How to Create Winning CX Surveys for Bank Customers

Constant engagement is key to creating a quality, meaningfully improved customer experience (CX). And for banks especially, the quality of the experiences customers have with a brand is the key factor in determining a customer’s longevity and willingness to maintain a relationship with a company. While an integrated CX approach demands that you go beyond the survey and look at data from everywhere – social reviews, call transcripts, chat logs, email threads, and more, CX surveys are the foundation. Banks can and should engage with customers via CX surveys and other feedback methods to see what customers love about the experience and what might need a little tweaking. Even more importantly, banks should engage with customers to let them know that they’re cared for not just as customers, but people.

Customers who feel heard and seen in this way will keep coming back even when the competition out there is fierce (and as you well know, it’s always fierce in the banking world). But what best practices should you follow to create winning CX surveys for bank customers?

Most banks rely on surveys to engage with their customers and gather this valuable intelligence, which is why today’s conversation focuses not ‘just’ on how to build a great survey, but how to do so in a way that speaks effectively to banking customers. So, with that in mind, let’s kick things off by going over our two favorite survey types: relationship surveys and transactional surveys.

Relationship Surveys

Relationship surveys are all about the big picture—brands in every industry use them to get a glimpse of the entire customer-company relationship instead of one or two transactions. A good relationship survey gives banks not only how their customers feel about experiences now, but also helps highlight which experience elements might be even more influential tomorrow.

What follows is the secret sauce for a great relationship survey. You want to include metrics that measure overall satisfaction and loyalty. You also need questions about brand perception, channel usage and satisfaction, product usage and satisfaction, and the experiences that impacted, or are impacting, your customers the most. Questions about marketing communication perception never hurt either! All of these questions, when used together, will give your bank a 360-degree view of customer relationships that goes a long way toward Experience Improvement (XI).

Transactional Surveys

As its name suggests, a transactional survey is all about how well (or not) a transaction at your bank went for your customer. These surveys can be tuned to both in-person interactions and online banking. Though transactional surveys are of a smaller scale than relationship ones, they’re also much more specific, which is great when you’re trying to get into the details of individual interactions.

Generally speaking, you want your transactional survey to ask how well the transaction went, overall satisfaction with elements like application processes and bank teller interactions, and whether there were any problems with either the transaction itself or the resolution that followed. All of that makes for a good enough survey, but we challenge you to go beyond by also asking about elements like how knowledgeable your customers think your reps are, how complete your information is, and whether it’s easy to jump between channels for a more fluid experience.

The Next Step

Whether you’re looking to design your first survey or double-checking whether your current one is up to scratch, we also challenge you to bear something else in mind: having a survey is great, but knowing when and where to deploy it is even better. Hot alerts, contextual survey deployments, and being able to analyze unstructured survey feedback can help take your bank straight to the top.

Interested in learning more on how to do all that? Click here to read our full-length eBook on how banks like yours can use surveys to meaningfully improve experiences, strengthen your bottom line, and build meaningful relationships with customers!

How Targeted Surveys Help Improve Your Customer Experience (CX)

One tool is practically synonymous with the customer experience (CX) industry: surveys. Since the inception of the industry, targeted customer experience surveys have been seen as a foundational listening and research tool that leverages strategic questions to collect data from a specific group of customers.

Sending out a targeted survey is the first step to improving customer experiences, employee experiences, and even the bottom line. Once a targeted survey has collected the desired data, a top-notch Experience Improvement platform mines that data using advanced analytics to uncover actionable insights. And once an action plan is made and carried out, businesses can improve their practices and processes in a way that helps them to acquire new customers and employees, retain existing ones, identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and eliminate extra costs.

All that starts with a targeted survey. But what are the best practices for creating a targeted survey? How do you get started? Well, that’s what we will break down today!

Picking Your Audience 

The first step to a successful targeted survey? Selecting a target audience! Ask your team, “Who are we trying to appeal to? How do we want to improve their experience?” The audience in question should be one that is crucial to your strategy, so be sure to examine sales data, demographics, and other analytics to inform your decision. 

For instance, let’s say that you are a fast casual restaurant looking to launch a new menu item in a specific region. Your target audience would then be customers from that region who are regulars at your restaurant. That would be helpful to gauging interest in your new sandwich combo!

You can also leverage other, more general surveys that ask broader questions in order to identify more specific populations to survey. Additionally, it’s possible that your company already has the data you need! Check other relevant data or research that may have already been done on your desired subject. If the insights you need are already in your possession, this can help you avoid the dreaded survey fatigue in your customers (and employees).

Four Principles for Building a Good Survey

At InMoment, we often get questions like, “What is the best way to design a survey?”, “What questions should I include?”, and “What rating scales should I use?”. The quick answer to those questions is that it depends on both the type and the topic of the survey.

Principle #1: Design with the End in Mind

This principle is also referred to as the “Backward Research Process.” When you design with the end in mind, you must first think about the decisions you want to make and actions you want to take based on the information you collect. 

Are you focused on increasing customer retention by identifying customers who had a poor experience? Do you want to “grade” your outlets or employees on their ability to serve customers? Do you want to assess which specific customer-handling processes are and are not working? The content of your survey should be guided by your answers to these questions. And since you’ve already identified your target audience, you’re ahead of the game!

Principle #2: Generate Hypotheses When Designing Your Survey

While designing the survey, it is often helpful to generate some hypotheses about how you think the results might turn out. This exercise can help you define what information you need to either collect or append to your survey data.

Principle #3: Ask the Right Questions

Don’t ask all the questions. Ask the right questions. Depending on your desired outcome, you might use a variation of these question types:

  • Multiple Choice Questions
  • Text Entry Questions
  • Quotas and Qualifications

Principle #4: Don’t Forget About The Survey Invitation

One of the most neglected parts of the survey design process is the survey invitation. Often, it is designed as an after-thought. You need to design your email invitation to maximize the likelihood that customers will receive it, notice it, open it, and click the survey link.

Email Targeted Survey Invitation
A well-designed, branded targeted survey experience is key!

Learn from the Data

You’ve zeroed in on your audience, chosen strategic questions, and sent out an optimized invitation—now the data is rolling in! This is the most exciting part of the process, because that feedback you’re receiving will be the basis of your next major improvements to the customer experience!

Your Experience Improvement (XI) tools (such as our Active Listening Studio)  will be able to ingest that data, and not only reveal insights, but will pinpoint the moments that matter (or the interactions, channels, and touchpoints that most impact your business). Prioritizing those moments helps you to take swift action to improve not only experiences, but also your bottom line.

After you’ve taken these actions toward Experience Improvement, you can also send follow up surveys to identify the effectiveness of your improvements and fuel continuous efforts toward experience excellence.

How InMoment’s Active Listening Studio Can Help

InMoment’s Active Listening Studio is a one of a kind listening suite that gives you the control to gather feedback at every touchpoint, allowing customers to tell you what matters most to them without bombarding them with survey after survey. Active Listening Studio includes:

  • DIY Survey Creation
  • Our AI-powered Engagement Engine™
  • The Rapid Resolution Engine™
  • Our Eligibility Engine™
  • Social Monitoring
  • Multimedia Feedback

Leveraging these tools allows you to create a more effective targeted survey, optimize your listening strategy, and ultimately prove that you’ve improved experiences and your business. One of our global retail clients was even able to increase survey response rates by 37% and response length by 38%!

Want to learn more about how InMoment can help you conduct a better targeted survey—and improve your customer experiences, employee experiences, and beyond? Contact our team today and we’d be happy to explore the right options for your business!

The Secret to Improving Your CX Survey Response Rates

It is a fact that CX survey response rates have been declining. Additionally, we are being surveyed more and more every day about every mundane thing in our lives. Even the federal government is in on it—an executive order in 1993 directed federal agencies to gather public feedback on how well they delivered services and to strive to offer a comparable level of customer experience with private companies. Orders similar to that one have continued into the present day.

But, with surveys being the lifeblood of nearly all customer experience (CX) programs, what is a CX practitioner to do to improve their CX survey response rates? Much has been written about the tactical things a survey owner can do: list hygiene,  fatigue or quarantine rules, visual appeal of the invitation, subject line, formatting, time estimates in the invitation, etc.  And while these elements can have some impact, they are temporary band-aids for the over-surveying problem.

The Secret to Improving CX Survey Response Rates Is…

I’ll let you in on a secret: if you truly want to improve and sustain your response rates, look to your CX program (specifically your closed loop processes). There are two critical things any company can do to improve its response rates, and they tie back to the inner and outer loop concepts described in the Net Promoter SystemSM.

You’ve probably heard that it’s vital for organizations to close these loops, as doing so can help you achieve everything from Experience Improvement (XI) to enhanced customer retention and sustained business growth. That’s true!  But effectively closing these loops also provides an incentive and opens a door for continuous feedback from your customers or members.

The Inner Loop

The inner loop refers to the systems, processes, and teams that organizations use to respond to customers one-on-one to address negative feedback. Having an effective inner closed loop process is of obvious importance to any company that wants to keep its doors open, let alone create a differentiated and meaningful experience for customers. Fail to close the inner loop, and you open the “leaky bucket.”

However, if you can build a system that allows you to receive customer feedback, analyze it for actionable insights, and respond both meaningfully and expediently, you’ll have a much easier time retaining customers and extending their lifetime value. You will learn more about their individual preferences and may even potentially cross-sell or upsell them to additional products and services.

There is also plenty of research that demonstrates that customers whose complaints have been successfully resolved tend to leave higher review scores than customers who never had a complaint in the first place! Finally, by responding to customers when they have complaints, you demonstrate that you have listened and acted on their feedback, giving them a strong incentive to provide feedback again in the future.

The Outer Loop

The scope of the outer loop is considerably wider than that of the inner loop and requires more organizational resources, cross-silo cooperation, and team coordination.  Rather than focus on individual customer interactions and complaint resolution, the outer loop is about the actions your organization takes on the collective feedback you’re receiving to drive Experience Improvement and communicate those improvements back to a much broader segment of customers (if not your entire customer base). The one-on-one interactions that comprise the inner loop are certainly important, but the outer loop is all about incorporating those into a cumulative group effort to drive sustained Experience Improvement.

This improves your CX survey response rates by demonstrating to all customers that your organization truly does care about feedback and attempts to take action to improve the overall customer experience. This provides a feedback incentive even for customers who may not have shared it in the past, as they see the direct benefit.

Widening Focus

Click here to read my full-length Point of View on how focusing on your CX program will actually help you achieve better outcomes. In the meantime, take advantage of anything you might have learned here to meaningfully improve your inner and outer loop processes. I promise you you’ll see a difference.

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