Many of our customers ask us, “How do I get more responses from my surveys?”
One of our suggestions is to make it as easy as possible for respondents to access and complete your survey.
To help you get more responses, we look at how to survey your customers “where they are.”
First, let’s look at why it’s important to stay in touch with your current customers and their satisfaction levels.
Customer Retention is Vital
In today’s busy, ultra-digital world, it costs at least five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain current ones. For some businesses, the cost of losing a customer amounts to several hundred dollars.
While that doesn’t sound like a lot for one customer, imagine the cost for every five customers you lose – well over $1000.
This is where the customer survey comes in. It allows you to measure customer satisfaction, fix problems in your business, and ultimately retain more customers.
Now let’s look at how to survey your customers where they are by integrating surveys into your daily business activities.
Use Surveys During the Sales Process
We think this is one of the most effective ways to survey your customers and find out more about their interactions with your business.
By integrating customer satisfaction surveys into your sales process, you meet customers right where they are. You can send your survey post-purchase through your email list, or you can even link it from your checkout pages. (tweet this)
It’s advantageous to survey your customers early in their sales cycle during the sales process because it’s fresh in their minds. It also shows your customers that you truly care about customer service.
Early surveys tell your customers their satisfaction is important to you. It pays to let your customers know you are willing to go above and beyond to handle any issues or problems.
Send Surveys Multiple Ways
You know your business best, so you probably know the best avenue for sending surveys. If you don’t know, it’s time to learn where your customers spend their time.
Is it on email, in your app or on their phones? The good news is that you can survey them in any of those places.
Email provides a chance for highly qualitative feedback. Why? This is because the people who respond to email surveys usually care because they are invested in your brand.
These folks are likely to take your survey one step further and even provide answers to your open-ended questions.
Using surveys through your website or mobile app often provide higher response rates, although your responses might not be of the caliber of your email ones.
Customers will usually answer your questions, though, and are less likely to opt out.
When you send surveys out through SMS (text messaging), you’ll find these are an effective and immediate way to interact with your customers.
Text messages beg for a response, and you’ll find your customers more eager to answer short, specific surveys.
Bottom line – it’s not about which method is better. It’s about which channels are the best for your customer base. Where are your customers? Know the answer to this question and meet them where they are.
Review Responses Regularly
We often see businesses who get excited to send surveys, spend a great deal of time crafting questions and putting the survey together, only to shelve their results for “another day.”
Best practice says you should review your customer surveys on a schedule and on an ongoing basis. For example, set aside 30 minutes to review survey data and results at your monthly staff meetings.
By dedicating yourself and your entire team to reviewing customer surveys on a regular business, you create a customer-service oriented culture at your business.
It helps hold everyone accountable, and it gets your team onboard with improving customer service at your business.
In addition, by reviewing survey data at staff meetings, you might find that your team can identify specific customers and elaborate on why they responded the way they did.
For example, if a customer gave you bad rating, or if they left comments, you can discuss this with your team to learn more about any problems and how you can keep them from happening in the future.
You can also use this information to brainstorm on ways to solve problems, and oftentimes respond to customers to try to repair any damage.
Do be careful when sharing survey results with your staff to not make them uncomfortable with the results. Your survey review sessions shouldn’t be “blame games.”
Stay open to listening to your staff members while coaching them to provide better customer service.
Review Surveys with Customers
For businesses who have relationships with their customers and provide a long-term service or product, it can be helpful to meet with them at least once a year to discuss survey results.
This provides you the ability to meet with your customers in person to discuss their survey responses and dig deeper into any issues that may exist.
Go through their answers to learn more and improve your process. You might find that this review process coupled with the initial survey smooths ruffled feathers and may prevent customer loss.
Final Thoughts
You already know that listening to your customers and meeting their needs is key to your success as a business.
Customer surveys are a terrific way to learn more about how your customers feel about you, so you can use the data to improve your company.
But, perhaps you are struggling with how, where and when to survey your customers.
The best way to solve that problem is to survey them where they are. This might be a pop-up survey on your website at the right time in the customer journey, it might be a post-purchase email or a link on the checkout page. Perhaps it’s a text with a link included.
With more options than ever before, you can meet your customers needs and your own by surveying them where they are.
Increasing your response rate gives you a clearer picture for managing and improving your customer service while at the same time improving retention and raising profit levels.
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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