survey feedback

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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9 Of The Most Common Survey Questions

Survey Tips

Wondering what your customers think of your business, your staff, and your product and services? The best way to find out is through a survey.

Surveys help you gather data and analyze it so you can take action if necessary. They have the ability to help you increase your business while strengthening your relationship with your customers.

To help you make the most out of your next survey, we look at nine of the most common survey questions and review their effectiveness.

#1: The Open-Ended Survey Question

The open-ended survey question is perhaps the most effective survey question because it provides you with the most information. (tweet this)

With this question, the sky’s the limit when it comes to answers.

You use the open-ended survey question when you really want to dig deep into how your respondents feel about your company, your brand, your products and services, and your customer service and staff.

This question allows respondents to answer the question in as much detail as they want.

#2: The Dichotomous Question

Generally speaking, this is the common yes or no question.

For example, you might ask, “Have you used our products in the last year?”

Respondents are then given the option to simply answer yes or no.

As for the effectiveness of this type of question, it’s beneficial if the only answer you want is yes or no. If you want to screen respondents out and send them on or dump them out of your survey, this question works.

Many people use this type of question to make sure only “qualified” people are taking their survey.

In the above example, you’d respond to survey takers who answered no, they haven’t used your products, with a thank you message and the end of the survey.

Those who answered yes, they have used your products, would continue on.

#3: The Multiple-Choice Question

Another common survey question is the multiple-choice question that consists of three or more answer choices.

With this question, you might ask respondents which products or services they’ve used. For example, the question might be “What is your favorite product of ours that you’ve used in the last year?”

You would then give them three-ten choices and they choose one.

We recommend adding in an “other” category for certain questions to make sure you cover all your bases.

Like the dichotomous question, this is also a good question for which you can use conditional logic. Depending on their answer, you can send them off into various directions to answer different survey trains.

#4: The Rating Scale Question

A very common type of survey question, the rating scale asks survey respondents to rate their experiences.

It might be a product, a service or how the customer felt about something. The key to this question is a scale, usually from something that was very bad to very good.

This question is effective if you just want to know how your customer perceives your product or service.

The most common form of ratings question uses the Likert Scale. When responding to this question, your survey participants specify their level of agreement or disagreement.

#5: The Rank Order Question

You’ve probably answered this type of question many times.

With the rank order question, you might list five of the services you offer and ask respondents to rank them in order of their usefulness.

This question is effective in that it allows you to prioritize your marketing dollars into the services that people find the most valuable.

#6: The Demographic Question

Common and important, most surveys include the demographic questions.

Why do you want to ask these questions? They’re vital to the data you collect.

With the demographic survey questions, you learn the age, gender, income, race, geographical location, number of children, education level and much more of your respondents.

This helps you filter your results by demographic items.

For example, you might find that most of your respondents with children feel differently about your products than those without. Or, you might learn that people at a certain income level had a different experience with your service than others.

You have a more accurate view of your respondents once you have demographic data. This helps you understand your customer and in turn market to them more effectively.

#7: The Single Select Question

This type of question allows you to ask your respondents to choose from preconfigured options. In this instance, they only choose one.

For example, you ask, “What is your favorite food?” They can choose from pizza, burgers, steak and chicken fingers, but they are only allowed to select one.

Based on this answer, if you own a restaurant, you might add more of this type of food to your menu.

This is a closed or forced-choice question. It’s effective when you want very specific data.

#8: The Multi Select Question

This is just like the single select question, except your respondents can choose as many options as they’d like.

In the previous example, if you made it multi select, respondents could choose each one of your food items.

This question can be effective if a broad amount of data is acceptable.

#9: The Semantic Differential Scale Question

Another type of ratings question, this common survey question asks respondents to rate your company, service or product using a seven-point scale. At each opposing end is a completely opposite description.

For example, one choice would be very likely, while the other choice would be very unlikely. Respondents would choose on the scale of seven, from 1 being very unlikely to seven being very likely.

This question is perhaps not the most effective because the middle ground is very vague.

To Conclude

Now that you know nine of the most common survey questions and their level of effectiveness, you’re ready to start building your survey.

Before you do, though, here are a few more tips to building the perfect and most successful survey.

Know your objective. Narrow down what you want to know from your customers and what you’re willing and able to take action on. Then, tailor your survey around this topic only.
Keep your survey short. For the best data, keep your survey to no more than five minutes. This generally means asking fewer than 10 questions.
Include a balance of closed-ended and open-ended questions and make sure the question style fits your query.
Ask only one thing per question. If you ask two things in one question, you end up with skewed data, and you confuse your respondents.
Be careful of question bias. Have others proof your survey before sending it out to avoid leading and biased questions.

Finally, do take action on your survey results and let your respondents know what you learned from the survey and what you intend to do about it.

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: Ken Treloar on Unsplash

Harnessing The Power Of Regular Feedback

Survey Tips

Do you know how your customers feel about your services and your products? Do you know what you’re doing right and where you can improve?

By building constant feedback into your processes, you can learn more about how to fine tune and increase your business.

Through regular customer feedback, you have the opportunity to improve loyalty, retention and sales.

In this article, we look at harnessing the power of regular feedback so you can learn more about your customer’s satisfaction levels.

You’ll find there are several ways to gain customer feedback and use it to improve your business.

Use Surveys for Regular Feedback

When it comes to surveys, you have several ways to reach your customers and at different times in their journey with your company.

Survey After First Purchase:

For example, you can survey your customers after their first purchase, their sign up for your service, or their sign up for your free trial.

It’s important to find out what your customers thought of their first experience with your company from your products and services to your checkout process and the ease of using your website.

You’ll find out from this survey where you can improve your processes.

Survey After Subsequent Purchases:

Each time your customers make subsequent purchases, you can also survey them. Once they’ve used your products and services and come back for more is a great time to ask more in-depth survey questions.

Survey At Specified Times After-Purchase:

Another time to survey your customers is at specified times after their purchase. You might consider three months, six months and one year afterwards.

For these surveys, you want to know what they think of your products and services long-term, if they’re still using them and if so, why.

If they haven’t made a purchase in a while, you also want to find out why.

Customer Satisfaction Survey:

Yet another survey you can send is after a customer has an interaction with your customer support team.

For example, someone calls in and has a question. After the phone call, you send a survey to find out your customer’s satisfaction level.

This survey helps you learn about the quality of your customer support. This is highly important to your business as you’ll find your customers will not shop with you if they receive poor service.

You can harness the power of this feedback to create employee training manuals and training sessions to help your staff learn more about providing great service.

Having this feedback helps you continue to monitor your service staff and make improvements or changes as necessary.

Engagement Survey:

You’ll find that gauging customer engagement is helpful to know as you grow your company. (tweet this)

By learning how engaged your customers are, you learn why they stay or why they leave. You’ll gain insight into your customer churn rates and the reasons why they are high, normal or low.

You can then make improvements in your products and services to try and increase retention.

For example, perhaps your items always arrive broken. At this point, your customers may disengage from you and decide they’re better off without your product because they don’t want to wait for a new shipment.

Learning this from a survey, you can then find a new shipping company that won’t consistently break your items.

You should send surveys after each interaction your customers have with your staff as this is highly useful regular feedback for your business.

Leverage Review Sites

Claim your social media business pages and review site listings.

Why? You want to do this so you can monitor your online customers reviews. By taking ownership of these profiles, you can respond to all positive and negative reviews.

While you didn’t necessarily ask for the feedback, you can still harness it by responding appropriately to each review so when others search for your business they see you are empathetic, appreciative and involved.

Track Your Reviews

Sites like Google, Yelp, Yellow Pages and more can affect your business by the sheer number of reviews that are possible.

It’s vital that you track your reviews and monitor your feedback as they affect your business.

Now, let’s look at how to use your regular feedback as a tool in your marketing arsenal.

Feature Feedback on Your Website

Once you’ve got the feedback, not only can you use it to improve your business, products and services, but you can use it as a marketing tool.

The easiest way to highlight your feedback is on your website. Take a look at these ideas:

Create a page for your reviews. Highlight the positive ones so visitors from your website can see what others think of your company.
Add reviews on product pages and also have a spot for people to leave reviews of their own. Adding reviews to your product pages means people don’t have to leave their shopping experience to read your feedback.
Create customer feedback videos. These pack a real punch because they are real people talking about your business in a visual manner. Video is a top marketing tool today, and one you should use.
Highlight customer stories on your blog. These could be testimonials written by your clients that also include a photo and/or video.
After you send out online surveys, you can feature the results on your blog along with a synopsis of your findings and what you plan to do with the results.

Feature Feedback on Social Media

We live in an age of social proof – it seems most of your customers want to see what others think about your business before making their own purchase.

Use your social media platforms to invite your customers to leave reviews. Highlight these reviews in your email marketing and send people to your social media review pages.

Showcase Feedback in Other Places

You’ll find other arenas are the perfect place to showcase your feedback, whether it’s from a survey or an online review site.

Use the feedback in your email marketing. Highlight it in your eBooks, white papers and other downloadables.

Don’t forget to include blurbs in your print marketing as well.

Final Thoughts

You want to harness the power of regular feedback because your customers’ opinions are important to the success of your business.

Asking your customers what they think, using customers surveys, shows them you care and are dedicated to improvement. The same can be said for monitoring and responding to online feedback.

Make regular feedback part of your daily processes and watch your business grow.

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 Interpret Negative Feedback On A Survey

Survey Tips

No business likes to receive negative feedback. It certainly doesn’t feel good.

But, instead of getting defensive and angry, you can turn it into an opportunity for growth and change.

In this article, we look at how to interpret negative feedback on a survey so you can use it to improve your business.

First, let’s look at some steps you can take to evaluate your data.

Interpret the Data

First, you want to read through all of your survey data. Don’t make immediate conclusions because that comes later.

After the initial reading, you can begin organizing the results.

Next, you want to look for patterns in your data. Your online software can help you do this. See which responses were the most popular and note the outliers.

You should start to see a pattern. For example, perhaps more respondents were happy with one of your products, but not another. This is where you’d find what you needed to fix.

For some people, it helps to view the data in a visual format like graphs or charts. Make sure you’re looking at the data in the way that best helps you understand it.

Finally, decide what responses necessitate action from you and make a plan for taking care of the issues.

Really Listen

Your first step in interpreting any negative feedback is to really listen to what your customers are saying. It’s hard to do this right after you read the feedback.

So, take a step back, breathe and return to review it after you’ve calmed down.

Read the response carefully to make sure you understand exactly what your customer is telling you.

Respond to the Customer

If you know the name of the customer who responded negatively, you should contact the respondent within 24 hours.

It’s usually best to respond with a phone call, but if you don’t know the number, you can send an email.

It will mean a lot to your customer that you took the time to call and make things right.

Your goal is to do everything you can to remedy the situation with your customer. This isn’t the time to be defensive or angry. You want to turn an angry customer into a loyal one by the service you provide.

Make sure your customer knows how much you appreciate his/her taking your survey and providing you with feedback. Ask him to give you more information, then apologize and provide solutions.

Make Changes

Once you’ve analyzed your survey data and compiled both your positive and your negative feedback, you are well-poised to make some changes.

Take the negative feedback and discuss it with your team. Brainstorm ways you can prevent this type of feedback in the future while providing the best customer service possible.

You can also take this one step further and craft an email to your survey respondents, thanking them for completing the survey. Then, you want to let them know what steps you are taking to remedy their issues.

This lets all of your customers know you are serious about the survey and truly value their thoughts and opinions.

Final Thoughts

Perhaps the most important thing about your survey is that you do something with the results, both negative and positive.

It does you no good to send out a survey and ignore the data.

If things are going great, congratulations. But, don’t stop there. Ask yourself how you can make things even better.

When you get negative feedback, you must respond and take action. This shows your customers that you value their comments. It lets them know that as a business, you intend to improve your service and products.

Once you’ve taken the steps necessary to correct your mistakes, consider sending a second survey.

You can ask your customers specific questions that focus on the negative feedback you received from the first survey to find out if you’ve improved.

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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