Sampling and Touch Rules

Touch rules are business rules that conserve, and seek to optimize the benefits enterprises gain from, stakeholders’ time and attention in providing feedback. CustomerSat touch rules supported by Enterprise determine how often, when, in which language, and for which surveys stakeholders are invited to provide feedback.

Specifically, touch rules have four objectives:

• Ensure that sufficient customers, employees, or other stakeholders respond to make results statistically significant
• Protect stakeholders from being over-surveyed
• Ensure that stakeholders are asked to provide the feedback that is most valuable to the enterprise
• Control the acknowledgement and follow-up with the stakeholder, if applicable, after feedback is provided.

The Internet has made it easy for any department or division of a large enterprise to survey its stakeholders, often with little planning or control. As a result, customers, in particular, are often inundated by requests from multiple divisions and departments, including marketing, customer support, headquarters, field service, web operations, order processing, and market research. Sooner or later, stakeholders refuse to respond to too many feedback requests.

CustomerSat touch rules ensure that stakeholders’ time and attention is used optimally. CustomerSat touch rules may be as simple as ensuring that no customer is invited to complete a survey more frequently than a pre-specified number of weeks or months. Or they may be rich and complex.

For example, if a stakeholder is eligible to respond to any of four feedback processes, touch rules may include such factors as:

• Size of each process’ available sample (number of eligible respondents)
• Number of responses each process has recently gathered
• Importance of this stakeholder to each process (as determined, for example, by the number of transactions the stakeholder has had with each process or the size of stakeholder’s investment in products and services covered by each process)
• How recently the stakeholder previously provided, or was invited to provide, feedback for each process.

To conserve stakeholder time and attention, touch rules reduce or stop sending invitations, reminders, or both to stakeholder segments as statistically significant numbers of responses for those segments are reached.

Touch rules also enforce opt-out preferences and prohibit individuals who have indicated that they wish not to be surveyed from receiving survey invitations. Because one-time, ad hoc surveys also make demands on stakeholders’ time and attention, touch rules typically encompass both on-going process-based and ad hoc surveys.

CustomerSat Enterprise gives you great flexibility in defining touch rules, including:

• Defining rules by stakeholder segment
• Defining sampling periods (weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc.)
• Define the sampling frequency (e.g., every record, every 2nd record, every 3rd record, every 5th record, etc.) needed to get a specific number of respondents for each segment.

These rules determine which records are sent personalized survey invitations for any stakeholder segment.

If desired, CustomerSat Enterprise will stop sending out email invitations or reminders to potential recipients for any segment as soon as a specified number (quota) of responses has been received.

Response Rate Reports let you immediately see the number of responses for any segment and for any time period. This allows you to fine-tune the sampling frequency to achieve statistically significant results.