In a digital-first world, too many companies continue to rely on NPS, CES, and CSAT surveys as the primary source for customer insights. Companies must develop a robust capability to collect, analyze, and act on customer insights.
The use of post Support and Customer Success transaction surveys to gather satisfaction or Net Promoter scores are common. Although widely used they seldom tell us much about true customer sentiments or suggest customer intent. A customer that indicates positive sentiment still may be at risk of churning.
To gain rich customer insights you must expand your data gathering and analytical capabilities to include multiple sources of customer data and embrace best practices and advanced tools including AI. Consider the following best practices for deeper, more meaningful customer insights:
Improve Deliverability – Get your questions to the customer’s inbox.
Too often we find that customer surveys never get opened or responded to. Sometimes the customer does not have the time or interest to respond and other times your request for feedback never gets to the customer.
Deliverability has become a challenge for digital markets and anyone that wants to get a message to the customer via e-mail. To overcome deliverability challenges, consider the following:
- Keep your customer list up to date.
- Use spam checking tools to minimize the chance that your survey invitation will get captured by a spam filter – a lot of spam gets caught by corporate IT policies and edge spam filters.
- Ask customers to add your domain to the safe senders list (locally or at the corporate level).
- See alternative channels to solicit feedback, on your web portal, via messaging, community, social channels, or even within the product.
Compel Customer Responses – encourage customers to respond.
If you get through the spam filter you still need customers to invest their finite time to share feedback. They often need a reason. If they are upset with you, you are more likely to get feedback. If you want a well-rounded and representative responses make the case for why you need to hear from everyone. Make it fun, make it compelling. Consider:
- Create a clear, yet simple explanation of how and why you are asking for feedback.
- Provide recognizable context for the customer to connect your request to a recent transaction or the relationship they have with your company.
- Offer incentives for participation and recognize those that share feedback in a way that protects customer identity.
- Gamify feedback though rewards and loyalty programs. If you use rewards or recognition in your community, you can extend that program to include responding to satisfaction surveys.
- Act on feedback and make it clear to customers that positive changes made to policies or programs are based on customer feedback.
Collect Actionable Insights – Make certain you can act on what you learn.
Once you get the time and attention of your customers make certain that you collect quality information. Don’t waste time collecting answers to questions you already know or have a strong sense about. Ask about topics that will expand your knowledge of what customers need, like, or don’t like. Consider:
- Define the top two or three things you want to learn from a customer – change what you ask about as your needs change.
- Ask questions based on the context of their need – if they contact you about apples, don’t ask questions about bananas.
- Consider your approach to learn a little about a lot of things or a lot about something specific. A single probing question with a follow-on prompt can yield excellent, deep insights.
- Consider how you will act on customer feedback as you formulate your questions.
- If you are not going to act on something, don’t ask customers for their feedback.
Target the Right Audience – Collect insights from the customers you need to hear from most.
Consider who you need to hear from. Survey samples can bias your responses by focusing on a narrow segment of your customer base or excluding some customers. Consider:
- Don’t fail to collect feedback from customers that contact you often just to avoid survey fatigue. If they are contacting you, learn about all their experiences.
- Engage customers you don’t often hear from. Post-transaction surveys offer valuable insights, but don’t forget to reach out to customers that you do not hear from.
- Engage your most strategic customers, but…
- Don’t forget about other customer segments. Smaller customers may not spend as much as your large ones, but there are often a lot of them.
- Use health scoring to solicit feedback from customers that may be at risk.
Maintain Context – Understand the context of the insights you collect.
Customer feedback is more valuable when you understand the context of who the customer is in relation to your business. Be certain to link customer surveys to existing customer records. Consider:
- Make certain that data collected through CSat, CES, NPS, and other channels can be associated with existing information you already know about customers.
- Analyze customer feedback in the context of key customer segments (e.g. account value, length of relationship, health score, pending renewals, etc.).
Supplement CSat, NPS, and CES with Digital Intelligence – Don’t rely on customer surveys alone.
Custom insights gained through surveys represent a fraction of what you can and should know about your customers. Look for customer specific feedback and insights through digital interactions including case records, community, and social posts. Use multiple sources of insight to understand customer needs, expectations, and perceptions.
- Mine digital customer records.
- Analyze support cases.
- Extract top issues and actional comments from communities.
- Examine social media for positive and negative mentions about your products and services.
- Evaluate use cases for AI to help analyze customer data.
Conclusions
When you measure customer satisfaction do not think of your satisfaction score as your end goal – think about how these insights can be used to positively influence customer behaviors. Encourage more customers to:
- Renew this relationship with you and buy more products.
- Reduce reasons for churn.
- Post positive reviews about your products and services.
Effective customer satisfaction strategies provide the necessary insights your company needs to make decisions about products, programs, services, and policies that will result in driving positive financial benefits.
While it is possible that satisfied customers will stop doing business with you, it is nearly certain that dissatisfied customers will be the first ones to churn.
ServiceXRG provides Support performance benchmarking and metrics design assistance. If you have a question, or need assistance please contact us.