So you want to start measuring your customer experience for your business, but not sure method you should use to capture the feedback?
Choices include Email surveys, digital survey tools or physical kiosks (like HappyOrNot). Read about my thoughts here on using email surveys but in this post I’m going to focus on comparing Digital survey tools vs physical survey kiosks.
Which solution works best for your organisation will depend on several factors, such as business context, which metric do you want to measure, relationship with customer, the type of customer experience you are looking to measure, the number of responses required, your budget, and your target audience.
The first and most obvious differentiator would be context in which your collecting customer feedback. If you are a purely online organisation, you’ll clearly require feedback software to measure your electronic engagements. But if you are operating brick and mortar locations, you will have more of a choice. A lot of organisations also operate in a hybrid of online and physical and so may require a combination of the two. So let’s assume that if you’re continuing on you are looking to gather feedback in a physical location.
The benefits of capturing feedback from physical devices in a physical location is that the devices can be placed at different ‘experience points’ to follow the customer’s journey. This allows the organisation to offer the opportunity to provide feedback at potentially many different experience points. This example of the San Francisco 49ers utilising HappyOrNot to capture real time feedback at entrances, concession stands, bathrooms, security, parking amongst others to drive their fan experience. It is obviously difficult for a digital solution to prompt a user in these types of interactions.
The next selection criteria will be the customer satisfaction metric you want to measure, this also aligns with your goal for the data gathering exercise. Read here about the differences between Customer satisfaction score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES). If you are wanting to survey customers about their perception of your brand, then NPS makes sense, and timeliness isn’t as important, this opens options of methods to collect to either digital or physical devices. But if you are looking to measure either CSAT or CES these are intrinsically tied to a specific experience and therefore timeliness is important, as well as the ability to gather feedback after every interaction.
This leads into the next point of how many times those interactions occur may also dictate which is the best method. If you want to be able to gather feedback after every ‘in store’ transaction a digital solution will not work well. Another example is if you are wanting to measure satisfaction at multiple touch points of an entire customer journey interrupting them with digital notifications will not be appreciated by your customer. If you are simply prompting them for feedback with physical kiosks along the path it will feel less like an intrusion.
Does the feedback method require a transaction to trigger the response? You will have received some offer to provide feedback on a receipt after your purchased something recently. This is a relatively low-cost solution for organisations to gather small amounts of feedback based on customers and potentially tie the feedback to a transaction. There will be retail stores that have a very high transaction conversion rate which theoretically means they can offer the survey to most of their customers. But think about the situations where you’ve gone somewhere and haven’t transacted, and you may have left disgruntled because of bad customer service or pricing. The feedback that you could have left would be invaluable. If you want to offer the ability for people who didn’t transact, with you, to leave feedback, you will need a physical survey option so they can leave feedback. This also lies at the heart of whether you want to only hear from customers, which traditionally NPS is based on. Versus allowing all potential customers to provide feedback.
Convenience for customers to give feedback may also impact the type of solution and this is often related to the context also. While giving feedback in a digital solution may make sense when there has been some form of digital interaction, or the customers already have an app which makes surveying easy. But if the context is a physical interaction having to take your phone out to scan a code or enter a code off a receipt is not convenient as opposed to simply interacting with a physical kiosk. Note the ease of giving feedback isn’t part of a CES, which is more around the ease of transacting with your organisation.
Relationship with customer – Some organisations may have a very intimate relationship with a customer and know a lot about their customers so can ask that customer for feedback about specific transactions etc. They may have an app or digital communication with the customer about individual transactions. But many organisations don’t have this level of customer relationship, or the share number of customers doesn’t warrant this intimate level of interactions. Equally organisations don’t want to clutter their existing communication channels with CX feedback for fear of losing their customer’s ear.
Type of Audience: If your target audience is more tech-savvy, a digital solution may be more effective in capturing their feedback. If your audience is less tech-savvy, less able to provide feedback either because of physical or mental capabilities or has limited access to digital devices, a physical kiosk may be more effective.
Detractors of physical kiosks may argue that you can capture more details with digital solutions like Demographics or contact details but recent product developments from HappyOrNot have added these capabilities to the Smiley Touch devices.
If you are looking to measure customer feedback in a physical location, looking to measure customer satisfaction or customer effort, don’t want to rely on a transaction to gather feedback, make it easy for your customers to give feedback, have the ability to measure multiple experience points along a customer journey, maybe have customers who you don’t know as well as you would like or don’t have a digital communication channel or they may struggle to give feedback in other means then physical kiosks, like HappyOrNot, will be a better option.
