How many times recently have you received an email survey from a company you have done business with?
How many have you responded to?
You may prioritise brands who you have an affiliation with but even then, how many times will you respond to surveys from the same company before you stop?
Or have you stopped halfway through because it is too long?
Can you even remember that flight/hotel/purchase from a week ago?
If your business is running any form of NPS or customer satisfaction solution you are probably doing this yourself. Anyone with a CRM system or a Mailchimp account can survey their customers to their hearts content. The direct cost to send an email to a customer is virtually nothing but what is that communication with your customer costing you?
The most important cost of a bad email survey programme is the ear of your customers.
Just like you and I, once your customers see the communications from you as noise they will stop listening. When there are important topics you want to engage your customers on, they won’t be listening or even worse stopped doing business with you. Unfortunately, it seems the more important you are to the business the more they want to survey you.
“Everyone likes to feel like his or her feedback is taken into account, but at a certain point, it can annoy people and sour them on your brand. For instance, I’m relatively brand loyal to Delta Air Lines and Starwood Hotels and Resorts, but both are now asking me for feedback on every flight and every stay. It’s too much.” Robert Glazer
What do we do with noise? We block it out. If you reduce the noise and send fewer more targeted surveys, you may keep your customers ear.
Equally as disruptive to your relationship with your customers are overly long surveys. Organisations seem to garner input from all departments when constructing a survey, who all want to know everything about you. So, a simple transaction suddenly requires a 10-minute survey. Because I am in the business of measuring customer satisfaction, I do attempt to respond to surveys but there are a few things that stop me from completing them.
- *My number one pet peeve is being dishonest about how much time it will take, don’t tell me it will take 10 minutes if it won’t. By the way 10 minutes is too long.
- *Requiring answers to questions that don’t relate to me, let me choose n/a if I haven’t experienced that part of your service, if I can’t skip the question I’ll stop.
- *Asking too much personal information, I know why you want to ask this but I’m not going to give you my birth-date, salary, first born child’s name.
“Every question you ask is expensive (in terms of loyalty and goodwill).” Seth Goodwin
Keep the surveys short, to the point and relevant to the recent transaction, if that was your initial premise to send it.
You have just received another email survey from your airline asking about your flight last week. But you flew three flights and stayed in two different hotels, can you really remember the details of the flight? Let alone the what the meal, service, check in experience was?
What if it was a bad experience, have you grumbled to other passengers already or booked the next flight on another airline. Unfortunately, as bad as too many surveys are delays in getting feedback from customers can also have serious consequences also.
“If churn is your only measure of customer happiness, then you’re always six months too late to influence your future” Harvard Business Review.
So, you have sent out the surveys, the response rate is low because of the points I’ve mentioned above, what next? The trickiest part of utilising email surveys is finding actionable insights from the data. Attempting to aggregate this data and make an informed decision on small response rates will take some work and importantly time. Research shows that 76% of Voice of the customer programs don’t lead to actions. Source: Temkin: State of Voice of Customer (VoC) Programs, 2017
Isn’t the point of these programs to make changes to your business, as opposed to collecting survey responses.
Sending too many surveys, too many questions, not at the time of the experience and doing nothing with the results aren’t the right thing to do. What are your options to reduce the noise?
Think about how you can create a friction-less experience to collecting customer feedback. How can you make the feedback process simple, easy to do, and at the point of experience?
The simplest and globally proven is the use of one of the HappyOrNot Smiley Terminals, it’s just a press of a button, no email, no text, just one key question. Utilising HappyOrNot to take care of the point of experience customer feedback will allow you to send fewer more targeted surveys to your customers, which will garner higher response rates.
The next time you send that survey, think twice will this be the last communication that my loyal customer will read before leaving me?
Take a look at how it works and see if HappyOrNot is the right feedback solution for you.