To Survey or Not to Survey: That is the Question
Business owners care about their customers. Period.
You want to know who they are, what they do, what they’re looking for, where they’re located, what their purchase history is, how much budget they’re working with, etc. The next set of questions usually asked are, “On a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being “not satisfied at all”, 10 being “extremely satisfied”: How satisfied are you with your experience with our company?”, “On a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being “least likely”, 10 being “most likely”: How likely are you to recommend our company?”, and lastly, “On a scale from 1 to 10, 1 being “least likely”, 10 being “most likely”: How likely are you to do business with us again?”. These questions make up Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys for the majority of companies from all industries, geographic regions, regardless of customer type.
What we’re experiencing as consumers and business owners is “survey fatigue”, which results in the non-response rate of these surveys. You’ll get a survey now whenever you sneeze in a place of business, let alone if you make a purchase or not. There are surveys for the grocery store purchase, an oil change experience, even about your doctor’s appointment; the last thing we want to do is answer another survey about what may be a seemingly meaningless interaction. So it begs the question, should we (as business owners) or should we not send the survey?
As a seasoned professional in Marketing and Customer Experience, I’ve seen companies who do it well and others who don’t (in my opinion), and honestly, the outcomes truly vary with customer surveying. It boils down to questions for the company first:
When are you surveying your customers?
What’s the customer feedback worth to you?
How are you showing your customers they and their opinions are important to your business?
What are you going to do with the results?
Survey Timing
When you send the survey, matters. It determines what kind of information you’ll receive from the customer.
Let’s look at timing logically from a Customer Journey standpoint:
Scenario #1: Would you survey a person who goes on your website, clicks around, submits their email for a discount, but doesn’t complete a transaction?
Knee-jerk response would be “no” for some; but from a behavior analytics approach, the answer is “yes”. You’d want to understand the “why” the person didn’t complete a transaction. Was it the pricing for your goods being too high? The offer received with the submission of the email: was it valuable enough? Were they simply shopping and doing price comparisons with a competitor? All of these questions are valuable and are worth an ask. The responses could impact your pricing strategy, your go-to-market approach, the way your website is designed, and how you customize your offers for new business/customers.
Scenario #2: Do you send a survey to a customer after they complete a transaction, but before they receive their purchase?
Hot take: No. My opinion, this isn’t the appropriate time to send an NPS/CSAT survey. The customer cannot logically answer your questions about satisfaction with a company, likeliness to recommend, or even if they’ll do business with you again, simply because they aren’t done being a customer.
All the person did was click “submit” for their order, so they can’t fully speak on what their experience was with your product/service or if they would recommend/do business with you again because they haven’t had the full experience yet.
You could send them a survey about the beginning and intermediary stages of their customer journey. Questions like: “How easy was it to find what you were looking for on our website?” “Where did you hear about us (Instagram, Facebook, colleague/friend, etc.)?” “What competitors did you consider before making your purchase?”
The goal is to “make it make sense”. What questions you ask a customer when deeply impacts the quality and rate of responses you’ll receive.
What’s Feedback Worth
Show me the money, baby! If I’m going to give you my time and money as a customer, you should make it worth my while as a business. Incentivizing surveys has become the best strategic approach to boosting survey response rate. (See above about “survey fatigue”, everyone is tired nowadays…) By incentivizing your surveys, it doesn’t always mean an upfront, out-of-pocket offer, like a gift card. It could be, and it definitely bumps up the success rate of your survey performance; but what’s it going to cost you?
Cost-risk analysis is a real thing as a business owner, no matter what you’re selling services or retail goods. So, analyzing what you can afford to offer a customer for their opinions and potential repeat business is worth the time and math.
If you are a boutique clothing retail store and your average cost-of-goods sold is $10, a $10 gift card isn’t the most appropriate offer for you to give. (The math isn’t “mathing”, if you get what I mean.) However, a “$10 off your next purchase of $30 or more” could be a more valuable driver.
Similar situation: If you’re an oil-change location and your average cost of service is $100, a “$10 off next service” coupon might not move the needle to increase your response rate. If you were to position it with a cost comparison to show value, such as “$20 off your next oil change ($100 or more)”, that’s more lucrative and allows the customer to see the monetary value.
I’d love to tell you there’s a magic dollar-amount or percentage-discount that is tried-and-true for customers and survey completion. Spoiler alert: There isn’t.
It’s about knowing and consideration of a) your audience, b) your survey length, c) the budget and what you can afford, d) the relationship with your customer, and e) your company’s ethical guidelines for incentives.
Got the Answers, Now What?
Hooray! They did the thing, now what do you do?
Survey responses can be a bear to navigate and weed through. This is where you put your money where your mouth is. If a customer puts forth the effort to give you actual, constructive criticism and information about your business, you should have a plan for what you’re going to do with it.
At a minimum, a customer completes a survey, send them an appreciative reply. A personalized email from an owner goes a long way. If you’re a large-scale business, this might not be feasible, but an automated response is appropriate, again, at a minimum. If you have a sales structure based on geographic regions, assign the respective salesperson to review the survey and provide them a templated email reply as a follow-up.
There are ways to categorize your customers’ feedback: Customer Service, Product Quality, Pricing, Marketing, etc. By breaking it down into department categories, it will designate areas of business for ownership and accountability, and put the onus of improvement where it makes the most sense. For example, if a customer says pricing is too high, assigning the feedback to Marketing to figure out if your pricing is appropriate. If “product quality” is mentioned to be poor, Customer Service shouldn’t own the responsibility for material and product improvement. Assigning a Customer Experience Manager, or as I was affectionately known as a “traffic cop”, ensures you have an “owner” for the NPS/CSAT/Customer Journey projects from end-to-end (end user/customer to internal process improvement).
The Thing About Opinions
Everyone has opinions. Not all are “good”, but they are all valuable. Ask the questions to get the information you need about your customers’ journey, employee experience, distributor relationships, and so on. Show how those opinions and feedback will be used and express appreciation for the time and effort given. Like everything in life, you get what you give energy to, so give attention and energy to what grows you and your business: your internal and external customers.
Want to start measuring for Customer Experience and don’t know where to start? Complete the “Contact Us” form or send an email to janie@bethegoodmarketing.com. Let’s start and continue to do good together!