When measuring customer experience, your company likely includes surveys in your approach. While this practice remains a viable method for gaining feedback, how your company sends these surveys is critical to getting responses. Forrester reports that the modern customer—one who is typically digital-savvy and seeks purpose in everything he does—only cares to complete a survey if it’s engaging and easy to answer. In addition, the customer must feel his answers will make a difference. For maximum engagement, your brand must modernize survey practices in a way that appeals to customers. Here are five tips to consider.
Surveys often feature long lists of questions with little or no images. But is that really the best way to engage your customers? In many ways, a good survey should parallel the qualities of your brand website. Visual appeal is needed to attract customer attention. Language should be clear and catchy. Lastly, content should always be relevant. One way to do this is by featuring images of people with whom your customers can identify. An airline, for example, might send out a survey that inquires about different points along the customer’s travel journey. Each step of the survey can be accompanied by images of travelers in the situations described. This fosters a personal connection with the customer, reminding him of his experience and soliciting specific answers.
When writing surveys, it’s always a good idea to include free response sections. This allows customers to explain concerns your company may not have considered. But why not take your approach a step further by inviting customers to share their own visual content? Just as social media posts that contain photos and videos are more likely to engage users, surveys that include such media are more likely to help your brand understand customer issues. For example, a photo may show a broken product that the customer still needs help with or a long line at a retail location. As many customers have smartphones, taking photos and videos is often easy for them to do and adds more impact to their survey responses.
For the best chance of a response, be sure to follow up on the channel of contact. A customer who communicates with an agent through a messaging app, for example, should not receive a survey via email. Send surveys promptly after each service interaction, and adapt them to each channel. Any survey that is likely to be opened on a mobile device should be optimized for such an interface, using buttons that are easy to click or embedded text rather than links to webpages that may not be optimized.
In addition to formal surveys, your company may collect feedback casually on the brand website. On product pages, for example, you might ask customers if the descriptions given were helpful to them. Keeping track of customers’ responses allows your brand to improve the user experience and ultimately create greater customer experiences.
Artificial intelligence may be used to identify recurring customer issues. Social listening tools, for example, are effective when looking for repeated negative words among your customers’ comments. While this information can be used to tackle problems directly, it is equally useful for updating survey questions. For example, if customers complain about late deliveries, you can include specific questions about this in your surveys to make sure the problem is not recurring.When customers respond to your surveys, they are doing your brand a favor by giving you their time. For this reason, it’s essential to offer them engaging content featuring meaningful questions. And perhaps most importantly, show them your appreciation by taking their words to heart and giving them great experiences they will want to write about.
