Connections ViewPoint: Asking for Feedback is Just the Beginning
Online Feedback Programs that Work:
Creating Effective eFeedback Forms
CustomerSat Announces: Customer Experience
Management (CEM) 4.0
ViewPoint: Asking for Feedback is Just the Beginning
Russell Haswell, V.P. Marketing, CustomerSat
Customer
feedback can be a powerful driver for meaningful, targeted process
changes. Data provided
directly from your customers can be invaluable in immediately pinpointing
root problems that need to be addressed, and identifying key competitive
advantages. When corrective
action is taken throughout an organization to address these issues, you
can generate effective process changes that can add incremental revenue
and increase profitability. Asking for customer feedback, in this case, is the first
step in a comprehensive, ongoing feedback program, demonstrated in the
following diagram:
CustomerSat
clients have implemented a wide variety of process improvements based on
real-time alerts and continuous analysis of customer data that have
improved both internal and external customer satisfaction.
Based on actionable customer feedback, process changes have ranged
from implementing customer-driven employee recognition awards to deploying
new communications methods for key customers.
Once implemented, these companies continue to measure and track the
success of the new processes to ensure continued success.
Building
and sustaining loyalty means meeting and exceeding your customer
expectations. By asking
customers for their thoughts, listening to their feedback, and
implementing targeted actions, you are able to address the real needs of
your customers.
Online Feedback Programs that Work:
Creating Effective eFeedback Forms
By John Chisholm, CEO, CustomerSat, Inc.
The
correlation of maintaining and improving customer satisfaction with
increased profitability is becoming paramount as companies seek to gain
the competitive edge in an increasingly complex environment.
Building a loyal customer base founded on high satisfaction levels
is a key to corporate success for eBusinesses, Click & Mortars, and
traditional businesses alike.
Studies show that the cost to acquire a customer is up to five
times the amount of retaining an existing customer, underscoring the
economic advantage of maintaining a solid customer base upon which you can
build and grow.
Profitability, as shown by Figure 1, increases dramatically as
customers remain loyal over time.
The
initial profit, year one, is usually margined as substantial investments
have been made in sales/marketing to acquire the customer.
As the customer remains loyal to the organization, there is a shift
from acquiring to serving and growing the customer.
Figure 1:
Profitability of Retention Graph
The
Harvard Business School reports that a 5% improvement in customer
retention can result in a 75% increase in profitability. But what makes your customers stay?
Unless you discover their attitudes, preferences and intentions
about your products and services, you can’t know the answer to this
question. Connecting with
customers for ongoing feedback, across interaction points, and over time,
can provide you with the data necessary to understand what drives your
customer loyalty, and what actions can drive customer retention.
Improving
eFeedback Response Rates
Basing
internal process changes on customer feedback assures that you are
investing in solutions that will meet the real needs of your customers.
Maximizing this effort requires a large and representative number of
thoughtful responses. Feedback
forms must be designed to accomplish this.
While there are many common elements between conventional and
online surveys, there are significant differences.
Listed below are ways to create powerful, effective online surveys.
Seven
Ways to Create Online Surveys that Work
- Keep the Length Reasonable. The more questions you present to the respondent, the more potential data you will receive, but the higher the perceived cost –- time –- to the respondent. Online techniques let you increase the total number of questions while reducing the number each respondent has to read or answer.
- Intelligent Skipping: As respondents complete the survey, they automatically skip to the appropriate questions or pages relevant to their specific answers, cases or personal profiles.
- Randomization: For multiple-choice questions that have too many choices for any single respondent to read and select, online systems let you present each respondent with a randomized, reasonable number of choices from the full set. By randomizing not only the choices presented but also the order in which they appear, you can remove order bias that can influence the responses.
Figure 2: Two
examples of Randomization
- Ask the Right Questions in the Appropriate Format: Use questions that will provide meaningful data. Your survey will likely include four types of questions: overall ratings (e.g., How likely are you to recommend our product or service?; ratings by attribute (e.g., speed of service delivery, ease of ordering); respondent demographics (e.g., product or service type; geographic data); and open-ended suggestions and other comments (e.g., How can we improve our service?). As you compose the survey, consider all possible responses to each question, and make certain that the responses will let you drive specific actions.
- Order Questions in Experience Sequence. Questions should flow in an order that most closely matches the experience of the respondent, allowing the customer to mentally re-live the transaction. For example, if the survey is directed to a hotel guest after his/her visit, the first questions should focus on the check-in or reservation process, followed by questions about the room, with the final questions dealing with check-out procedures. Automatic skipping can quickly move customers to only the sections that are relevant to their visit. For example, if customers did not use room service, they will not see that corresponding set of questions.
- Personalize
Communications. Personalization
of all customer communications – from the email invitation to the
feedback form to the thank you page – increases the motivation to
participate. CustomerSat
lets you automatically include customer data from CRM systems, Web
sites, or other sources to add a personal touch.
For example, a service-related feedback form could include the
customer’s name, case number and description, service rep’s name,
and date of the call. This
level of personalization not only adds credibility, but lets
respondents provide more complete and accurate feedback in less time
than when relying on their unassisted recall of the event. CustomerSat
allows automatic uploading of data fields streamline this process, so
exact data fields are identified as the feedback form is created. This
data is then available for use in all communications and analysis.
Figure 3:
Sample of Automatic Upload of Data Fields
- Customize and Add Graphic Interest to the Feedback Form. Customers expect Web-based communications to be dynamic, colorful, and exciting. Don’t overlook the importance of using color, fonts, and other graphic elements to make your survey appealing. Customizing the feedback form to reflect your corporate design will also serve to reinforce your identity system, and increase its believability for the respondent.
- Use Actionable Questions. The goal of customer feedback is to uncover satisfaction issues that can lead to targeted actions that improve the customer’s experience. With action-oriented questions, you can tell the difference between a symptom and a root cause, and identify clear courses of actions instead of describing an outcome.
- Keep
the Feedback Coming. Customer feedback is not a project, but rather a
process. Maintaining
connections with your customers and website visitors on a regular
basis allows you to keep track of their shifting needs and attitudes.
In this manner, you can predict behavior, and implement
corrective action before the customer is impacted. An automated,
online feedback program can be deployed to capture information across
interaction points, and over time.
CustomerSat
Announces: CEM Release 4.0
Jason
Whittenberg, Product Manager, CustomerSat
On
February 24, CustomerSat will launch its most significant set of
enhancements for its Customer Experience Management (CEM) System.
With a host of robust reporting and data analysis additions, as
well as new GUI-based form creation tools, Release 4.0 gives users more
power to create complex feedback programs, while speeding deployment time.
Benefit highlights include:
-
Chart Designer: This flexible GUI-based reporting tool allows users to easily generate and store customized charts using up to 20 independent data points. By specifying questions or uploaded data fields, applying filters, and using date intervals for time-based analysis, Chart Designer provides you a fast and easy way to graphically produce product performance comparisons, trendlines, regional analysis, and other user-specific charts that were previously available only through off-line reporting.
-
Multi-Page Surveys with Suspend: Also GUI-based, this survey design tool has been added to speed the creation of multiple page surveys, using a point & click process to define complex skipping for advanced survey design. Not only does it enforce skip patterns, but because questions appear in smaller “bursts”, longer surveys are less daunting to the respondent, and completion rates increase. Additionally, the new suspend feature lets respondents save their survey at any time and return to it later, picking up where they left off.
-
Import Responses: Answering the need to integrate phone and postal mail feedback data with online results, this key new feature enables organizations to combine all existing survey results into a single system, making reporting available across the enterprise for analysis using CustomerSat’s Web-based analysis system. Merging off-line results with concurrent on-line studies provides for complete analysis, and eases the transition from paper and pencil, phone and CATI based surveys, to fully-automated web-based programs.
-
Power Filters: This enhancement gives unprecedented power to “slice and dice” data, providing views from a macro to a highly-targeted micro level. Users throughout the enterprise – be it different departments, product groups, regions, levels, etc., can create filters with up to 20 different criteria, allowing them to segment the data according to their specific needs. Once the filter is created and saved, it can be applied to any of the online analysis charts. Power Filters also add more ways of defining filtered criteria, including a wildcard search on text-based questions.
-
Grid Question Generator: A popular method for evaluating performance over multiple criteria is to create a grid or table question allowing the respondent to simply select radio buttons relative to their satisfaction level. Using Grid Question Generator, a user can now easily create sets of questions, saving the respondent time and improving the overall user experience.
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Suppress/Hide Questions in Export Files: This feature gives you a secure way to maximize accessibility of customer feedback to employees throughout the enterprise. Users can now define what specific questions or data is available to different sub-users or groups within your organization. The data relevant to these defined areas is available for online-analysis, while sensitive or irrelevant data remains hidden, accessible only to authorized users.