How To Maximize The Value Of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

The customer satisfaction survey has long been a tool for CX-focused companies to collect feedback from their users.

Surveys allow people to tell brands what is or isn’t working with respect to aspects of their experiences, such as product quality, customer service, and website performance. If structured correctly, they also allow the collection of ideas on how to improve the customer experience (CX).

Once the primary way to measure customer happiness or dissatisfaction, there is now debate among CX professionals about the usefulness of customer satisfaction surveys.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has changed the way companies collect customer information. AI analytics tools can collect and analyze user feedback from multiple sources, including social media, product reviews, blog comments, and call center interactions. This has created a greater amount of information than is collected by customer satisfaction surveys.

So Is The Customer Satisfaction Survey Obsolete?

The answer is no. Surveys remain an important component of a brand’s customer experience management (CEM) strategy. Effective CEM programs are based on the analysis of large amounts of customer data that allow companies to understand their customers extensively.

While survey results alone won’t provide this complete customer insight, they do provide good information on customer satisfaction, willingness to refer, and effort. And they can be used specifically to understand transactional experiences, or at a more macro level to measure a customer’s satisfaction with the business relationship.

Organizations must follow best practices to get the most value from their customer satisfaction survey process. In this post we’ll give some tips on how to maximize survey response rates, design surveys to collect the information you need, and analyze and act on survey results.

How To Maximize Customer Satisfaction Survey Response Rates

One of the greatest weaknesses of this type of survey is the low response rate. According to Satmetrix, average response rates for B2B customer satisfaction surveys are 23% to 32% (depending on survey type) and average response rates drop to 13% to 16% for B2C surveys.

In other words, the average B2C customer satisfaction survey will tell you how 16% of customers feel, but what about the other 84%? To capture more comments from “silent” users, it is convenient to:

1) Offer Surveys Automatically When Possible

The end of a contact center interaction is the perfect time to ask customers about their satisfaction with customer service. One key to higher response rates is to offer transactional surveys immediately after the transaction. However, response rates can be hampered if the survey process relies on agents manually transferring callers to the tool in question.

The right feedback management system can automatically present customers with surveys at the end of an interaction, which can improve response rates and give agents one less thing to remember.

2) Structure The Survey For Customers To Complete

Most people have been the recipient of a boring customer satisfaction survey, and some of them may have even hung up halfway through. To avoid this scenario with surveys, it would be necessary to:

• Create an attractive invitation. Whether sending out a digital survey or calling customers for feedback, the invitation should hook them.
• Don’t make the survey too long and let customers know in the invitation and during the survey how long it will take to complete.
• Ensure customer contact information is accurate and the correct group is being surveyed. Some types of survey invitations need to be sent through channels like email and voice, making accurate contact information essential for strong response rates. Also, the response rate will suffer if the wrong group of people is surveyed. For example, if you want to determine satisfaction with the retail experience, you don’t have to survey customers who have only made online purchases.

In conclusion, how the collected information is used is probably the most important part of the customer satisfaction survey process. Performing analysis without taking action is a fruitless activity.