General

How to Measure the Success of Your Support Department

How to Measure the Success of Your Support Department

General

Well-known management consultant, Peter Drucker, said, “What gets measured, gets managed.”

His management philosophy means that a best plan of action is to measure the things that matter to your company. One of the most important things to measure is customer satisfaction.

If you’re ready to more than meet your customers’ needs and exceed their expectations every time, you want data you can measure.

Here’s how to measure the success of your support department.

How to Measure Satisfaction

One way to measure success is to send out feedback surveys. This helps you assess how well your support team is doing, while learning what your customers need and expect.

These metrics help you keep tabs on what your customers experience when they talk with your support team. Is the time spent with your support staff easy, or is their time difficult and frustrating?

You can always use the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey to measure customer satisfaction. Yet, in this case, the NPS merely scratches the surface of your customers’ whole experience with support.

Consider also sending surveys that measure the following:

  • The number of conversations a person had with your support department to resolve the issue.
  • How many customers hung up frustrated.
  • If your customers felt their issues were resolved.
  • Overall satisfaction.
  • If customers felt the amount of time spent on the phone was satisfactory.
  • Whether or not the team member was friendly, courteous and ready to help.

Final Thoughts

Your customer support department is highly measurable. From things such as call volume, chat time, interaction counts, resolution rates, and customer satisfaction, you can record data and measure it quite easily.

Remember that you can only change and improve the things you are aware of. If you don’t know about the success of your support department, you can’t reward it or improve it.

Because your support department and ensuing customer service is meaningful to the success of your company, it makes good business sense to measure it on an ongoing basis. (tweet this)

Your satisfied customers who had a good experience with your support department are the ones who’ll return to shop with 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.

Image: rawpixel on Unsplash

How to insert a survey question into an email

How to insert a survey question into an email

General, Product Information, Survey Tips

At SurveyTown, we give you the HTML you can copy and paste into an email you send to a customer.

See how to embed a survey question in an email.

This means that your question will show in the email itself, allowing your customer to one-click in the email and give their response.

There are four types of question types that you can embed into your emails.

  1. Rating
  2. Net Promoter Score
  3. Radio
  4. Picture (choose one)

The process of embedding is to go into the “Promote” tab, and then clicking on “Questions” from there you can copy and paste the HTML that you can embed into an email.

We created a full video that guides you on how to put the HTML into an email.

Happy Surveying!

Alerting customer service by email to negative reviews automatically

General, Product Information, Survey Tips

One of the main reasons to use surveys is to keep a pulse on customer satisfaction. You can add questions such as Ratings or Net Promoter Score to gather immediate feedback from customers. But what if you get a negative review and want to follow up on it right away? Using SurveyTown you can get alerted to negative reviews by sending an email to your support or account management department for immediate followup. Here’s an example of setting up SurveyTown to do this.

Let’s assume that you are creating a ratings question of stars 1 to 5 and wanted customer service to be alerted by email if anyone rated their experience less than 4 stars.

First create your question

Step 1 is to create your customer service question.  In this example, we are using a simple ratings question – “Please rate your experience.” and we give the customer a choice of 1 to 5 stars.

Second, create an “Action”

Under the “Logic & Actions” tab, click the button to “Add New Action”.  The action we are creating is to send an email when a someone rates the question as less than 4 stars.  So the next step is to create the condition.

Third, define the condition

Add a Condition

Press the button that says “Add a Condition” and defein the condition of  “How would you rate our service?” is less than “4”.

What this means is, if someone rates their experience as less than 4 stars your action will be triggered.

Set the Alert email recipient

Now set the “Alert Email” which means put in the email of the person or the group that you want to receive the email alert.

 

Save the logic an action and then you are done.

Using the “Preview” you can test our your new functionality.  If you have set things up correctly you will get an email when take the survey and give it less than 4 stars.

The email you get will contain the condition that was met.  It will also contain a link to be able to click on and see the full response.

 

If you have asked for the customers phone number or email or if you have passed this data along to SurveyTown when you passed the customer onto us then you can find that information and followup with the customer.

That’s it.  Happy surveying.

 

 

What Is A 360 Feedback Review

What Is A 360-Feedback Review?

General

Performance reviews happen in companies the world over, and some of them are done well, and others aren’t.

In this article, we’re going to talk about how to conduct employee reviews so you can see the entire picture of your team members’ performance.

We ask the question, “What is a 360-feedback review?”

The 360-Feedback Review

As the name implies, the 360-feedback review provides a full-circle review of each member of your team.

While you’re most likely familiar with the traditional annual or semi-annual review, this type of review is a bit different.

How? The traditional review only involves the manager and the employee, so there is only one opinion involved. The traditional review is appropriate in many instances, but it doesn’t give a total snapshot of the employee as a whole.

With the 360 review, which is not a performance review in the traditional terms, the employee is given the feedback needed to develop business and interpersonal skills.

The 360-feedback review provides the following:

  • An identified place to begin working on new skills.
  • A way to measure progress. For example, if your employee needs to improve conflict management skills, you have a starting point to begin measuring progress.
  • The chance for you and the employee to identify personal blind spots of behavior that the employee may not notice. For example, the feedback review may alert you to personality issues or traits that bother co-workers.

Just remember: the traditional review is about the job the employee is doing, and the 360-feedback review is about the employee personally.

Who Participates in the 360-Feedback Review?

A team member’s co-workers provide the feedback on an employee’s performance. The manager requests this information.

The co-workers who participate may include:

  • The boss or manager
  • Peers
  • Other employees who come into contact with the employee

The best part of the 360-feedback review is that you can gauge your employee’s performance from 360 degrees of your organization. (tweet this)

Co-workers can weigh in on the skills and contributions of the reviewed employees. They’ll let others see how they feel about the employee’s contribution and performance. Areas they’ll weigh in on include:

  • Leadership
  • Teamwork
  • Interpersonal communication and interaction with employees and customers
  • Management
  • Work habits
  • Accountability and punctuality

How Does the Feedback Work?

You’ll find a few different methods for gathering feedback about your employees.

In most businesses, the managers request and receive the feedback. They then analyze the feedback paying particular attention to the employee’s behavior. They aren’t just looking for the negative feedback but the positive as well.

The goal is not to degrade the employee, but to give them important information about how others view his work and his work habits so he can improve.

Some businesses hire external consultants to administer the surveys. This is most often true if it’s the manager receiving the 360-feedback review.

Other companies use electronic employee surveys to look at the results objectively in an electronic format.

With electronic surveys, employees can score their peers using supplied answers as well as open-ended questions.

Let’s look at how to use electronic 360-feedback surveys.

Crafting the Electronic Survey

One of the easiest and most effective ways to craft a 360-feedback survey is to do it electronically using an online survey software. You can also use the system to help you categorize and compile your results.

As with all surveys, don’t overwhelm your staff with survey questions. Think about what you’d exactly like to learn and only ask the questions you’ll use.

If you’d like to get started developing your own 360-feedback survey, here are some areas to concentrate on. Be careful, and don’t concentrate on all the areas at once.

Ask too many questions, and you’ll lose the concentration of your survey respondents. You might find they carefully consider the first questions and just start clicking buttons if it’s too long.

Here are some ideas for your 360-electronic feedback survey:

  • Ask questions about leadership skills such as delegation, listening, approach-ability, communication, coaching, decision making and management.
  • Pose questions about communication skills that include how the staff member listens, how clear they are, and their speaking and networking skills. Don’t neglect to ask about their non-verbal behavior, their ability to give and receive feedback and how they handle constructive criticism.
  • Another area to concentrate on is team skills including their ability to work as part of group, listen to others and their openness to the ideas of others.
  • Ask about organizational skills – can they handle projects, multi-tasking, logistics and fine details?
  • You also want to know about their problem-solving skills – how do they identify problems? Are they creative in solving them? Can they brainstorm and come up with solutions?
  • When helping employees grow, other good questions surround their interpersonal skills and include empathy, confidence, stress management, how positive they are, their negotiation skills, enthusiasm and personal appearance.

Final Thoughts

The 360-feedback review is valuable for companies and employees.

The review provides a chance to address core competencies and provide opportunities for developmental progress.

The 360-feedback survey allows employees a chance to see how they measure up in the areas of work as well as interpersonal skills.

This feedback review isn’t about their performance, but how they can grow as people and as workers.

You’ll find that the 360-feedback review allows managers to help their employees grow so they are the most productive employees possible.

Today’s workers appreciate this type of feedback. It helps them learn more about their strengths and weaknesses while justifying training and development opportunities.

You’ll find that 360-degree feedback reviews are important to your company as whole as well as employees and managers.

  • Managers benefit because they get feedback from multiple sources, and they can improve their leadership skills and fine-tune their strengths
  • Employees benefit because as we mentioned earlier, they want to improve.
  • Your organization benefits with a more productive workforce and a culture that welcomes feedback and continual improvement.

Give the 360-feedback review a try in your company and learn how to help your employees reach their full potential.

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.

Images: Paolo Candelo

 

10 Reasons to use SurveyTown instead of SurveyMonkey

10 Reasons to use SurveyTown instead of SurveyMonkey

General, Product Information

Why SurveyTown might be the right choice for you.  

SurveyMonkey is a great tool and we admire them in many ways.  But if you are in the market for surveys, here are some reasons you might want to take a look at SurveyTown instead.

1 . Customize Your Success Pages with Images

When your respondents finish the survey, you may want to thank them or show your own social media icons to allow them to share their experience with their friends.  In SurveyTown you can customize your survey success pages with images or icons.   Upload them and we will host them for you!

2. Monthly Commitment

Hey — commitments are great, don’t get us wrong.  But SurveyMonkey walls off lots of functionality unless you pay for an annual account.  At SurveyTown, we don’t have this limitation.  You get full access the functionality of your account with only a month-to-month commitment.

3. Obsessed with Customer Service

We are small (for now) and obsessed with customer service.  Working with SurveyTown you get access to a small dedicated team that is devoted to customer service and ready to collaborate.

4. Survey Personalization

With our URL Variables, you can create questions that address the survey taker specifically.  For example, “George, please rate your experience” or “How did you enjoy the performance of ‘Wicked‘?”.  In both examples the question text as been customized to the survey taker given who they are or what they have purchased, which increases response rates.

5. API Access for 30% less

Looking for a survey partner you can integrate with.  Our API is robust and includes Webhooks.  Also, we give Direct API Access at our Professional Account level which is $70 (instead of SurveyMonkey’s $99) and does not require a yearly commitment.

6. Embed Survey Questions in Emails sent from any Email Service Provider

In SurveyTown, we give you the code that you can use to embed survey questions in emails you are sending out.  So you can put them in emails generated by Campaigner, Bronto, Mailchimp or any other Email Service Provider.  You can also embed them in custom emails you maybe generating or sending out via other applications.

7. Enterprise Grade White-label

SurveyTown is a great fit for agencies because in addition to giving you an “unbranded” URL to host your surveys and allow you to customize success URLs, we also allow you to add your logo inside the application itself and to sell it as your own product to your customers.  In addition, SurveyTown gives you the ability to manage multiple accounts through one administrative interface.   For more info please see the blog post –  the difference between white-labeling and white-label reselling surveys.

8. Tagging

SurveyTown has tagging instead of foldering which means you can label one survey with multiple tags which is tantamount to putting a survey in two or more separate folders at once.  You can also add, edit or delete these tags via our API.

9. Additional Enterprise Users are only $20 a month

You can add additional “Enterprise” users inside of SurveyTown and share administrative privileges with them (or not) for $20 a month. An additional user at SurveyMonkey’s “Platinum” level will double the cost of your account.

10. Mobile Surveys – “Tap Your Phone, Take A Survey”

Want to improve your “in person” survey responses.  Let’s us partner with you on “Tap Your Phone, Take A Survey”.

 

 

Feel free to create a SurveyTown trial account or to talk more or schedule a demo please contact us.

 

 

Survey Overview gets an upgrade

Survey Overview gets an upgrade

General, Product Information

SurveyTowners – We have launched a new version of SurveyTown that includes changes to the survey overview, the introduction of tagging, the unification of surveys with events and some changes to the completed surveys properties tab.  Read below for an overview of the changes.

New Survey Overview

Let’s start with the survey overview changes. You should notice right when you login the a new look.  The new survey overview page is aimed at make searching and finding new surveys faster and easier.  Here’s a screenshot.

SurveyOverviewPage-2

There are many changes to see here.

  • First, all “Draft”, “Scheduled”, “Active” and “Completed” have been unified into one view.  You can easily filter out and see surveys of one particular type using the “Status” dropdown at the top left. (1)
  • We have introduced Tags as an organizational tool. (for more info on what tags are see below)  You can filter for surveys that have been tagged with certain tags.  (2)
  • Events tab has been replaced by the “Events” tag.  If you had surveys that were event registrations, instead of finding them in a separate “Events” tab, they are now tagged as “Events”. (5)  You can find them specifically by filtering for surveys tagged as events.
  • Sort Alphabetically or by Date Created – We added a dropdown that allows you to sort your surveys based alphabetically or by the date they were created.
  • Searching as been added – You can now search for survey names using the search box (4)
  • Added relevant dates – We added into the view important dates depending on the type of survey you are looking at.  So for Draft surveys, we now show the “Last edited” date, for Scheduled surveys we show “Scheduled” date, for Active surveys we show the “Activated on” date and for Completed surveys we show the “Completed On” date.

We also added icons that represent the different statuses of surveys next to the survey names.

For more help you can see our survey overview help page.

Tags

We added to the application the concept of tags.  Tags are simply words you use to label surveys so you can easily group them together.  Using them is kind of like putting surveys into folders except that Tags have the added feature of being able to add several of them to a survey.  Once you tag surveys you can then filter for them on the survey overview page. (see above)

To creating a tag is simple.  One way is to navigate from the top menu.

tag-navigation

 

And then you get the to the tags overview screen which allow you to create, edit, or delete tags.

tag-overview

Once you create a tag you can apply them when you create a new survey or even after they are activated or completed.

applying-a-tag

For more you can see our tags help page.

Events unification with Surveys

Since there was not functional different between an “event” and a “survey”, creating an event versus a survey was a purely organizational concept.  Since we have now introduced tags, we are leverage the new tagging system to unify the two concepts and get rid of the redundant tabs.  If you had any events, we have automatically created and applied an “Event” tag to any of those surveys and now you can find them by filtering on the tag “Event”.

Event-tag

Properties tab added to reports view

We have added a “Properties” tab in the reports so you can manage the survey tags or edit your survey name and included the information that was normally on the survey overview page such as the survey URL, ID and any URL variables you may have defined.

 

properties-active-survey

 

API additions

For developers out there, we added the ability to create, edit, apply and delete tags to the API.

The Tag related API calls we added are

We also added two other calls changing surveys status and they are.

We hope you enjoy the new features and please feel free to give us any feedback to support(at)surveytown.com.

 

White-labeling surveys vs White-label reselling surveys

White-labeling surveys vs White-label reselling surveys

General, Product Information

The term “white-label” (or “private label”) is used often to describe the ability to re-brand a product.  But all flavors of white-labeling are not the same and there is a difference between white-labeling and white-label reselling.   This article explains the difference between white-labeling and white-label reselling a survey product like SurveyTown.

White-labeling a survey builder usually means you have the ability to:

  • Use a generic URL to host the survey – So instead of hosting a survey which has a brandname in it like http://surveytown.com/se2342, for example, the URL will have a generic domain. Ours is “myfeedback.io”. 
  • Remove any product branding on the survey itself and define non-branded success pages
  • Have the ability to add multiple users to one account

White-labeling is generally a service for any organization, especially a larger one, who might not want a customer taking a survey to know that it is hosted at a third party provider.  They may also have multiple people in their organization who are running surveys and want to give access to different users to see results.

White-label reselling is quite different in that it includes the features that allow you to brand and resell a product as your own.  In addition to the above, white-label reselling features include the ability to: 

  • Skin the application to show a different brand name – This means replacing the  logo and colors inside the application with your own so that it looks like a customized product.
  • Create and control new accounts – Generally called sub-accounts, each new sub-account can have one or more users.
  • Hide the billing page and redirect users of the application to a reseller’s website
  • Customize the powered-by images and landing pages to show your custom brand.  
  • Change the URL of where surveys are hosted to a branded URL – for example http://surveys.SURVEYRESELLER.com/
  • Customize the login URL

In addition, the reseller themselves can control their own sub-account’s ability to: 

  • Show a generic URL instead of the reseller branded URL
  • Remove any product branding on the survey itself and define non-branded success pages (it’s the Reseller brand that is being hidden in this case)
  • Ability to add multiple users to their sub-account

The customers who choose white-label reselling are generally people who want to offer the survey product as a product of their own.  Here are two examples.

  • Product Developers – Companies that integrate surveys into another software or service usually for a specific target niche or software and sell the product as their own.
  • Agencies – Companies who may be running surveys on behalf of several other businesses.

Marketing Language

The breakdown of the difference between white-labeling and white-label reselling is important because when getting quotes is important to distinguish.  Basically, if a company says they do white-labeling they may or may not include the ability to do white-label reselling.  

SurveyTown

SurveyTown includes the ability to white-label and to white-label resell.  This means in addition to removing branding in any particular account, you can also rebrand the entire app so that your customers can login to their own separate accounts which you control through a master account.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss which options work best for your company, please reach out to us and we will get back to you right away – http://surveytown.com/support/.

 

Knowing makes all the difference

Knowing makes all the difference

General

In the episode “Go Big or Go Home” on the StartUp podcast, three co-founders are trying to figure out why they are not quickly acquiring customers in their startup group dating app called DatingRing.  One day Y combinator partner, Michael Seibel, asks them, “How do we know this is a product people want?”.   They had assumed that group dates were inherently better than on-on-one dates and the whole company was geared to go in that direction.  But in an effort to figure out why they were not getting traction, they decided to ask their customers if they actually preferred one-on-one dates or group dates or both.

As Lauren, a co-founder, explains : “The results started coming and initially it was all ‘one-on-one’ dates.  I was like  ‘Woah. REALLY”…  it was literally only one person … who said they preferred group dates .”.

“I had no idea.”

The podcast goes on to explain that the startup pivoted.  They ended up starting up one-on-one dates and the revenue shot through the roof.

SurveyTown is a platform for gathering information that can change your direction for the better.  Gathering feedback from those you serve – whether that be customers, clients, partners, employees, constituents, donors, students or anyone else –  can make all the difference between struggling to make progress and taking great strides forward.

At SurveyTown, we strive to give you the tools you need to create those perfect surveys and integrate them into the way you do business today so you can gather that feedback and act on it.

Please let us know how we can help.  Let information be your guide.   Welcome to SurveyTown.