Posts published by Dayne Shuda

Why Embedding Questions Gets More Survey Results

Survey Tips

One of the best ways to increase your survey response rates is to embed the questions right in your email marketing software.

Why does this increase your response rate? You see higher response rates because your respondents don’t have to leave their email to take your survey. They can answer it right in the virtual comfort of their inbox.

This is different than putting a link in your email, and it eliminates an extra step for survey takers.

In this article we look at why embedding questions gets more survey results.

Why are Response Rates Higher?

Response rates for emails with embedded survey questions are often higher for several reasons:

As your respondent clicks to answer your question, they have already invested their time and are compelled to complete your survey. There is less chance of large dropout rates.
Your respondents are more likely to answer a single question in your email than invest the time to click through to a long survey.

What is the Best Question?

Surveys embedded in emails generally see a much higher response rate than when you send a link to your survey. (tweet this)

Because of this, you want to ask the question that is the most important to your company. In many instances, this would be your Net Promoter question, “How likely are you to recommend our business to others.”

You’re sure to come up with other one-question surveys that fit your needs, but it’s a good idea to keep embedded surveys to no more than three questions.

Final Thoughts

Email is a powerful vehicle for your surveys. Nearly everyone checks their email, and by embedding your survey questions right in your email, you increase your chances of a response.

Embedding the survey reduces a perceived barrier to completing the survey. Your respondents can complete it immediately upon opening their email. They don’t have to click a link away from their email and take extra steps to complete your survey.

This is a bonus for your business and can help you learn more from your surveys while making it easier for your customers.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

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How To Integrate Survey Results Into Your CRM

Survey Tips

When you take the time to survey your customers and really listen to what they have to say, you want to make that survey data work for you.

One way to do this is to integrate your survey with your CRM (Client Relationship Management) tool.

Why is this important? It helps you get your survey data into the right place while it’s at its most valuable. Survey integration with your CRM helps you improve your sales.

In this article, we look at how to integrate survey results into your CRM. First, let’s look more at the CRM.

The Customer Relationship Management Tool

Your CRM helps you build solid and successful relationships with your current customers as well as your potential ones.

You probably already know there are many ways to use your CRM software to your benefit. Yet, perhaps something is missing.

This is where the survey comes in. Your CRM is only as successful as the quality of information stored in its database.

You also know that one of the best ways to learn what your customers and your leads want and need is through a survey. Even more, you know that data isn’t worth much unless you first analyze it and then act on it.

When you import your survey data into the CRM, you add your valuable results, so you can use the information to further market to your customers and prospects in the most effective manner possible.

Your survey software and your CRM complement one another. This integration lets you combine multiple pieces of information about your customers into one system.

This in turn makes it easier for you to grow your business by managing the customer relationship in one place.

Now, lets look at the ways you can use the integration.

Work with Your Personas

Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of what your ideal customer looks like based on market research and real-time data of your current customers.

Personas help you create and deliver a better marketing strategy. They provide you a clear picture of the type of person who would be interested in doing business with you. Creating buyer personas helps you target the right people at the right time.

Your surveys can help you uncover the following information to create better buyer personas:

Demographic info
Behavioral data and patterns
Geographic information
The purchasing process of certain groups of people
Customer profiles

When you take this survey data and add it to your CRM, you have very specific buyer personas and can create marketing strategies to meet their needs.

In other words, you can execute marketing strategies based on the customer profiles or buyer personas that you create from your survey data.

You’ll also boost your sales in the process.

Improve Customer Service

One of the most important markers of your success as a business is your Net Promoter Score.

When you provide the best customer care, you encourage customer loyalty and retention. You also have brand ambassadors who’ll share their good dealings with your business to their family and friends.

Integrating your CRM with your survey results allows you to get better data on your Net Promoter Score in relation to your customer transactions and interactions.

When you integrate, you can use your Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey results in your CRM to:

Trigger an automated response for follow-up with your customers
Ask customers who gave you a favorable NPS to give you a Google review
Reach out to customers who rated you negatively on the NPS survey immediately. This helps you preempt any negative online reviews they might have and turn the situation around.

Learn More About Current Customers

If you want to run a successful business, it pays to listen to your customers.

By sending a survey, you’ve already shown a willingness to do just that. You’ve given your customers a voice and invited them to share their experience with you.

They are able to respond positively or negatively. They can tell you more about what they want and need. They can tell you about their negative experiences in a non-threatening forum.

When you ask your customers what they think and integrate your survey data into your CRM, you learn the following information:

What makes your customer stay with your business
How to retain your customers
What encourages their loyalty
More about their needs and desires
Description of your target market
Minimize the chance of negative online feedback because you handle it as it comes in

With this integration, you can rest assured that your CRM has the most up-to-date information about your customers.

You can also learn more about the customer’s journey with your business and then create surveys to match the journey.

Maximize the Moment

Sometimes it can be hard to know the exact right time to make a customer contact to make the sale.

But, when you use your surveys to learn more about your customers, you can use the survey data and your CRM to get the right information in front of particular customers at just the right time.

For example, you send out a survey to your leads and ask them what products or services they want to learn more about.

Once the survey is returned, you can trigger just the right automated email string.

Final Thoughts

The best part of integrating your survey results into your CRM is the ability it gives you to attract new customers and retain current ones.

This integration helps you facilitate a long-term relationship with your customers by providing the data you need for personal marketing.

You’ll find that by integrating your survey results into your CRM, you have smart data to make even smarter decisions.

Your feedback and your marketing opportunities come full circle because you have all of your information in one system.

You know the value and potential value of a wide range of customer types based on their survey data.

Above all, survey and CRM integration help you connect the dots for the most informative picture of current and potential customers. (tweet this)

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

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How to Share Survey Reports Across Your Organization

Survey Tips

You’ve done the hard work – you created, revised, tested and sent a terrific survey.

The results came in quickly and in great numbers.

You put together the data, looked at it and found that it’s high-quality, insightful and actionable.

The key word here is actionable because now that you’ve got the data, it’s time to do something with it. In this article, we look at how to share survey reports across your organization, so you can turn your data into action.

Allow Survey Access

For many businesses, it’s advantageous to have multiple users in your survey platform.

For example, Survey Town collects your survey responses and provides you with graphs and reports of your data.

Not only can you see the number of responses and view the aggregated statistics in charts, but your team can view them as well.

Allowing multi-users makes it easy for your team to manage and analyze your survey results, ultimately collaborating and deciding on action.

The bonus in Survey Town is that you can assign permissions on a per user basis. This means your team may have access to one survey but not another.

Share a Web Link

One of the easiest, most straightforward ways to share your survey results is to share a web link throughout your organization.

For example, you might send an email with a summary of your survey results exported into a spreadsheet and include a link to the data export of your survey.

This allows your employees access to the survey results and your analysis of it without giving them backend access to your survey.

Create a Presentation

Another way to share survey reports across your organization is through a presentation that you do in-person.

You can export your survey results into a presentation-ready format for presenting to your core team.

By creating an offline copy of your data, you can insert it into a PowerPoint or Keynote presentation, so you can share the results to your team members.

This allows you to meet together, discuss the results in person and then brainstorm ways to take action on the data. When you provide data that is easy to read, it’s a great way to start the conversation with your employees and strategize using the data.

Now that you know how to share survey results, let’s look at why you should.

Why Share Survey Results?

One of the most important reasons you should share your survey results is because it makes you and your staff accountable to the data. It begins the conversation and encourages your staff to take action.

Another reason to share your results is education. With the data in front of them, your staff can begin an open and honest evaluation of your processes and how they affect your customers.

You and your staff can look at customer engagement and really understand how your customers view your company.

When you make the results available to your staff, you help them see the overall big picture. Everyone can begin to see and understand where your company excels and where there’s an opportunity for exploration and change.

Sharing survey results ultimately enlists buy-in from your employees and gives them a reason to improve. Your staff will feel more loyal to your brand as they all work together to change for the better.

It’s a good idea to share survey results because it opens up an avenue for a culture of continued improvement as your staff works to improve their survey data.

Final Thoughts

With several avenues available to you, you’re sure to find a way to share survey results across your organization that spurs conversation and change.

Find the way that works best for you and your team and move forward. You may even find that multiple ways are best for getting the data out to your staff.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

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NPS Score vs. Ratings: Measuring Customer Satisfaction

NPS Score: Measuring Customer Satisfaction

Survey Tips

For businesses today, the single most affirming action a customer can make is to come back to your business again. This is one of the true measures of customer satisfaction.

Your goal as a business owner is to ensure your customer’s happiness so they’ll return for a visit.

Right along with this and just as important is knowing your happy customers will tell others about you, and this is where the NPS (Net Promoter Score) comes in. An effective way to measure this is by actively asking for feedback through the net promoter survey.

In this article, we look at the NPS survey and how it relates to the customer satisfaction survey.

NPS and Customer Satisfaction Surveys

The Net Promoter Score is often calculated separately from the customer satisfaction survey, but it can also be part of it.

Remember that the Net Promoter Score survey is the way you learn your customer’s willingness to recommend your business to others.

It includes one question, “How likely is it that you would recommend x business to a friend or colleague?” The NPS survey uses a 0-to-10-point rating scale and people are categorized as either promoters, passives or detractors.

On the other hand, the customer satisfaction survey gauges how your customers feel about your services (both positively and negatively).

The customer satisfaction survey normally has five-10 questions, uses a rating scale of 1-10, and queries the customer on their experience, satisfaction and service delivery. It aims to find out how happy your customers are.

The customer satisfaction survey needs to ask more questions to come up with an overall rating, while the NPS only needs to ask one question.

Final Thoughts

The NPS survey and the customer satisfaction survey aren’t really interchangeable, but they can be used in unison when measuring customer satisfaction. (tweet this)

So, which is better? It could be that the two surveys complement one another. You might embed the NPS question in the customer satisfaction survey to give your team on the overall view of the customer’s satisfaction as well as their likelihood to recommend you.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

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How To Get Links To Your Survey In Front Of Your Customers

Survey Tips

You want to provide the best customer experience possible, and one of the best ways to do this is to find out how your customers feel about their experience with your company.

A survey is an excellent way to find out if your customer service, products and overall experience are meeting the needs of your customers.

But, what happens when your survey participation rates are low because you aren’t sure how to disseminate your survey?

In this article, we look at how to get links to your survey in front of your customers.

Send an Email

One of the most efficient and commonplace ways to communicate with your customers and get your survey link to them is through your email marketing channel.

Since email is a direct line of communication with your customers, you can easily send them a link to your survey.

Your email lands right in the inner sanctum of their email box, and because you can highly target your email list, you can decide just exactly who to send your surveys to.

For example, you might choose to send a survey to only the people on your list who made a purchase in the last year. Or, perhaps you want to survey customers who haven’t made a purchase in the last year.

You also might segment your lists by demographics. Another option is to survey people who landed on a specific page of your website and not made a purchase.

Finally, perhaps you’d like to survey those on your list who chatted with your customer service staff. The possibilities with email are limitless.

It’s worth noting that your emailed surveys will most likely show the highest response rate because these are people who’ve opted in to your email list and are receptive to communication from you.

As you send your email surveys, here are a few tips to follow for the best results:

Use a short and specific headline to grab your customers’ attention.
Make the subject line seem like an exclusive, special invitation.
Do nothing else in your email other than explain your survey and provide the link to avoid any distractions.
Be brief in your description.
Offer your thanks and explain the incentive if you’re offering one.
Make your call to action button (your link to the survey) big, colorful and visible.
Send a follow up reminder if you have a low initial response rate.

Host Your Survey on Your Website

Another way to get links to your survey in front of your customers is by hosting the survey on your website.

By placing your survey on your website, you can invite your website visitors to complete your survey.

This can be beneficial to you because while these people may not be your customers yet, you can still gain valuable information from them.

Even though you gain information about your website visitors through your Google Analytics, you can glean even more information by posing specific questions to the people who visit your website.

How might you do this? Here are a few questions for putting surveys to work for you right on your website:

Create surveys for specific pages of your website. For example, you might include surveys on your product pages or your blog.
One survey might ask them what brought them to your website or how they learned about you. Another survey might ask them what they think of your brand-new product or what they might think of a proposed product or service.
In addition, you could ask them if they found your content useful or enjoyable.
You could also use a survey as a means to gain their contact information. Just be sure to tell them that you are doing it. There are many possibilities.

Where you place your survey is of significant importance. While you might place it right on your pages, you could also put your link in a pop-up box as visitors either land on your site or prepare to depart your site.

You can also use a survey on a follow-up page. For example, you might add a survey on your thank-you page after someone downloads something, makes a purchase or signs up for a beta of your services.

Do be sure to use a strong call to action and a very visible button.

Create a Blog

Another way to get a link out is to write a blog article and add the survey to the article.

This allows you to briefly explain why you want to conduct a survey and what you hope to gain by it. You can also return to update the blog post once you have your results.

Your blog allows you the ability to really connect with participants and encourage them to complete your survey.

Again, you want to use a strong call to action as well as a button link to your survey and text links to your survey within the blog text itself.

Use Social Media

Another premier spot to get your survey links into the hands of your customers is through social media.

While you can link to the blog post that includes your survey link, you can also create posts that share direct links to your survey.

The benefits of social media are many. Namely, social media allows you to start a conversation and encourage feedback in a friendly, low-key manner.

When utilizing social media, include a direct link to your survey. Consider using bitly to shorten the link as a best practice.

You can also use others on social media to share your link as well. Capitalize on your influencers to share your survey link.

You might also add a drawing to your social media link to encourage more survey participation.

Final Thoughts

The value of the survey is quite unsurpassed for finding out what your customers think about your business.

In fact, a survey by the Pew Research Center says that online surveys are one of the most convenient and cost effective ways to collect data from your customers.

Yet, it can be difficult to get responses for your surveys. The best way to combat this is to have an effective plan for distribution, and then to follow up and make sure it’s working.

Use your existing digital channels and brainstorm a few others. Then, promote your survey and distribute it to elicit a higher response rate.

Finally, the most important thing to remember is to make your survey about your customers, not you. You want to learn how they feel, so tailor your questions so your customers know how much you value their opinions.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

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Rewarding Managers For Good Survey Scores

Survey Tips

Should you reward your managers for providing a superb customer experience by managing their employees well and setting the tone for improved customer encounters?

In many cases, the answer to this question is, “Yes.” While you expect your managers to excel at leading their teams, you also want to reward them when they’ve done well.

How will you know when they’ve excelled at their job? When you’ve received positive survey scores.

In this article, we look at rewarding managers for good survey scores.

Customer Service is Key

In today’s digital world where reviews are everywhere on the internet, it’s never been more important to provide the best possible customer service. It’s what separates your business from the competition.

One way to encourage your staff to provide top notch service is to reward them, and this starts with your managers.

Since you recognize the importance of providing excellent service, you want to use your surveys to find out if your customers agree that is what is happening.

By surveying respondents to learn how they feel about your service, you are immediately putting your staff on notice. This may be a cultural shift for some of them, but one that’s immensely important to your overall success.

As your managers and ultimately your entire team see that customer service is your top concern, and they note that you are going to use surveys to gauge it, they’ll soon jump on-board.

So, by rewarding managers for good survey scores, you send a strong message that customer service matters, and that you’re willing to reward staff members for helping you excel.

Tips for Succeeding with Rewards

Before you decide to reward your managers for good survey scores, you want to have the following in place:

Set up a training program for your managers as well as your staff so they know how to serve your customers best.
Create some parameters for measuring customer service through your surveys. Decide what you’d like to benchmark and what you consider good enough for rewarding your managers. They must know what’s expected if they’re going to reach your goals.
Make sure your surveys reflect what’s important to the customer and not necessarily to you. For example, what the customer wants out of the experience might not be what you think they want.
Once you receive the surveys, go through them with your managers. You want to communicate the feedback you receive so everyone understands it and places the same value on it.
Use your Net Promoter Score. Let it drive the change you want to see in your business. The NPS tells you the value your company has in the eyes of the consumer. This is a good way to measure the customer experience, so you can reward managers when it’s positive.
If the surveys aren’t positive, do you have a structure in place to identify problems and effect change? Talk to your manager and implement the proper procedures.
Make sure your managers have ownership of the survey results and create a plan with your team for managing the customer experience throughout the year.
Outline the reward program so it’s official. Give them a target to reach for and encourage them to share the “thank-you” with their staff for a job well done.

Final Thoughts

It can be beneficial for your company to reward and incentivize your managers for good survey scores.

Not only will it help your company excel at customer service, it let’s your entire staff know that a culture of “customer first” is important to you.

On the flip side, you do want to set out in writing what you’re going to do when surveys don’t come back with good scores. It pays to make your staff aware of what happens when you receive good survey scores and when you receive not-so-good scores.

Ultimately, the goal of rewarding your managers is to encourage their strong participation in your customer service goals and to improve your bottom line.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

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NPS Score: Why It’s Good To Use

Survey Tips

The Net Promoter (NPS) Score is the single best question to ask respondents because it not only helps you gauge customer loyalty, but it helps you learn whether your customers appreciate you so much they’d tell other people about you.

The NPS question is this: “How likely is it that you would recommend our business to someone else.”

Let’s look at the NPS score and why it’s good to use.

It Measures Repeat Business

With one simple question, you can determine if your customers will shop with you again.

It’s a great tool for forecasting your business growth potential.

The NPS score measures the likelihood of repeat business while at the same time measuring the probability of new business. (tweet this) For example, if a customer responds high on the positivity scale, you know they’ll be back, and they’ll recommend you to others.

It’s Easy to Implement

What could be easier for respondents than a one question survey?

The NPS Score is simple, straightforward and lightning quick for your survey takers. All you want to know is how likely they are to recommend your business to a friend.

It Helps You Track Change

Let’s say that your first NPS Score didn’t reveal great results.

You go back to the drawing board and fine tune your customer service policies. You train your staff and provide ongoing refreshers. Finally, you begin instilling the thank you culture into your business model.

It’s six months later, and you send out another survey, and the results are much improved.

By using your NPS Score, you can survey customers twice a year to see if your improvements are working. If they aren’t, you can again make changes.

Final Thoughts

Start the process in your business today and use the Net Promoter Score as part of your overall marketing strategy and business growth plan.

You’ll gain valuable insights about the customer experience and learn where you need to improve.

Use the NPS Score to improve your customer service and your processes for the absolute best customer relationships and to ultimately grow your business.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free Survey Town trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

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10 Questions for Your Guest Evaluation

Survey Tips

Sending a survey after someone stays at your hotel or bed and breakfast is a fairly commonplace marketing tool.

If you aren’t currently sending a guest evaluation, or if you’d like to give your survey a refresh, this article includes 10 questions for your guest evaluation.

These are questions you can use to see where you are excelling, or perhaps where you can improve your business.

Your reputation depends on what people are saying about you, and if you don’t know how they really feel, you have nothing on which to base your improvements. (tweet this) This is why a guest evaluation survey is so important for the hospitality field.

With many of the questions below, you can choose to offer open-ended questions as well as rating questions or closed-ended questions where users can choose more than one answer.

Consider what you really want to know before deciding on the question type.

#1: Why Did You Choose to Stay at This Hotel?

By asking this question, you get a good idea of whether it was an online search, price, word of mouth, reviews, repeat customer or something else.

Provide choices for your customers and let them check as many as they’d like because it could be multiple reasons.

#2: Tell Us About the Front Desk Staff?

These employees provide the first impression for your guests, and they set the tone for the entire stay.

Let respondents rate the front desk staff. If the response was negative, provide another question so they can say why.

#3: How was the Check-In Process?

This question lends itself to an initial closed-ended question.

You might ask respondents how satisfied they were with the check-in process with choices like: very satisfied, satisfied, neutral, dissatisfied and very dissatisfied.

Yet, you could employ conditional logic to gather more information in the form of an open-ended question.

For example, if they answered satisfied or very satisfied, you would send them to a question asking them why.

If they answered on the opposite end, you certainly want to know what happened, so you’d ask for details.

#4: Was Your Room Clean Upon Arrival?

This is a simple question and usually, a yes or no answer is just fine.

But, again, you want to employ conditional logic if survey respondents answer with a no response.

Push further to find out what wasn’t up to par. This helps you better train your housekeeping staff to meet the needs of your guests.

With regard to clean rooms, it’s worth noting that this is one of the most important items to your hotel guests when it comes to choosing accommodations.

#5: How Did the Housekeeping Staff Do During Your Stay?

With this question, you would use a rating scale.

For example, your question might look like this:

The housekeeping staff did an excellent job cleaning my room.

o Strongly agree

o Agree

o Neutral/Not sure

o Disagree

o Strongly disagree

If they answer that they disagree, move them on to another question so you can learn about the problems they encountered.

#6: Did You Use Any of the Amenities? If so, which ones?

This is an important question because you really want to know if they used your business center, swimming pool, hot tub, exercise room, restaurant, etc.

So, the best way to do this question is to provide a list of all of your amenities so they can check the boxes of all that apply.

You could follow this question up with a “Why didn’t you use X amenity,” if you want to learn how important individual ones are to your hotel guests.

#7: Was Your Bed Comfortable?

This is another important item for your hotel guests. While it might not be what makes them make the initial reservation, you can bet that it is a determining factor when they decide the following:

Whether or not to return to your property.
What kind of online review they’ll write.
If they recommend you to others.

So, ask this question. Then, take a look at your results over a few months. If the answer is most often a no, then you want to work new beds into your next budget.

#8: Did You Enjoy Breakfast?

If you serve breakfast, this is an important question to ask because it’s vital to the overall impression your guests have of your property.

While this can be a yes or no question, you certainly want to follow it up with conditional logic.

The end goal is to find what they enjoyed about the breakfast. You might find no one likes oatmeal, so you can remove it from your offerings.

You also want to know what they like to ensure it stays on your menu.

#9: How was the Check-Out Process?

Just like the question you asked about the check-in process, you want to know about the check-out process.

This includes things like:

Was your bill accurate?
Did you check out online?
Did you go to the front desk to check out?
How was the front desk staff?
Were there enough luggage racks for you?
Did you find the parking adequate for ease of getting your bags to the car?

#10: How Likely Are You to Recommend Our Hotel to Others?

Finally, this is the ultimate question on your list. This is the meat of your guest evaluation.

Why? Because when all is said and done, you want to know if you succeeded in making your guest’s stay so wonderful that they will recommend you to others.

This question is what makes up your Net Promotor Score. It’s what lets you gauge the loyalty of your customer.

Did you go far enough to build a great relationship?

If the answer to this question is less than satisfactory, you have a problem on your hands and one that must be solved quickly.

Final Thoughts

The hospitality business is based on reputation, digital reviews and even word of mouth.

To make sure that your hotel or bed and breakfast is getting a five-star rating and reputation online, you want to know what your guests think. The best way to do this is through a guest evaluation survey.

The 10 questions included here will help you determine whether or not your property is making the grade. You will get insight on where you excel and where you can improve.

In the hospitality business, anything under a four-star rating will give your guests pause, so it pays to conduct a guest evaluation so you can make quick, positive corrections to ensure five stars show up for you each time.

Surveys help you make the best decisions for your business. Are you ready to get started with your free SurveyTown trial? Start with your free account today, and you can upgrade at any time.

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