Do your customers love your product and service? What do they think about your brand, staff, and call center?
The more you know about what your customers think, the better, and yet it can be difficult for many companies to hear directly from their customers about what they want, dislike, and why. That’s why customer feedback surveys are so valuable. Surveys allow your company to directly communicate with your customer and ask them everything from “How did we do?” to “What could we do better?”
The problem is that many customers have survey fatigue and don’t want to spend their time and energy helping you out. So how do you overcome survey fatigue while still getting valuable customer feedback?
First, we need to discuss what survey fatigue is. There are two types:
In either case, customer survey fatigue results in low-quality data, unhappy customers, and poor results for you. And that’s a significant problem.
We know that customer surveys are essential. Customer feedback provides:
But since everyone asks for customer feedback today, how do you avoid survey fatigue and still get the results you want? It’s about being smart and garnering customer feedback wherever you can.
The following seven tips deal with survey fatigue and provide you with some actions you can take today to increase survey responses and gain more valuable feedback.
Don’t waste your customers’ time and energy on unnecessary questions, complicated objectives, or wordy polls. Keep your surveys simple and focused on the goal.
Few customers have the time or inclination to spend more than a minute or two filling out a survey. Keep the survey short and to the point.
Sometimes, just one question, like with CSAT surveys asking CSAT surveys that ask customers to answer, “How satisfied was you with your experience on a scale of 1 to 10?” is enough. This is called micro-polling and allows you to get to the bottom line of the customer feedback you need most in every instance. The key is immediately polling customers right after their experience while the memory is fresh and they are already giving your business time out of their busy schedule.
It can be tempting to send out a customer survey every time you need feedback on something: a new product release, a change in your call center, or the CEO wants to know what customers think about X, Y, and Z. The problem is that the more surveys you send out—the more you flood your customers’ inboxes and phone lines—the less likely they are to respond.
Instead, save your surveys for situations when the results matter. Choose how and when to send out a customer survey. And if you need feedback on various topics at once, divide your surveys up amongst your customers, so each customer only has to answer one survey, but you get answers to all.
Customers want to feel like the surveys they take are relevant to their needs. For example, if they just called your call center, they’ll be more willing to answer a survey about their experience than your new product's launch. Always make sure your survey targets the right audience at the right time.
And as part of relevancy, make sure your survey focuses on your company and not the person. Many customers are uncomfortable revealing personal information about their demographics, buying patterns, or purchase history. Keep personal boundaries in mind and only ask personal questions as they relate to your survey objective.
If you track help tickets, read social media comments, live record chats, and receive emails, you have thousands of pieces of customer feedback. The best and most accurate feedback comes from customers when they don’t realize they’re giving feedback. The key is reading, analyzing, and understanding this customer feedback through text analytics.
You can automatically review any unstructured text with text analytics and extract valuable insight into customer sentiment/emotion and keywords associated with complaints, satisfaction, and questions. You’ll better understand:
Your Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the gold standard for measuring customer experience and assessing customer loyalty. All customers have to do is rate your brand on a scale of 0-10—with 0 representing extremely unlikely to recommend and ten representing extremely likely to recommend.
From here, you can divide your customers into three buckets: Detractors (scores of 0-6), Passives (scores of 7-8), and Promoters (scores of 9-10). Then, using that insight, reach out directly to each different customer bucket with the questions, enthusiasm, and empathy necessary to evoke the proper survey response.
And remember, a customer experience promoter has a lifetime value to a company that’s 600-1,400% that of a detractor.
Customer feedback is customer feedback. It doesn’t have to come directly from a survey to be valuable. That’s why we also recommend taking advantage of customer service scorecards as a valuable source of feedback.
Your contact center agents have an excellent idea about how their interactions have gone. A customer service scorecard is an evaluation system to measure how well they’ve met expectations and achieved desired outcomes. These scorecards are entirely customizable and can be as detailed as you want to identify contact center trends, lacking customer experience, and overall customer satisfaction.
Remember, at the end of the day, customer feedback is only valuable if you use what you learn—52% of people around the globe believe that companies need to take action on feedback provided by their customers. So, after implementing our seven tips for gaining feedback without survey fatigue, make sure you take the time to implement the suggested changes. Through this implementation, you’ll build customer loyalty, increase profitability, and improve the entire customer experience.
