An Excellent Customer Experience Program Starts With an Excellent Survey

Excellent customer experienceSurveys are essential customer engagement tools. A good survey will offer valuable insights that can help brands hone in on what customers really need, want, and expect. Marketers rely on them to build brand loyalty and create meaningful customer experiences. The problem, however, is that too often surveys are ineffective. Any marketer that has ever attempted to use a survey that was too long, poorly constructed, misdirected, or outdated knows these pitfalls.

During Tuesday’s Loyalty360 webinar titled, “The Seven Deadly Survey Sins – and How to Avoid Them,” Brian Koma, VP & Customer Experience Practice Leader at Verint, and Sean Mahoney, CCXP, Strategic Solutions Consultant, Customer Analytics at Verint, illuminated how to significantly improve the impact and relevance of surveys. They avoided sterile talk of survey “theory” to instead offer tangible and practical real-world steps that can actually maximize the value of any survey.

A successful customer experience program depends on an accurate understanding of the consumer, and that understanding begins with an effective survey. Therefore, according to Koma and Mahoney, to be successful a survey must achieve its intended goal, produce data that accurately represents the targeted Excellent customer experiencepopulation sample, and improve the satisfaction level of the respondents.

Step One: Focus on a Goal

Without a goal, the survey will be directionless and useless. Koma and Mahoney recommend clearly defining what information your organization needs to collect and what it ultimately plans to do with it. Not every department should be allowed to ask every question that comes to mind. A specifically focused and outlined goal will serve as the ideal starting point, which will also significantly simplify the survey in the end.

Step Two: Survey the Right People

A survey is not a census. Not every single person in a company’s database needs to be queried. That’s overkill and it also adds layers of complexity. Focus instead on what you want to know and whom you want to know it from. Koma and Mahoney offered a perfect example to illustrate this point.

“You only need a few sips to know how hot the pot of soup is,” they said.

Step Three: Craft Your Invitation Carefully

Koma and Mahoney expound on the obstacles that arise when turning survey recipients into actual respondents. A potential survey respondent has to first be on the e-mail list and not on the unsubscribe list. They must not flag the message as spam, proceed to open the e-mail, and then actually click on the link.

In order to increase the chances that a survey recipient will follow through on each of these steps, an invitation must be well crafted to “jump these response hurdles.”

Step Four: Order Questions Logically

Logically ordered questions make surveys easier to complete and make the respondents feel more comfortable. Koma and Mahoney suggest beginning a survey with screener questions, and then moving onto open-ended questions, general questions, specific questions, demographics, and concluding with follow-up questions.

Step Five: Write Objective Questions

Survey respondents should not be able to discern an organization’s position on any subject. Non-judgmental wording and neutral terms should always be used. Subjective or emotionally charged language can positively or negatively affect the personal opinions of respondents, which in turn can bias the survey results and lead to incorrect conclusions.

Koma and Mahoney say to avoid leading questions such as, “What do you like about your service?”

A better alternative would be, “What, if anything, do you like about your service?”

To avoid ambiguity, they also suggest writing the survey from the respondent’s perspective while sidestepping industry jargon and subtle distinctions.

Step Six: Shorten the Survey

As the number of survey question increase, the rate of survey abandonment among respondents also exponentially increases. And long surveys can still be ineffectual even if they are actually completed.

Long surveys can cause “survey fatigue.” As the survey progresses, respondents will being rushing answers and generally stop paying close attention. This will drastically compromise the quality and accuracy of the end results.

Step Seven: Close the Feedback Loop

This step is essentially defined as 1) Survey, 2) Learn, 3) Improve, 4) Share, and 5) Repeat.

Respondents generally contribute to surveys because they value your brand and/or they want to see you improve. Therefore, Koma and Mahoney recommend explaining what your company is using the data for, sharing the data with those involved, identifying the actions that the survey influences, and setting up an online community that can provide ongoing feedback.

Brands that consider all of these steps while designing and implementing a survey will yield better survey results in the end.  

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