A great customer experience is critical to your organizational success. Strategically sourcing feedback and qualitative data from service recipients and donors help you identify what’s working – and what can be improved. ACD offers a variety of automated survey collection solutions specifically designed to help your organization deliver exceptional customer service. Here’s what to know about digital survey solutions.
Why do Surveys Matter?
Customers who have a positive experience with your organization are more likely to spend more and be loyal supporters of your efforts. In contrast, a negative experience can cause customers or clients to take their business elsewhere. And with your contact center being the “face” of your organization, it’s vital that the experience exceed expectations.
Voice of the Customer (VoC) solutions such as digital surveys capture what people are saying about your product or service. They identify expectations versus actual experience and outline customer needs, challenges, and potential areas for improvement. Whether they’re simple numeric surveys or involve more extensive written or spoken feedback, they can provide powerful insights into what you’re doing well and what you could be doing better.
In short, automated customer survey solutions:
- Help you learn and improve
- Help improve brand perceptions
- Provide market and customer research insights
- Are cheaper than “manual” surveys
- Eliminate manual data collection
- Allow you to reach more people
How do Surveys Work?
Surveys can take a number of different formats. They include:
- Post-call surveys. These might take the form of simple “yes/no” questions, might request a numeric rating of the customer experience, or might ask customers how likely they are to recommend your business. They can be taken over by text, email, or phone.
- Customer “listening” data. These leverage AI and machine learning to analyze the content of calls, assess customer sentiment and help you identify themes and trends to improve your agents’ performance, routing, and overall customer satisfaction.
- Website surveys. These allow you to target customers through other channels such as your website and newsletter. These brief surveys can be a great way to obtain in-the-moment data that complement the insights from your contact center surveys.
- Social media monitoring. This approach taps into reviews, social media mentions, and other publicly available data to give you insights into what people are saying about you – and even your competitors – online.
The information gathered from customer surveys can be combined with other call and brand insights for powerful customer intelligence you can use to shape your approach to customer service, customer outreach, and even branding, business, and marketing decisions.
What Kind of Questions Should I Ask?
When surveying customers, there are best practices you can follow in order to achieve standout results. They include:
- Keeping it short – what do you really need to know?
- Asking only the essentials – don’t ask what you already know.
- Acting on the results – strategically use the data to refine your approach.
There are many great questions you can ask, but in general, they should be grouped into the following themes:
- Â product/service feedback
- customer effort
- competitive positioning
- overall experience.
Some question examples include:
- On a scale of 1-5, how likely would you be to recommend this company?
- How would you rate this experience? (Thumbs up/down)
- Which of these three features is the most valuable to you?
- If you could change one thing about your experience, what would it be?
- How easy was it to solve your question?
Your survey can be as short as one question or span several, but you’ll get more and better responses by keeping it brief and to the point.
While you can build your surveys yourself, using an existing, tested solution such as ACD’s customer survey technology will help you ask the right questions, analyze the results in combination with other quantitative data, and provide actionable insights you can use to elevate your customer experience. Contact us today to see how our survey solutions can drive customer satisfaction.