You use customer relationship management software, so it only makes sense you like to know more about incorporating survey results into your CRM.
survey response
7 Proven Methods You Can Use to Get Customers to Answer Your Survey
Survey Tips
You want to grow your business and provide the best experience to your customers. You know that happy customers mean repeat business and new customer acquisition as well.
To accomplish your business goals, you want to use an important marketing tool – the customer survey. Securing customer feedback is crucial to growing your business.
Smart businesses know that sending surveys helps you gain valuable information to propel your business forward. Plus, surveys are easy and affordable to create. (tweet this)
You’ll find there are a few tricks to sending surveys that get responses. In this article, we look at seven proven methods you can use to get customers to answer your survey.
#1: Make Customers Feel Special
Since you want people to complete your survey, you have to make them feel special. How do you do this?
You want to show you genuinely appreciate your customers’ participation in your survey.
There are various types of messaging to use in your survey that accomplish this, and here are two suggestions:
- Use the subject line: “We want to know what you think.” This immediately sets the tone and lets your customers know that you really want to know their opinion on your products, services, or customer support. You might then elaborate a bit and tell your customers how their feedback will impact them and your business.
- Or, use this subject line: “Please take a short five minutes to complete this important survey.” With this sentence, you tell your customers up front how long your survey is going to take them. Five minutes is a good length because most people have that amount of time to spare. Be sure that you have had sample subjects take your survey, though. You don’t want to promise five minutes when it is really 10. Don’t forget to thank them as well. Always remember that shorter surveys are better.
#2: Provide an Incentive
You can try the above tactics, but if they aren’t working for you, try something different in your next survey.
Offer your customers an incentive to raise your survey completion rate. Here are a few examples:
- Offer a discount at the end of the survey. For example, you might provide a 15% off coupon for their next shopping trip.
- Give your customers a gift certificate at the end of the survey – $10-15 is a nice range.
- You can also offer a drawing as an incentive. For example, “Enter our survey and be entered into a drawing for a $100 gift card.”
Whatever incentive you offer, make sure you know your target audience. It should appeal to a broad range of your respondents.
#3: Use Multiple Channels
Sometimes businesses make the mistake of only sending surveys through one channel.
For example, if you post a link to your survey on Facebook, you won’t necessarily reach all of your customers. Some of them might not even use the social media platform.
The easiest, and usually the best way, to send surveys is through your survey provider or in other instances, your email marketing service provider.
If you have your customers’ email addresses, this is the most reliable way to get your surveys in front of your customers.
Next, you might consider posting your survey through your social media channels and putting it on a landing page on your website. You can also send survey links through SMS.
How does all of this help? It ensures that your customers will see your survey. If they ignore the first notice, but they see a link to the survey three more times, they might just click and complete it.
#4: Keep Your Survey Short
How long is too long?
Research shows that survey length is one of the most important thing respondents consider when completing your survey and accounts for many drop-outs.
As a rule of thumb, keep your surveys under 10 questions. For most surveys one-three is the ideal amount.
The last thing you want is your survey drop-out rate to increase because your survey is too long. Show your customers you appreciate their time by keeping your survey short.
It should only include the questions that you are actually going to act on in the near future.
#5: Be Timely
You want to send your customers their survey the same day they made their purchase or used their services.
It’s best if the experience is fresh in their mind because they’ll be more likely to complete your survey. If they can’t remember their experience, they might provide you with inaccurate feedback.
#6: Know the Goal of Your Survey
Before you even begin putting your survey together, you want to make sure you know the goal.
Perhaps your goal is to find out if your customers would recommend you business. Your go-to survey is the Net Promoter Score survey.
Or, your goal might be to find out how your customer liked the product they purchased. This is a short survey with detailed questions.
Next, you want to tell your customers up front what you’re going to do with the information. And, after the survey, when you’ve formulated your plan, email your customers and let them know the actions you’re going to take.
This helps them feel appreciated once again.
#7: Personalize Your Survey Email
Your customers expect you to know who they are.
According to a survey, when you send emails with personalized subject lines, your customers are 26% more likely to open them.
When survey respondents see their name in print on their screen, there is a subtle nod that encourages them to complete your survey. The human touch works when it comes to increasing survey response rates.
Consider using their name in not only the email subject line but the body of the email as well.
Final Thoughts
Now that you know the seven proven methods you can use to get customers to answer your survey, you’re ready to create your first survey.
You are also well on your way to understanding your customers’ needs and wants better so you can refine your products and improve your customer service.
By taking the time needed to create the best survey possible, you have a better shot at more responses which is just what you need to improve 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.
Image: rawpixel and rawpixel on Unsplash
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 the 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 ensuring 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
5 Reasons to Integrate Survey Results into Your CRM
Survey Tips
A CRM (customer relationship management) platform is a vital centerpiece to your business.
Why? In our digital age, the business that builds relationships is the one that succeeds. The best way for you to set yourself apart from the competition is by using your CRM to interact with your customers.
And, when it comes to meeting the needs of your customers and providing the best products and services, you have to know what they want. One way to learn about their needs is through surveys.
So, instead of leaving your survey results out there on their own, you can send the information to your CRM.
In this article, we look at five reasons to integrate survey results into your CRM. When you do this, you can add this info to your CRM to enhance the service you provide your customers.
First, let’s look at customer feedback.
Why Feedback is Important
Before we get into the importance of integration, we want to discuss why surveys are so important to the customer service experience you provide your customers.
Feedback is vital to understanding the desires of your customers and to learn how they feel about you. It’s nearly impossible to improve your customer experience if you don’t ask people what they think.
Asking for input means you can take action quickly.
Because feedback is so important to your success, it doesn’t help you to keep it outside of your CRM. Enhancing the customer experience means seeing the big picture, and that’s best done through integration.
Now let’s discuss why you should integrate your survey results into your CRM.
#1: You Get Immediate Feedback
Integrating your survey into your CRM software gives you more power to convert leads into customers.
For example, if someone contacts you through your website, you can set up an automatic survey to learn more about them. Once you get this feedback, you can qualify the lead based on their survey responses.
#2: You Get to Know Your Customers
Let’s say you use a survey platform like Survey Town, and you have a CRM. If you integrate them, you have access to all of your customers’ information in one place.
For example, you may have a website lead, Bob Smith. You have the info he requested on your contact form. He may have even made a purchase from you, and that information is in your CRM.
You sent out a survey last week, and Bob Smith completed it. Because you have an integrated system, you can see his data in your CRM and use it with the other data to reach out to him and provide him with just what he’s looking for.
Or, conversely, if he hasn’t made a purchase yet, you can send him a survey to learn more about his needs.
#3: Provide Better Customer Service
Your customer just purchased several items from you. Then, you wait about two weeks, and you send them a survey to get their feedback on your products/services.
The survey responses land in your CRM, and you have all the information you need to reach out. This is especially helpful if the comments are negative.
By having this leverage, you may keep bad reviews off social media and Google because you can respond faster.
An integrated system lets you respond to negative experiences and provide immediate solutions which is a win-win for everyone.
#4: You Reach Qualified People
You can use your CRM data to conduct better surveys. For example, if you send a survey on its own, you may not have a way to tie it to a person. But, if you integrate your CRM, you have a better chance of reaching qualified people who give you great feedback.
Customer feedback surveys and customer relationship management systems are uniquely intertwined.
They pack a powerful one-two punch when it comes to building customer relationships and improving their satisfaction.
#5: You Get Your Staff Involved
Another benefit to integrating your survey results and your CRM is the help it provides your employees.
This integration gives your team members the ability to handle leads in a more informed way which in turn helps them convert more of these leads into paying customers.
If closing sales is your goal, integrating your survey results into your CRM is a must-do.
Improve Your Systems
We’ve looked at some ways this integration helps with your customers, but let’s also look at how it helps your business.
When you tie the two together, you simplify your processes. Everything lands in one place, and you aren’t spending time importing lists or manually sending out survey emails. Your integrated feedback and CRM solution does all of this for you.
When you can see your survey results along with the purchases and contacts each customer has had with your business, you have more insight into what works and what doesn’t. (tweet this)
This also helps your sales team and your customer service team because all of the info is in one place.
To Conclude
Marketing in today’s digital climate is all about the customer. You want to get them the right information at the right time, and you want to make sure you’re meeting their needs.
To do this, you may already be sending surveys which is terrific. Increase the power of your surveys by integrating them with your customer relationship management system.
By integrating, you’re also streamlining your systems. This makes your data work harder and allows you to build strong customer relationships.
Combining your survey feedback and your CRM helps you personalize your customer messaging and your marketing targeting.
You can send custom surveys that are tailored to happy as well as unhappy customers, again enhancing the relationship.
Bottom line – your goal is connecting your target audience with your products and services. To do this you not only have to know what they want, but you have to build a relationship.
Integrating your survey results into your CRM helps you connect everything together so you can grow a strong 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.
Image: rawpixel on Unsplash
5 Smart Ways to Improve Your NPS Score
Survey Tips
Are you ready to supercharge your Net Promoter Score (NPS)?
As the game-changing survey, you’ll find that the NPS is the single best way to gauge your customers’ loyalty and find out how willing they are to talk positively about you to family and friends.
In this article, we look at five smart ways to improve your NPS score so you can make your customers happier and increase retention.
#1: Concentrate on Service
In this day and age, your customers expect incredible customer service. Make sure their experience is seamless and easy. Don’t waste their time and make sure your employees keep the customer at the forefront.
In addition, resolve any conflicts quickly.
#2: Engage Your Staff
Happy employees mean happy customers.
Treat your employees great, and you can be sure they’ll pass on the good service. An employee who is content at a job is more likely to share those good feelings and culture with your customers. (tweet this)
#3: Listen to Phone Calls
You can improve your NPS by listening to customer calls or watching employee/customer interactions at your place of business.
If an employee falls short, it’s time for some extra training.
#4: Provide Ongoing Training
Customer service training should go on all year long and not just once a year or at new hire on-boarding.
Create a culture of service by working on it on a daily basis.
#5: Say Thank You
You should, of course, say thank you in your NPS survey, but you also want to consider saying thank you after the results come in.
There are several options for thanking your customers for completing a survey. One way is to send a thank you email, but if you really want to impress, and you know your customer’s name, send them a hand-written note through the mail.
Final Thoughts
Surveys have their place for any business, especially when you want to know how your customers feel about your products and your service.
NPS surveys are important, too, as they give you a clear picture of how your customers feel about you. It helps you learn if you’re excelling or falling short. It also lets you know very specifically if you can count on your customers to be brand advocates, which is important to your overall marketing and growth strategy.
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: Andy Beales on Unsplash
Understanding Your Survey Results
Survey Tips
You’ve done your due diligence and created a simple, data-rich survey, and the results are pouring in.
Now what?
It’s time to review your survey responses. In this article, we look at understanding your survey results and how to move forward with them.
Display Your Results Visually
The human brain processes visual images 60,000 times faster than it does text.
So, take your data and put it into an image-based format. Think tables and graphs. This makes it easier not only for you, but for the rest of your team, to interpret the results.
Consider tables when looking at precise numbers or when you have just a few comparisons. Use graphs and other imagery when you have more to compare.
Ignore the Outliers
Once you have your survey data in a visually appealing format, you can concentrate on the high points. This means look at the biggest trends and for the initial discussion, ignore the outliers.
At first glance, you’re after the big picture of the data. For example, 15 respondents answered a question the same way, while two people didn’t. Save those outliers for a later discussion because they might even be mistakes.
You don’t want to miss the big picture because you focused on the smallest survey responses. (tweet this)
Use the Data Wisely
Let’s say you conducted a survey, and you wanted 100 responses, but you only got 10.
If your survey was about something as important as a major product change, you might want to send out a few more surveys a respectable time apart to be sure the data is correct.
If you do this, consider revising your survey and asking the question in a new way to elicit more responses.
Once you find your survey data correlates with one another, you can feel safe moving forward with your business change.
Final Thoughts
The best surveys are simple and specific with data that you can take action on. They begin with a well-crafted survey and end with a thorough examination of your survey results.
Finally, before you create your survey, write down its purpose along with what you think you’ll find. Then, you’ll have better results and something to compare them to.
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: Helena Lopes on Unsplash
How To Filter Survey Reports
Survey Tips
When you conduct a survey, you may want to look at your survey from several different angles. Filtering your results can help you do this.
In this article, we look at how to filter survey reports into your report so you can segment your respondents according to how they answered your questions.
Slice and Dice the Data
Using filters in SurveyTown, you can get multiple views of your data by going to the Reporting Tab and using “Filter Results.”
This allows you to compare results based on different groups of respondents. By clicking on “Filter Results,” you can view various data. Simply go step-by-step and choose various data points to filter your responses.
Not only can you filter data by responses, but you can filter it by age, demographic, gender, ratings and more. You will have had to ask for this information in your survey, though, to be able to filter it.
It’s often helpful to explore the similarities and the differences between subgroups in your audience. This helps you identify your strengths, weaknesses and even opportunities. (tweet this) For example, you may find audience members of a certain age rated you five stars when you only expected three of this particular group.
Finally, here are a few suggestions for filtering your survey results. You can filter by:
- Survey status
- Response date
- Question Answers
- Age and/or Demographics
- Survey Link – where they accessed your survey
Final Thoughts
You’ll find filtering your survey results beneficial for several reasons.
First, it provides you with more in-depth data and reports on how certain parts of your target populations answered specific questions. Second, filtering your results let you segment your respondents for further communication.
For example, you might filter all the people who answered question number three negatively and send them a follow-up email to try and make things right. Or, if you asked a question pertaining to a potential new product, you could filter out the responses that indicated they’d like to learn more.
Ready to get started filtering your survey results? Head on over to SurveyTown.
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.com on Unsplash
How To Survey Your Customers “Where They Are”
Survey Tips
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.
Image: rawpixel.com on Unsplash