t take up much time to gather responses.
“Any survey questions that require consumers to write lots of words or give a lot of thought into what they’re doing simply won’t be answered. The average survey response level is between 10%-20% if businesses are lucky. But if they begin to ask long questions and challenging questions, then that response drops to 5%.”
The key is to provide a survey that customers actually want to respond to. To elaborate on MacSween’s point, estimates suggest that in the last 20 years the median response rate for feedback has dropped from around 20% to just 5%. For many brick-and-mortar retailers, this has fallen to well under 1%. The effect of this is while businesses focus on delivering a hyper-personalised service to consumers, the feedback samples they’re working with are getting lower. This can spark a disconnect between customers and businesses. MacSween says the trick to boosting survey responses is to give customers an option to elaborate if they wish to.
“When businesses send out customer surveys, they’re given an opportunity to see what the customer wants them to see. But companies must make sure they have a mechanism in place to act on that feedback. Because if they don’t, then to be blunt, there’s no point asking the question in the first place if it won’t prompt positive change”
To summarise, surveys should reflect the demographic of the customers businesses have, while making them as user-friendly as possible. Consumerism is in a state of post-COVID change, where businesses are adapting to meet the needs of customers. Surveys are an excellent way to reconnect with a customer base that may have changed following the pandemic. Conducting post-purchase surveys, in addition to post-call surveys will provide businesses with well-rounded feedback too. And having incentives in place to really tempt a customer into responding to surveys while asking follow-up questions are just some of the other great tactics to consider.
