Mastering unstructured data analytics is going to be key for any business wanting to improve the customer experience, and succeed in today’s business environment. While traditional customer feedback is a goldmine of insights that can drive business growth, a substantial portion of this valuable feedback lies in unstructured data. Emails, social media posts, customer reviews, call center transcripts, and open-ended survey responses—all hold crucial information about customer sentiment and preferences. Leveraging unstructured data analytics is the key to transforming this raw data into actionable insights that can transform your customer experience strategy.
Understanding Unstructured Data Analytics
Understanding unstructured data analytics is crucial for businesses looking to extract valuable insights from vast and diverse data sources. Unstructured data, in contrast to traditional structured data, poses unique challenges due to its lack of predefined formats. It encompasses a wide array of data types, such as text, audio, images, and video content, making it difficult to analyze using conventional methods.
However, through the application of advanced technologies like Natural Language Processing (NLP), voice analytics, and predictive customer analytics, companies can now unlock the hidden potential of unstructured data, gaining deeper customer insights and improving decision-making processes.
Being able to analyze unstructured data is not only about processing data but also about recognizing the invaluable insights within it. By tapping into unstructured data sources, businesses can elevate their customer experience strategies, customer experience research, improve personalized interactions, and create more meaningful connections with their target audience, ultimately gaining a competitive edge in today’s data-driven marketplace.
The Challenge of Unstructured Data
Unstructured data analytics can be a challenging process due to its diverse nature. However, it holds immense potential to unveil customer sentiments, emotions, and expectations, which can significantly impact business decisions. Traditional data analysis techniques fall short in making sense of this unstructured data, leading to missed opportunities and incomplete insights.
Moreover, the sheer volume of unstructured data can overwhelm traditional data storage and processing systems, making it difficult to handle and manage. Companies may struggle with data silos and do not understand the danger of data silos in customer experience management. This various inefficiencies hinder their ability to consolidate and analyze data from multiple sources cohesively.
Addressing the challenge of unstructured data necessitates investing in cutting-edge technologies and data management strategies to unlock its true potential and gain a competitive advantage in the era of data-driven decision-making.
The Benefits of Unstructured Data Analytics:
From deeper customer insights and improved customer experiences to data-driven decision-making, unstructured data analytics paves the way for a transformative journey towards customer-centricity and long-term business success. Let’s dive in and look at the benefits of unstructured data analytics!
Deeper Customer Insights
Unstructured data analytics unlocks hidden patterns and trends that may not be apparent in structured data alone. This deeper understanding of customer preferences and pain points empowers businesses to tailor their products and services to meet customer demands effectively.
Unstructured data analytics allows companies to uncover hidden patterns and trends that would otherwise remain unnoticed, shedding light on subtle shifts in what drives your customer’s behavior and expectations. Armed with these in-depth insights, businesses can fine-tune their product offerings, service delivery, and marketing strategies to align precisely with customer demands and desires.
Moreover, unstructured data analytics offers a holistic view of the customer journey, capturing the entire spectrum of interactions across various touchpoints. This 360-degree understanding enables organizations to identify critical moments of truth that significantly impact customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Businesses can prioritize areas for improvement, focusing their efforts on delivering meaningful experiences that leave a lasting positive impression on customers.
Embracing the power of unstructured data analytics allows businesses to stay agile, customer-focused, and innovative, cementing their position as industry leaders and fostering long-term customer relationships based on trust and satisfaction.
Improved Customer Experience
With unstructured data analytics, organizations can adopt a proactive approach to customer experience management. Rather than reacting to customer complaints and issues as they arise, businesses can anticipate and resolve potential problems before they escalate. By staying ahead of the curve, companies can create a seamless and satisfying customer journey, resulting in increased customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Embracing unstructured data analytics empowers companies to adapt quickly to the evolving needs and preferences of their customer base. As consumer behaviors change, businesses can make data-driven decisions, implement relevant enhancements, and offer personalized experiences that resonate with their target audience. This agility ensures that businesses remain competitive and stay ahead in the fast-paced and ever-changing marketplace.
Unlock the Voice of the Customer
Mastering unstructured data analytics is the key to unlocking the Voice of the Customer (VoC) and gaining profound insights into customer sentiments and preferences. The VoC represents the collective feedback, opinions, and expectations of customers across various touchpoints and interactions with a business. A significant portion of the VoC resides within unstructured data sources, such as customer reviews, open-ended survey responses, social media posts, and call center transcripts.
By harnessing advanced technologies like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis, businesses can analyze unstructured text data to extract valuable insights from the VoC. NLP enables the understanding of customers’ words, emotions, and context, providing a deeper understanding of their experiences and feelings. Sentiment analysis helps gauge customer satisfaction levels, identify recurring issues, and spot emerging trends in customer feedback.
Mastering unstructured data analytics in the context of the VoC empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions, identify opportunities for improvement, and optimize their customer experience strategies. By listening attentively to the Voice of the Customer and tapping into unstructured data sources, companies can cultivate strong customer relationships, foster loyalty, and continuously refine their offerings to meet and exceed customer expectations.
To learn more about how unstructured data analytics is key to understanding the Voice of the Customer, read this white paper!
The Next Step to Mastering Unstructured Data Analytics
In the age of data-driven decision-making, tapping into unstructured data analytics is a game-changer for businesses aiming to elevate their customer experience strategy. By harnessing the power of natural language processing, voice analytics, and image and video analysis, companies can unveil valuable customer insights and create more personalized and meaningful interactions. Embracing unstructured data analytics will not only drive business growth but also position your organization as a customer-centric industry leader.
To learn more about how your brand can use unstructured data analytics to drive business success, request a demo here!
One size doesn’t fit all, but knowing essential NPS best practices that can fit any program is a great place to start. In our latest report, State of Customer Experience: 2023 UK Consumer Study in partnership with NPSx by Bain & Company, we uncovered the differences between industries and brands and how each brand represents certain values. We learnt that there are multiple approaches to achieving success and that the true differentiators between leading and lagging companies are culture, capability, and execution.
In this blog, we have listed NPS best practices that will help you shape the course of your organisation into becoming a leader in customer satisfaction.
NPS Best Practices Tip #1: Listen To Your Customers
Understanding your customers is paramount in shaping your business strategy. While reports and data can offer valuable insights, the most authentic and relevant information comes directly from your customers. The strength of your organisation’s capability to listen, understand, and act upon customer feedback is crucial. By engaging with those who use your products or services, you gain unparalleled access to the truth about your brand’s perception and the experience you deliver.
Start by delving deep into your customers’ perspectives, their pain points, and their expectations. This knowledge will empower you to craft a customer experience (CX) approach tailored to your unique circumstances. Remember, customer feedback is a goldmine of actionable data that can steer your business towards delivering exceptional experiences and fostering lasting customer loyalty.
NPS Best Practices Tip #2: Build a Customer-Centric Culture
A customer-focused culture is essential, where processes align with customer-centricity, making it a systematic approach rather than mere aspiration. It requires alignment of processes and actions that prioritise customer satisfaction at every level; from the leadership team to front-line employees, everyone must understand their role in delivering for customers and comprehend the significant impact it has on the success of the business.
It is imperative that everyone across the organisation understands their role in delivering for customers and why crucially it makes great business sense. Companies that prioritise their customers and build a culture around their needs, tend to thrive and outperform their competitors and grow ahead of the market.
NPS Best Practices Tip #3: How You Execute is Key To Your Success
Effective execution determines success. Even if you have established listening posts and a customer-focused culture, poor execution will hinder your progress. The true value lies in taking decisive action based on the insights gathered from customers. Turning knowledge into action is the driving force behind real progress.
By actively listening, learning, and implementing changes based on customer feedback, customer-focused companies create a framework for continuous improvement. While knowledge is valuable, taking action based on customer insights is what drives progress. Simply knowing everything without implementing changes will hinder your advancement. Continuously evolving and adapting based on customer insights propels these businesses towards sustained success.
NPS Best Practices Tip #4: Listen Outside of Your Industry
Often, brands focus solely on their own industry, and while it’s natural to focus on your own industry for inspiration and benchmarking, looking beyond those boundaries can yield valuable insights and a competitive edge.
Analysing similar structures in different industries can provide valuable insights that may not be apparent when only examining your own category’s performance. For instance, in this study, we observed that the automotive industry can learn valuable lessons from other industries, such as energy. Even in relatively narrow categories like insurance, there are opportunities to gain inspiration and insights from unexpected sources. Embracing ideas from different industries can lead to groundbreaking strategies and a forward-thinking mindset.
NPS Best Practices Tip #5: Don’t Ignore Low NPS Drivers
It is interesting to note that sustainability ranked relatively low in terms of importance. However, upon closer examination, some leading brands do have robust sustainability charters and consider environmental impact in their operations. While it may not be a major driver, there is a subtle undercurrent of customers caring about how companies treat their employees (which manifests itself in the employee experience) and the origins of their products.
As customers become more conscious of corporate social responsibility, the significance of these factors may grow over time. By acknowledging and addressing low NPS drivers, businesses can stay ahead of evolving customer expectations and position themselves as responsible industry leaders.
If you are unsure whether your existing CX technology vendor can help you achieve these goals, we would be happy to talk to you about how we can assist you. InMoment’s award-winning AI-based experience improvement technology and decades of industry expertise combined with NPSx market-leading training certification and communities for CX practitioners, and CX Roadmap & Assessments help organisations align and prioritise their CX investments, create customer-centric cultures and give clients a comprehensive set of solutions to support customer loyalty and business growth.
Take the initiative today and book your meeting to start your journey towards improved NPS and a remarkable customer experience. We look forward to discussing how we can support your growth and success.
It seems like the internet is full of ChatGPT “hacks” these days. We are all inundated by articles and webinars that start with “How to Use ChatGPT to…” I have also had way too many conversations with my Gen-Z son and millennial colleagues about how they use the tool to make everyday tasks go by more quickly. And I wouldn’t be the true customer experience nerd that I am if I didn’t ask: “Could we customer experience (CX) professionals leverage ChatGPT customer experience survey questions?”
On the surface, it seems like an obvious application for a ChatGPT customer experience approach. A survey is pretty straightforward, correct? Not so fast.
Keep reading to find out what happened when I tested this approach and why it may not be the best way to go when it comes to your customer listening approach.
Testing ChatGPT for Customer Experience Questions
I started off with a simple question for ChatGPT, hoping for a simple customer satisfaction survey, typing in, “Write me a survey.” You can see the screenshot of the output below.
A ChatGPT Customer Experience Survey
After reviewing the generated answer, you may be asking, “what’s missing?” Well, to the untrained eye, there could be little to no difference between a traditionally written survey and a ChatGPT customer experience survey. After all, there are demographic questions, the typical “How satisfied were you with your experience,” and other basic survey asks.
But here is what stands out to me as a glaring absence. What is missing is pretty much the most important part of any survey: the link to the business questions you are trying to answer by launching a survey in the first place!
Quick PSA from Jim: Creating surveys is an important topic, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that while surveys are a tried-and-true method of collecting customer feedback, they are not the only way (or the best way, in many cases) to hear from customers. With so many channels available for you to monitor the voice of the customer, to restrict yourself to surveys alone is to limit your insights. This is another topic for another day (but if you’re interested, you can learn more about other listening channels here). End of PSA.
For now, let’s talk about the risks of using AI like ChatGPT to write surveys!
ChatGPT Customer Experience Risks & Best Practices You Need to Know
ChatGPT Customer Experience Questions Miss the Point
Let me ask you a question: Is the point of your CX program to launch surveys? Now, many of you are likely rolling your eyes at me, but I promise, there’s a point to this. Hopefully, you answered no. Because the point of customer experience is not to ask questions, but to listen to customers and the market to help guide your path to achieving business goals. The questions are simply a vehicle to gain insight into what will help or hinder your business on the way to realizing those goals.
When you look at the output of ChatGPT customer experience questions in the screenshot above, these questions really miss the point. Yes, they are generic questions that we have all likely seen in surveys before, but what are they getting at? The only results I can see this survey gleaning is a scoreboard metric and some customer demographics that we might already have access to via other data sources.
When you craft surveys, the first questions you should ask should be for you and your team. Do you have a set of northstar goals (GOALS not scores!) for your customer experience program already? Great! If not, start that conversation with your executive stakeholders and team. Only then can you truly design your program, surveys, and other initiatives with the end goal in mind.
Once you have agreed upon a desired end goal, then you need to ask:
What are we hoping to learn?
Who are we hoping to learn from?
Do we already have access to this data?
If you want to gut-check your surveys, you can check out this CX survey assessment my colleagues developed to help you optimize your surveys!
ChatGPT Doesn’t Know Your Customers Like You Do
Context is everything. And when it comes to ChatGPT customer experience questions, they won’t have any of the contextual data that you do. If your CX program has been around for a while, you likely have a mountain of customer data around. And that existing data will shape what you already know, and what questions you still need to ask.
(Additionally, you might be tempted to feed ChatGPT some of your customer data, but that can unearth a whole boatload of security complications. Do you really want every ChatGPT user having access to your customer data? Didn’t think so.)
An effective customer listening strategy is personal and targeted. Speaking to the customer in their language is critical. Many brands have worked hard to develop a brand persona. Asking customers for feedback in a sterile, canned voice will not yield the best results or further endear your brand to your customers. I don’t believe your brand personalization can be accomplished by a ChatGPT survey—at least not today.
ChatGPT Is a Starting Block, Not the Finish Line
Now you may be thinking, “Jim, you’ve made a good case for the risks of using ChatGPT for customer experience surveys. But there has to be some way I can use it.” I’m glad you asked and yes, there is!
I know we have all heard the fear-mongering conversations about AI taking jobs. And if we’re being realistic, AI will eliminate some jobs, but it will also create new ones. Those who will be safe from that chopping block are those professionals who learn how to leverage AI to increase efficiency and perfect skills that AI alone just can’t manage without human input.
In the customer experience space, this could be leveraging ChatGPT as a starting point, then leveraging the additional context you have about your customers and your brand’s identity to perfect its suggestions.
For example, ChatGPT can give you phrasing ideas for your survey questions as long as you are very specific in your prompts. It can also help you to think of other ways to ask questions you’ve been posing to customers for a long time, giving your same old relationship and post-transaction surveys a refresh.
It’s not about AI or humans. It’s about humans using AI to improve and become more imaginative and efficient.
I will end with this. I do not want to come off as a “debbie downer” or, even worse, as naive. AI is going to have an increased role in customer experience and in creating the listening posts that practitioners create to capture customer insight. But, I believe true value will be well beyond simply crafting a survey.
The real power of ChatGPT and other AI tools will be to help understand the data that comes from a survey or the multiple direct and indirect data sources that make up the voice of the customer. And, just to validate this statement, I asked ChatGPT why the voice of the customer is important? In this case, ChatGPT was spot on:
I think we can all agree that ChatGPT is right on target with that answer.
In today’s business landscape, customer experience (CX) has become a critical differentiator. Customers have high expectations when it comes to interactions with brands, and delivering exceptional experiences has a direct impact on loyalty, satisfaction, and overall business success. To meet these demands, companies are turning to customer experience experts who possess the knowledge and skills to enhance CX platforms and drive customer-centric strategies.
Who Are Customer Experience Experts?
Customer experience experts are professionals with a deep understanding of customer behavior, psychology, and industry best practices. They bring a unique blend of expertise, combining data analysis, strategic thinking, and a customer-centric mindset. These professionals often have backgrounds in fields like market research, customer service, UX design, and psychology. Many of them also have experience leading customer experience programs at the world’s greatest brands, and now advise other CX professionals on how to grow programs that benefit their businesses.
Why Are Customer Experience Experts Important?
The importance of customer experience for modern businesses cannot be overstated. Companies that prioritize customer experience outperform their competitors and build long-term customer loyalty. However, achieving exceptional customer experience requires a dedicated focus on understanding and addressing customer needs and expectations at every touchpoint. This is where customer experience experts play a crucial role.
Customer experience experts possess the skills to identify pain points in the customer journey and suggest actionable improvements. By analyzing customer data, conducting surveys, and studying customer feedback, they uncover valuable insights that can drive transformative changes. They have a finger on the pulse of evolving customer expectations, enabling businesses to proactively adapt and stay ahead of the competition.
How Can Customer Experience Experts Elevate Your CX Initiative?
Customer experience experts can elevate your CX platform in several ways:
Assessing and Optimizing Your CX Program: Customer experience experts bring fresh perspectives and extensive experience. They can evaluate your existing CX program, from your customer listening strategy to your governance approach and beyond, to identify areas of improvement and suggest strategies to enhance customer satisfaction and improve on business-critical goals such as customer acquisition and retention.
Leveraging Data-Driven Insights: Customer experience experts are skilled in analyzing data to uncover patterns, trends, and customer preferences. By leveraging advanced analytics and machine learning techniques, they can make data-driven recommendations that improve business outcomes.
Implementing CX Technologies: With their expertise in CX technologies, customer experience experts can help you adopt and integrate cutting-edge tools such as AI chatbots, sentiment analysis platforms, and omnichannel solutions. These technologies streamline interactions, personalize experiences, and enhance customer engagement.
Collaborating With Your Team: Customer experience experts work collaboratively with your team, aligning CX strategies with your business goals. Their ability to communicate and influence stakeholders ensures that the CX improvements are integrated seamlessly across departments, resulting in a consistent and superior customer experience.
How Your Business Benefits From the Customer Experience Experts at InMoment
In a world where customer expectations are continually rising, delivering exceptional experiences is no longer a choice, but a necessity. Engaging with customer experience experts at InMoment can make the difference between a passable customer experience to one that is a true differentiator for your brand and a driver for your business.
InMoment’s customer experience experts include our expert practitioners and Strategic Insights Team, a dedicated team of consultants with over sixty years of research, marketing sciences, and advanced statistical expertise.
These individuals are embedded in our clients’ organizations, helping them transform any type of data into actionable (ROI) insights.
These customer experience experts take a unique approach of “designing with the end in mind,” which enables our clients to understand their customers, non-customers, and employees at a granular level. Additionally, their expertise further empowers our clients to build strategies and action plans that focus on the bottom line: acquisition, retention, customer lifetime value, and cost reduction opportunities.
The Strategic Insights Team’s services include:
Industry Benchmarking
Market Pulse Surveys
Journey Mapping
True-Driver Analysis
ROI-Based Linkages
And more!
These customer experience experts and their understanding of customer behavior, analyzing data, and implementing CX strategies can transform your business, boost customer satisfaction, and drive sustainable growth. Don’t miss the opportunity to leverage their skills and insights to stay ahead in the competitive marketplace. Invest in a CX provider that includes strategic services and other experts today and make your customer experience a differentiating factor for your business success!
In our recent virtual panel discussion, we explored how different financial firms are embracing the Consumer Duty Act and identified areas where most of their resources have been designated. The panelists engaged in insightful discussions, sharing their organisational challenges and best practices, while attendees were to engage in polls aimed at answering three key questions on preparedness, challenges, and changes related to Consumer Duty.
And because at InMoment, we value sharing knowledge as widely as possible, I’m going to share the results of that in-event poll with you here, along with a few thoughts about our learnings.
How Prepared Do You Feel for Consumer Duty?
We were pleased to see that the majority of firms who joined us felt very prepared, with 50% selecting this option, and no one stating that they weren’t prepared at all.
The panelists shared valuable insights on embracing changes and putting customers at the center of their business. A key takeaway was the importance of ensuring that everyone in the organisation was informed and that they understood what Consumer Duty means for the whole business, but also their specific accountability in delivering against it. Increasing awareness and providing comprehensive training to employees are crucial steps toward ensuring adherence to the act’s expectations.
The discussion around preparation also highlighted the importance of assessing product alignment with target customers, the risks of non-compliance, and the benefits of adopting a customer-first approach.
Furthermore, the concept of “substantive compliance” was emphasized as a means to exceed expectations and gain a competitive advantage. Ensuring the needs of vulnerable customers are met was also discussed as a crucial aspect of achieving desired outcomes.
What Have Been Your Biggest Challenges in Getting Ready for Consumer Duty?
When asked about the biggest challenges they have faced, there was an equal split between “creating change within the organisation to adapt to the FCA requirements” and “conflicting priorities.” Both challenges undoubtedly speak to the need to implement new processes as well as ways of thinking, especially when strategic plans or other requirements such as digital transformation were already planned as necessities.
Solving for these challenges requires an organisation to embrace the Consumer Duty Act as an opportunity for a strategic evolution, rather than a complete upheaval of existing business strategies. The key is in adapting your perspective to see these adjustments as a fine tuning rather than a complete abandonment of the preexisting travel plan.
There was also emphasis on fostering a culture of ongoing learning and improvement. By embracing a mindset of adaptability and remaining attuned to shifting customer expectations and regulatory landscapes, organisations will be best able to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities presented by the act.
What Are the Biggest Changes That You Have Made Towards Identifying Risk Amongst Your Customers?
Lastly, we asked attendees about the biggest changes they had made to identify at-risk customers. The poll and the subsequent discussion revealed the significant industry-wide adoption of integrating diverse data sources (other than traditional surveys) into Marketing Intelligence (MI), with the third poll showing that 81% had integrated different data sources into their reporting. This integration empowers organisations to leverage comprehensive data, driving focus and strategic changes that are aligned with evolving customer needs.
Leaders in this space have continued to make adjustments to their CX programmes to support Consumer Duty requirements such as reviewing touchpoints and customer journeys to bridge gaps, more effective dissemination of customer insights to stakeholders, and a greater focus on measuring consumer understanding in order to take proactive action to address improvement areas. This final action leads to not only improved communication out to customers but also improved internal communication around expectations and making material more inclusive to drive better understanding.
“Firms should harness the benefits of data and technology to improve their services and understand the outcomes they achieve for their customers.”
The FCA
To get access to detailed notes, poll data and more, you can click here for a full summary of the Consumer Duty Panel Discussion!
It’s clear that the most successful brands will be those that focus on enhancing their customer-centric culture, putting the customer at the heart of all decision making, rather than focusing only on a compliance-first approach.
Having the right experience programme in place can help build customer centricity and use it to your advantage!
Find out how InMoment can help you embrace these changes to:
Deliver positive outcomes for your customers
Gain an improved consumer understanding
Identify customers at risk to complain and churn
Develop a culture of continuous experience improvement
Click the link if you would like to learn more about how InMoment can help you with Consumer Duty Compliance!
Customer experience surveys have served us well when it comes to collecting customer feedback data. When we have questions about our brand’s customer experience (CX), there’s no better way to get answers than by asking our customers directly, right? But how do you make sure you’re sending the best possible customer experience survey? Asking the right questions? Sending your survey at time?
Keep reading to find the answers to these questions and more in this overview of customer experience survey facts, best practices, and beyond.
What Is a Customer Experience Survey?
Customer experience surveys are customizable questionnaires sent to targeted customer segments to determine how a brand is performing, uncover areas where customers are satisfied, and detect areas in need of improvement across the customer journey. The end goal of these surveys is to improve customer experiences and impact business metrics.
Why Use Customer Experience Surveys?
Customer experience surveys are more vital than ever before due to an extremely competitive market in every industry as well as empowered consumers. In mere seconds, customers can compare your brand’s products and services with that of your competitors. Therefore, you cannot afford to overlook any areas of dissatisfaction that may prevent customers from purchasing from you.
When you deploy customer experience surveys and other methods of customer listening, however, you are placing your customer and their satisfaction at the heart of everything you do—and that pays. In fact, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than
companies who don’t focus on customers. This is largely due to the fact that brands who are customer centric leverage the insights they gain from customer experience surveys to make improvements for their customers, which improve the following metrics:
Customer Acquisition: Create exceptional experiences that attract new customers via word of mouth, and also leverage your voice of customer to create more targeted marketing campaigns.
Customer Retention: Reduce customer churn by resolving points of friction throughout your customer journey and leverage predictive analytics to identify customers who are likely to leave so you can implement a rescue plan.
Higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Understand what keeps customers around so you can continue to not only satisfy their needs, but go above and beyond to delight them, keeping them around for a lifetime
Lower Cost to Serve: Identify areas where you can eliminate duplicate efforts and inefficient processes so you can fine tune your approach to save time, effort, and money.
Different Types of Customer Experience Surveys
There are four popular types of customer experience surveys many businesses leverage across the customer journey to gauge their brand reputation, customer satisfaction, customer effort, and other more targeted metrics.
#1: Net Promoter Score (NPS)
What Is Net Promoter Score?
Net Promoter Score or NPS is a method of measuring brand customer satisfaction that was released in 2003 by Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company. It is among the most popular customer experience metrics as 48% of companies with more than $500 million
in revenue are using NPS as their primary indicator for measuring the customer experience success.
How Is Net Promoter Score Measured?
The Net Promoter Score is based on one question: “What is the likelihood that you would recommend company x to a friend or colleague?” NPS then categorizes customers into three types. The customer type is based on their likelihood to recommend your brand on a scale of 0-10:
Promoters (10-9)
Passives (8-7)
Detractors (6-0)
Your Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage total of detractors from the percentage total of promoters.
Why Does Net Promoter Score Matter?
NPS helps brands to get a brand-level tracking study of their overall customer experience because it gives them a single metric to measure their brand health. Additionally, NPS helps brands adopt an easy-to-understand, common language by giving them one singular metric to keep track of.
Net Promoter Score Survey Template
If you are looking to deploy a NPS customer experience survey, you can use the following template to craft a Microsurvey for in-app, in-site, or in-platform feedback, or even for an email survey or SMS survey.
Net Promoter Score Customer Experience Survey Example
#2: Customer Satisfaction Score
What Is a Customer Satisfaction Score?
Customer Satisfaction Score or CSAT measures a customer’s level of contentment after a specific interaction, transaction, or general satisfaction with a specific feature within a product or service.
CSAT customer experience surveys ask “how satisfied are you with your recent experience at BRAND X?”
How Is Customer Satisfaction Score Measured?
Customer Satisfaction Score is equal to the total number of satisfied responses (with respondents who rated a 4-5 on a scale of 1-5 considered to be “Satisfied Responses”) divided by the total number of responses, then multiplied by 100. The final results should be rounded to the nearest whole number.
Why Does Customer Satisfaction Score Matter?
Customer Satisfaction Score is relatively easy to understand as it correlates to a single question on a survey. Also, it makes benchmarking against other brands simple and straightforward.
Additionally, CSAT customer experience surveys allow brands to get a snapshot of the customer experience at a specific touchpoint, which allows them to more easily identify areas that need improvement.
Customer Satisfaction Score Template
Looking to use CSAT post transaction or at another touchpoint? Check out this customer satisfaction score template:
Customer Satisfaction Score Customer Experience Survey on Mobile
#3: Customer Effort Score
What Is Customer Effort Score?
Customer Effort Score or CES is a customer experience survey metric that allows brands to measure the ease of customer interaction and resolution during a request.
The Customer Effort metric became popular in the 1990s as companies realized that understanding the amount of effort it takes a customer to do business with them is critical. The thinking was that effort should be low for easy interactions whereas customers should expect to put in more effort for complicated or involved experiences. Effort plus satisfaction would help the organizations understand whether they were delivering on expectations.
How Is Customer Effort Score Calculated?
CES appears on a customer experience survey by asking customers to rate whether they agree or disagree with this statement: “The company made it easy for me to handle my issue.”Customers answer according to a scale from 1-7 with 1 being “Strongly Disagree” and 7 being “Strongly Agree.”
Organizations then take the number of those who responded with 5 and above then divide by the total respondents to calculate the CES.
Why Does Customer Effort Score Matter?
CES is especially popular in contact centers, but it is becoming more popular with other industries. It also allows companies to focus on one goal: doing whatever it takes to make things easy for their customers. Therefore, they can unify their efforts and work toward
that desired outcome.
Customer Effort Score Template
If you’re looking for a Customer Effort Score template, you’ve come to the right place! Take a look below:
Customer Effort Score Customer Experience Survey via Chat
#4: Custom Customer Experience Surveys
When to Use a Custom Customer Experience Survey?
A customer CX survey allows you to ask more specific questions to targeted customer segments about a product, interaction, or service. These questions allow you to get into the details of your customer experiences to add more context to specific initiatives, such as product development, employee training initiatives, and beyond.
These customer customer experience surveys should be extremely targeted and designed to trigger at a very specific time, for instance, right after a customer performs the specific action your team is trying to fine tune.
There are plenty of benefits to using custom customer experience surveys, but the primary benefit has to be the fact that these surveys allow you to fill in any knowledge gaps or blind spots in your brand’s customer journey (more on this later).
How to Take Action on a Customer Experience Survey
Leveraging the metrics we’ve discussed so far is a great way to get a specific score associated with either your overall customer experience or customer satisfaction or ease at a specific touchpoint, but what about taking action on that metric to improve experiences? That’s why you need to get the story behind the score with a follow up question.
A follow up question comes after a metric-based question and simply asks, “What is the reason behind your score?” (or a variation of that question) and then leaves a text box open for customers to type in their explanation.
Net Promoter Customer Experience Survey With a Follow Up Question
This is where the most impactful insights will come from. Leveraging text analytics, you’ll be able to analyze the unstructured data from the text box to get to the why behind the score. It’s the difference between knowing an experience needs to be improved and knowing how an experience can be improved.
The best customer experience solutions will also provide dashboards within their platforms that identify the key drivers of specific experiences, which let you and your team know what elements of the customer experience you need to get right. Additionally, some CX platforms even can suggest action plans based on the unstructured data you collect via your customer experience surveys.
Customer Experience Survey Best Practices
When to Send a Customer Experience Survey?
When you should send a customer experience survey depends on why you are sending a survey. More relationship driven surveys with overarching questions like Net Promoter Score can have more flexible sending times, as you are gauging the overall satisfaction with a brand.
For more transaction- or interaction-based questions such as CSAT or CES, however, timing is everything. You want to make sure these surveys are sent right after the interaction in question. If there is a delay, you risk inaccurate data or lower response rates as the interaction or transaction is no longer top of mind for the customer.
You also want to make sure you aren’t sending surveys too frequently or you risk survey fatigue. If you’re reaching out to your customers every time you have a question, there’s a serious possibility that they’ll get tired of your questions and stop participating. This leads to lower response rates, which can affect the quality of the results you receive. Even worse, it can even cause over-surveyed customers to have a negative perception of your brand.
Where to Send a Customer Experience Survey?
There are various distribution channels you can leverage for your customer experience survey:
In-Store Surveys (via tablet, point of service, or push-button terminal)
Surveys via Push Notification
There are plenty of options, but the most important factor to consider is where your customers prefer to leave feedback. When you meet customers where they are and on the channels they frequent most often, you have a higher likelihood of sufficient response rates and more valuable and actionable feedback data.
Three Steps to Take Before Sending a Customer Experience Survey
Today, there are also so many other ways to collect customer feedback other than customer experience surveys. For instance, research shows that today’s customers are less likely to leave feedback via a traditional long form survey. However methods like Microsurveys, as well as social media and review sites and chatbots have grown in popularity.
Now, that doesn’t mean we need to abandon surveys all together! In fact, it’s just the opposite. It just means we need to send them at the right time and for the right reasons.
Below, we’ll talk through three expert-advised steps you should take before you send that customer experience survey.
Step #1: Ask, “What Am I Trying to Achieve With This Customer Experience Survey?”
This first step may seem a little rudimental, but we find that it is often the most vital, yet overlooked element of a successful customer experience survey strategy. We often tell our clients to “design with the end in mind,” meaning to think about not just what you want to accomplish tomorrow or even a few months from now, but when you think about your ideal future state of your customer experience, what does it look like? Only then will you be able to accurately identify how to get from point A to point B.
Failure to pinpoint your goals when it comes to survey strategy often looks like sending too many surveys with too many questions, leading to too much data—and therefore, too little intelligence.
That’s why we suggest getting your team together (and maybe including some expert consultants like our Strategic Insights Team) to decide what problem you’re trying to solve or what you’re trying to improve.
For example, are you striving to increase market share? Retain existing customers? Knowing the answers and setting goals right off the bat will help you narrow down the areas to listen (because if you listen everywhere, you end up with a lot of data and no answers).
Step #2: Take a Look at Your Current Customer Feedback Data
Wondering what questions will surely cause survey fatigue? The ones that you should have the answers to already. That’s why it’s so important to take a look at your existing customer data. This can be inferred data (such as customer relationship management data) or internal data (from emails, slack, and the like).
Today, there is no shortage of data. So, why would you want to add even more to your pile when your existing data might already hold the answers you seek?
Using the same example from step one, if you are looking to increase retention, you may be able to use inferred/internal data to identify that 30% of your churn is driven by a lack of personalized experiences. That gives you an area in which to take action, all without sending a single survey!
Step #3: Consider Existing External Data
So you’ve decided what you’re trying to achieve and sorted through your existing inferred and internal data. Now what? Next comes the data that already exists, but maybe you don’t have access to it yet.
We are of course referring to indirect data, such as comments and ratings from Glassdoor or other review sites as well as social media comments, credit card and IP targeting data, and the like. The right Experience Improvement partner should be able to help you access this data and the insights it holds.
By leveraging indirect data, you are gaining additional insights from existing customers and employees, but also non-buyers and non-employees. For instance, if you examine Glassdoor data from competitors, you can identify why their job postings are attracting candidates. You can then leverage that data to improve your own postings.
Now You Can Send That Survey!
Still have questions? Great! These are the perfect candidates for sending a quick survey. By following the three preceding steps, you can rest assured that you have exhausted all of your considerable data resources, and can send out a strategic, minimal survey without risking survey fatigue.
Want to learn if your customer experience surveys are the best they could possibly be? Our experts have developed an assessment that allows you to optimize your surveys and make sure that they will provide actionable insights that drive business results! Check out the Survey Assessment
In the modern consumer-led environment, the customer experience is of paramount importance. Whether you’re offering omnichannel contact center solutions like we do at RingCentral or work in online retail, you must go the extra mile to ensure that your customers enjoy the best possible client experience. Because if you don’t improve customer experience, you can rest assured that your competitors will.
Where once the emphasis might have been on clever publicity schemes or B2B affiliate marketing, now businesses recognize that these methods – though they remain hugely important and valuable—need to be complemented by a laser-like focus on customer experience. Without that focus, you’ll find that consumers explore other options, and take their business where they feel it’s more valued.
Delivering exceptional customer experiences requires a wholehearted commitment across your company. That’s from the most senior management at the top, to the staff dealing directly with customers on the shop floor (or in the call center). It also requires a willingness to ask awkward questions about your own business, and a preparedness to confront – and address – any failings you might identify.
To improve customer experience and make your client encounters the best they can possibly be, you need to ensure that each interaction a consumer has with your business is smooth, consistent, and straightforward. You must also attend to their needs and concerns. Whether you’re showing customers how to record a webinar or helping them find the right furniture for their home, the same fundamental principles apply.
With all this in mind, then, it should be apparent that customer experience is vitally important to scaling a business. But what particular customer experience competencies can boost your business’s growth? This is what we’ll discuss in this guide, but first, we’ll look in more detail at exactly why the customer experience is of such overwhelming importance.
Furthermore, it is important to note that these expectations have changed quite dramatically in a relatively short period of time. The sheer choice available online has made it easier for consumers to shop around and explore alternative options. It’s no longer a matter of competing with businesses in your local vicinity, as there is (almost literally) a world of options out there for people to choose from.
Offering an exceptional customer experience, then, can have all sorts of welcome consequences. As we’ve discussed, it’s essential to ensuring long-term customer loyalty, thereby putting your whole business on a firmer footing. In addition, it also encourages positive word of mouth. Customers promoting your business to their friends and colleagues, and thereby (hopefully) bringing more custom your way.
The most important thing to remember with regard to customer experience is that the power these days lies with the consumer. No longer is it possible to pull the wool over their eyes with sub-standard products and services. The bar has been substantially raised, and this is the reality you must adapt yourself to.
Understanding Customer Expectations
Understanding customer expectations is crucial for businesses seeking to improve customer experience. It begins with identifying customer needs and desires, diving deep into what truly matters to them. By actively listening and gathering feedback, businesses can uncover valuable insights to tailor their products and services accordingly. Recognizing key touchpoints, such as initial contact, purchase, and post-sales support, allows businesses to focus their efforts and resources where it matters most. Mapping the customer journey provides a holistic view of the entire customer experience, enabling businesses to identify pain points and opportunities for improvement. By thoroughly understanding customer expectations, businesses can deliver personalized and exceptional experiences that leave a lasting positive impression.
So, now that we’ve clarified just why customer experience is so vital, we need to discuss the competencies that can transform your business for the better and send its growth soaring into the stratosphere, as well as creating a healthier business environment for everybody involved.
Here are five customer experience competencies which you must be continually focused upon:
1) Prioritize the Customer
It might seem like an obvious point to make, but to deliver the best possible customer experience, you need to genuinely prioritize the needs of the customer. This is of the utmost importance whether you’re promoting a video hosting platform or trying to tempt people to try a new restaurant.
The exact experiences that people expect differ from sector to sector, of course, but prioritizing the customer must remain constant across the board.
Customers need to feel that they are the focus of your attention at all times. They need to feel valued at all times. This needs to involve more than just rhetoric or platitudes. Your plan to improve customer experience must be backed with a plan for action, including the resources necessary to back it up. Set clear metrics and use hard data to measure customer experience management.
2) Be Prepared to Engage
Another point that needs to be kept in mind is that customer engagement is an integral part of delivering exceptional experiences. Consumers these days love to give their opinions, and most of the time they don’t require much prompting to do so. This is something your business has to be properly prepared for. Customer engagement, therefore, needs to be a leading priority for your business.
It’s best to take the initiative yourself. Be proactive in your efforts to seek customers’ opinions, and provide your own outlets where clients can offer them. Of course, people will use social media too, so be alert to any discussion of your business there. Also, when customers provide feedback, listen to it. They may highlight issues of which you were previously unaware, and it’s always frustrating for customers to feel their views aren’t taken seriously.
3) Demonstrate Firm and Open Leadership
Much is often made of the importance of purposeful and strong leadership in business, and there’s little doubt that this can make a huge difference. The value of entrepreneurialism has been proven over many years, from the largest multinational corporations to the smallest mom-and-pop retail outlets. But when it comes to customer experience, business leaders themselves must be prepared to be led by customers.
Business leadership must, therefore, accept the necessity of customer-centric growth. This involves heeding the views of consumers and maintaining an intimate understanding of exactly what they’re looking for. This doesn’t mean following the whims of customers blindly, however. It’s a question of distinguishing the good ideas, ones that can genuinely advance your business, from the fly-by-night suggestions.
4) Get Employee Buy-in
Following on from the previous point, leadership isn’t about dictating from on high and then leaving everybody else to make sense of the latest diktat. If we’re working to improve customer experience, we need to make sure that an ethos of prioritizing the consumer’s needs saturates the whole business. This means that the entire team, from top to bottom, needs to buy into the idea.
Employees must be provided with the resources, tools, and training they need to provide customers with outstanding experiences. They could be helping a customer find the perfect holiday gift or undertaking a Google Analytics health check for a client. Either way, they need to be supported and encouraged in their efforts to enhance customer experiences.
5) Build Strong Brand Values
We’ve touched upon the importance of having a clear and compelling ethos. This also needs to inform the general values of your brand. You have to remember that customers will hold you accountable if your business, its products, and services don’t live up to the various values you espouse. Whether it be a commitment to attentive customer service, unbeatable value for money, or simply a pledge of consistent quality in all areas.
Also, it’s crucial that your values aren’t just hot air. They have to relate in a concrete way to what your business is doing. Your team must understand how the work they do ties into the broader values your business has articulated. It’s not enough to reel off some superficial platitudes and then try to present these as a mission statement. They have to actually mean something, and what’s more, they have to be seen to mean something by customers.
6) Designing Intuitive User Interfaces
Designing intuitive user interfaces is essential for creating a seamless and satisfying digital customer experience. One key aspect is simplifying website navigation, ensuring that users can effortlessly find the information or products they are looking for. By organizing content in a logical and user-friendly manner, businesses can reduce frustration and improve engagement, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates.
Optimizing mobile responsiveness is another crucial element in today’s mobile-centric world. With more users accessing websites through smartphones and tablets, it is imperative to provide a seamless and enjoyable mobile experience. Responsive design ensures that websites adapt to different screen sizes and resolutions, allowing users to easily navigate and interact with the content. By prioritizing mobile responsiveness, businesses can cater to the needs and preferences of their mobile users, enhancing their overall satisfaction.
Streamlining the checkout and conversion processes is vital for minimizing cart abandonment and maximizing conversions. Long and complex checkout procedures often deter users from completing their purchase. By simplifying the steps, minimizing form fields, and offering convenient payment options, businesses can create a frictionless experience that encourages users to convert. Streamlining the conversion process not only improves the user experience but also increases the likelihood of repeat purchases and fosters customer loyalty.
Measuring and Analyzing Customer Experience
Measuring and analyzing customer experience is vital for businesses to understand and enhance their interactions with customers. Key metrics serve as valuable indicators of customer satisfaction and loyalty. Metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) provide quantitative insights into the overall customer experience. Collecting and analyzing customer feedback through surveys, reviews, and social media monitoring allows businesses to gain qualitative insights into customer perceptions and identify areas for improvement. By actively listening to customers, businesses can address their pain points and meet their expectations more effectively. Additionally, utilizing customer journey analytics provides a holistic view of the customer’s end-to-end experience across multiple touchpoints. This helps businesses identify moments of friction or delight along the customer journey, enabling them to optimize each stage and enhance the overall experience. By measuring and analyzing customer experience, businesses can make data-driven decisions, implement targeted improvements, and ultimately deliver a more personalized and satisfying experience that fosters customer loyalty and drives business growth.
Conclusion
It’s very easy to tell customers how important they are and how concerned you are to ensure their happiness. There’s scarcely a business in the world that doesn’t tell its customers how important they are, and how valued their opinions are, and so on. But far fewer businesses actually uphold standards like these. The crucial test for your business is to prove to customers that their welfare and satisfaction is your number one concern.
That said, if you can prove your sincerity, then improving the customer experience is the natural result. After all, when clients know that you are on their side, then they’re likely to be much more willing to work with you to optimize all aspects of your business.
In this guide, we’ve listed some of the core competencies which your business will need if it is to make these commitments into an everyday reality. Of course, the exact steps your business has to take to improve customer experience will vary according to a number of factors. They include the resources at its disposal, what competitors are offering, the sector it’s competing in, and so on.
You should also remember that your focus will inevitably change as your business prospers and expands. Nevertheless, you must redouble your efforts to ensure that your customers remain at the heart of what you do, and that you don’t lose sight of your original mission and purpose.
John Allen is Director, Global SEO at RingCentral, a global UCaaS, VoIP, and cti software provider. He has over 14 years of experience and an extensive background in building and optimizing digital marketing programs. RingCentral is a Wootric customer.
These days, understanding your customers isn’t a “nice thing to do”; it’s an absolute necessity. To truly understand your customers, you need to spend some quality time listening to them and understanding the voice of the customer. That’s why mastering the art of the voice of the customer survey can be a game-changer for any business seeking to better understand its customers. The power of listening to your customers transcends beyond just collecting feedback; it serves as a strategic compass, guiding your decision-making, shaping your product development, and, most importantly, building strong, lasting customer relationships.
Read on to learn more about voice of the customer surveys, why they’re so important, how to create them, and some sample questions that can get you started creating your VoC survey today.
What Is a Voice of the Customer Survey?
At its core, a voice of the customer (VoC) surveys captures customers’ expectations, preferences, and aversions toward products, services, or your company in general. A VoC survey involves gathering both quantitative and qualitative feedback from customers about their various touchpoints with a company. Touchpoints could be anything from an interaction with your website, chatting with your customer service representatives, or actually using your products and services. By exploring customers’ experiences with these touchpoints, you’ll gain a holistic understanding of your customer’s journey and experience with your company.
Why Are Voice of the Customer Surveys So Important?
A VoC is more than just another survey to worry about. The benefits of VoC surveys extend far beyond mere data collection. They provide invaluable insights that can shape product development, fine-tune marketing strategies, and enhance customer service. Hopefully with all of these pieces in place, you’ll experience improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. Thus, the power of VoC surveys lies not just in listening to what customers have to say but in using those insights to create a better, more personalized customer experience.
Let’s dive into three specific benefits from utilizing VoC surveys as the powerful they are:
Understanding Customer Needs and Wants
At the heart of any successful business strategy lies a deep understanding of customer needs and wants. VoC surveys are literally the voice of your customers. They serve as a way to pull out real and salient insights into your customers’ needs and wants. These insights are the pulse of the market, reflecting real-time customer sentiment and demand. By tuning into the voice of the customer, you can identify what truly matters to your customers and adjust your strategies, products, and services appropriately. Your customers love it too.. VOC surveys provide customers with the opportunity to communicate their needs and wants directly to businesses.
Improving Customer Satisfaction
You created your business to solve a problem, and you want to make sure your products and services are actually doing that. The way to see if you’re reaching your customers the way you want is to evaluate your customer satisfaction. A VoC survey gives you the chance to do just that. Plus using these surveys can also help you boost your customer satisfaction on its own. Customers love the opportunity to be heard and understood, so when you’re actively working toward that, they’re going to notice and appreciate that.
Improving the Business Overall
VoC surveys are not just about improving customer experience; they offer significant benefits for the overall health and growth of the business. These surveys help businesses pinpoint potential issues from the customer’s perspective, allowing them to proactively address these concerns before they escalate and cause significant damage. Whatever customers aren’t liking, with a VoC, you have a chance to stop that in its tracks. This proactive approach not only improves the customer experience but also strengthens the company’s reputation, enhances operational efficiency, and drives overall business success.
Designing Your Voice of the Customer Survey
Voice of the customer surveys are powerful. How do you go about creating your own? Let’s dive into some of the basic steps for designing a highly effective VoC survey.
Define Objectives
Before crafting your VoC survey, it’s crucial to define clear, specific objectives. What are you trying to do or understand? Are you looking for insights on a specific product or service you want to refine? Or are you looking to improve your customer satisfaction overall? Knowing what your objectives are will help you design a survey that gathers data to help with your goal. You can ensure the data you collect is actionable and relevant to your overall business goals.
Choose the Right Types of Questions
Once you have clear objectives, you need questions that achieve your overall goals. The choice of questions in your VoC survey can significantly impact the quality and type of feedback you receive. To gain a comprehensive understanding of your customers’ experiences, it’s advisable to use a mix of multiple choice questions, scales (like the Likert scale), and open-ended questions. Multiple choice questions and scales are excellent for collecting quantitative data, offering clear, easily analyzable feedback. On the other hand, open-ended questions allow customers to express their opinions and experiences in their own words, providing rich qualitative data that can offer deeper, nuanced insights. A mix of question types will give you deeper insights overall.
Keep It Simple
While it’s important to gather as much valuable feedback as possible, your customers won’t complete a long survey. It’s much better to have fewer questions and more complete surveys than the other way around. Aim to keep it simple and keep your surveys no longer than 10 minutes. The simpler and more streamlined your survey, the more likely customers are to complete it and provide honest, thoughtful responses.
Start Broad, Then Get Specific
When structuring your VoC survey, a useful approach is to start with general questions before delving into more specific ones. Starting broad helps your customers “warm up” to providing you with feedback. Broad, initial questions can pertain to overall satisfaction, general experiences, or perceptions of your brand. Essentially, your early questions should be easy to answer without too much extensive thought. You can narrow as you go to get more detailed feedback.
Questions to Ask in a Voice of the Customer Survey
Those strategies can help you get started. To really take your VoC survey to the next level, we have some starter questions to help you write your own voice of the customer surveys. The questions we provide are broken up into general categories that you may want to consider on your surveys.
Value-Based VoC Questions
Did you find everything you were looking for today?
Is there anything you were looking for that we didn’t have?
On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate the value of your purchase?
What are the most important qualities you look for in a product or service? (This question is particularly poignant as a multiple choice question)
Did our customer service help you resolve any issue you came across?
Brand Loyalty VoC Questions
How likely are you to recommend our brand to a friend or colleague on a scale of 1–10?
When thinking about our brand, product, or service, what is the first thing that comes to mind?
What might prevent you from doing business with us in the future?
How likely are you to switch to a different brand, product, or service?
Customer Satisfaction Questions
How would you describe your experience with us today?
How satisfied are you with the product or service you received?
Was your customer service agent able to handle any issue you had?
What could we have done to improve your experience?
Final Thoughts
Overall, VoC surveys are powerful tools to better understand your customers and how they really perceive your company. Utilizing these surveys, you can further refine your products and services, enhance your customer satisfaction, and better meet the needs of your customers.
Learn more about how a voice of the customer survey can help you build a better brand with InMoment today!
Surveys are a way to compile data from a group of people, but they can be more than that. Surveys are also direct insight into your customers and information about how they feel about your company, products, and services. How did your customers perceive your most recent product launch? How do they feel about your company’s social media presence? Surveys are a direct line to find out and glean valuable information about your customers and your company.
But not all surveys are the same, and different types of surveys can provide different insights. There are many types of surveys your company can choose from, and it can be hard to determine which one would be the best for your needs. So to help you figure out the right type of surveys for your needs, we’ll walk you through the most common survey types, the benefits of using surveys, and how to get started today.
How to Choose the Right Survey Method
Prior to launching a survey, it’s imperative to consider what resources are available to you to conduct the surveys, your goals and objectives, the sample and population size and many other factors to consider:
Time: Typically in-person surveys require more time than online surveys. Consider how much time you have available and how soon you need results.
Money: Consider what your budget is and how much it will cost to conduct your survey of choice.
Audience: Consider your audience demographic. Online surveys are typically more difficult for an older population. Consider what type of surveys yield a higher response rate for your audience.
Technology Capabilities: Consider whether you have the proper technology that can handle your data analytics.
Research Expertise: Consider whether you have the proper research knowledge such as clearly defined problems, objectives, a target audience, proper data tracking capabilities etc.
Responses: Consider whether you have strategies in place to combat slow response or no response rates.
The Most Common Types of Surveys
There are so many survey types, but we’ll explore 7 types of surveys in depth since these are the most common and beneficial for most companies.
Online Surveys
Online surveys are one of the most popular types of surveys and for good reason. Online surveys are easy to create, disseminate, and gather responses—challenges many other survey types face. Using an online survey platform, your company can create a survey easily and quickly—often with a wide range of question types—and send it out to customers within seconds. Your customers can then answer the survey at their convenience and send their responses back to you instantaneously.
In addition, online surveys are beneficial for companies that have a wide reach and customers around the world. Online surveys are accessible by anyone anywhere with only the click of a button. You can reach a wide audience with this type of survey.
But like any survey type, online surveys do have their cons. Online surveys could be accessed anywhere, but the survey recipient has to have internet access. There are parts of the globe and some households that don’t have internet access (or easy access to public internet) that could be valuable contributors to your survey. In addition, online surveys can provide a wealth of information, but they fall short in some depth. There’s no organic way to ask follow up questions or to probe deeper into an answer when you want more insights.
Paper Surveys
Paper surveys are sometimes looked at as old fashioned, but they do still reach an audience that can’t access many other types of surveys. Many audiences—like senior citizens or those without internet access—are far more likely to respond or far more comfortable with paper surveys than online surveys. Plus paper surveys are often easier to read for many since they’re printed in large fonts with black text on white paper.
But one major con of paper surveys is that they can be one of the pricier types of surveys. Paper surveys have to be printed off, sometimes in large quantities, to reach your audience. That can add up if you’re trying to reach a large amount of people. In addition, paper surveys aren’t the most environmentally friendly way to survey.
Mail Surveys
Mail surveys are one of the most traditional types of surveys. While some people may look at them as old fashioned, there’s a reason this method has been around for so long: it feels authentic and offers you access to an audience that may be less inclined to respond online. Those demographics who are less likely to answer an online email survey are often familiar with mail surveys and will be willing to respond. In addition, mail surveys also have a wide geographic reach since most places are accessible by post.
When it comes to mail surveys, there are a couple of things to plan for in advance. First, creating the surveys can often be simple, and you do only need to print them off to distribute. But you should keep in mind that your response rate will often be lower if you don’t pre-paid return envelopes for the participants. One drawback of mail surveys is that they require some extra work on the part of the survey participants—something that often lowers response rates. You’ll want to reduce that level of work as much as possible by providing return envelopes that simply need to be dropped in a mailbox.
That brings up the second con of mail surveys: they can cost your company a little bit more. The cost of printing, envelopes, and postage can add up—but could be worth it for the responses you receive. Second, when it comes to response rate, less is more. Mail surveys have a better completion rate if they’re short. Try to keep your survey to about a page. Not only will that increase your chances of completed responses, short surveys also reduce printing and postage costs.
Telephone Surveys
Telephone surveys are another more old fashioned method of surveying that has been around since landlines. Now that nearly everyone carries a phone with them or has one at phone, telephone surveys are alive and well in surveying methods. For a telephone survey, a real live interviewer will ask a series of questions and record responses. With modern technology, it’s easy for interviewers to insert responses directly into a computer system to chart and track data. In addition, telephone surveys let interviewers add a personal touch to the conversation that isn’t possible for online, mail, or paper surveys. The chance to ask follow-up questions can give the interviewers a chance to probe for deeper insights and emotions.
Telephone surveys still face a few cons. These surveys may be cost effective, but they should be kept short. Fifteen minutes is the cap for an effective phone survey. In addition, phone surveys run the risk of looking like a telemarketing call or being ignored. With the saturation of telemarketing calls, many cell phone users don’t answer calls from unknown numbers. Some even block all unknown numbers. While telephone surveys can be effective, your team of interviewers will first have to be ignored a decent amount.
In-Person Surveys
While paper and online surveys lack a personal touch, in-person surveys excel at that. With these surveys, interviewers are able to directly interact with a respondent and to ask follow up questions that really delve into the nuances and intricacies of a response. These surveys provide accuracy and profound insights. In addition, in-person interviews are a great way to collect responses from audiences with low literacy—something that may hinder groups from participating in other methods.
While the insights gleaned from these surveys can be immensely valuable, there are still some cons to consider. In-person surveys can be time consuming. Your team will need to prepare a venue, schedule interviews, and spend the time actually performing the interviews. It’s a very hands-on process the entire time. In addition, in-person interviews run the risk of interviewer bias or inexperience. The interviewer is crucial to getting usable insights, so you will need to spend the time and money training or hiring one. Even a well-trained interviewer can still lead to interviewer bias skewing your information.
Panel Surveys
Panel sampling is when you select a group of people to survey repeatedly over a period of time. Your respondents will be randomly selected from your target audience, and they’ll respond to several surveys over a determined period of time. Longitudinal studies are a great example of panel surveying. These surveys can provide long-term insights and show in-depth understanding of a target audience. In addition, your company could use a third-party research company to perform a large bulk of the research and to ensure it’s done at a high level of quality.
But panel surveying takes time and preparation to make them effective and usable. In addition, some participants may choose to stop responding to surveys part way through the study, leaving you with gaps. Your company may need to provide incentives to encourage participants to follow through with the entire surveying process.
Focus Group Surveys
Focus groups are a variation of in-person surveying methods that includes a panel of 6–10 people that represent the target population. All of these people will answer questions and hold a discussion, moderated by a professional who attempts to keep everything on track and as unbiased as possible. These surveys can reveal personal attitudes and perceptions for a sampling of your entire target population—something that can be very valuable for market research.
The cons of focus groups, though, include the costs of preparing a moderator and participants. It can take time to select just the right panel of participants to make sure you are accurately exploring your target audience. You may also need to pay for the travel expenses and time of an effective moderator. Oftentimes you may also need to survey your focus group participants a second time to gather quantitative data, and that takes additional time and preparation.
Benefits of Using Surveys
If surveys take time, preparation, and work, why do companies keep turning them for market research? Aren’t there easier ways? Well, there may be, but there are few ways that can give you such insight into your target populations and how your brand is performing. Surveys provide strategic benefits based on customer feedback that can help improve CX and improve brand loyalty.
Here are some other key benefits of using surveys:
Large sampling size. Surveying can reach many customers in many locations or with many limitations. With a variety of surveys, you can reach people all over the world, people who don’t use the internet, and people who can’t normally participate in other marketing research methods.
More cost-effective. Even the pricier types of surveying are fairly cost effective when compared to the valuable insights you can gain.
Reliable and usable information. Surveys can give you information and insights that are a reliable reflection of your audience, especially of how they feel toward many parts of your brand. In addition, this information can actually be usable (with the right analysis) to improve your brand, customer experience, and, ultimately, ROI.
Improve the brand experience. Your customers deserve a brand they trust and have a positive experience with. Using surveys, you can get real feedback from your customers and improve your brand experience in meaningful ways.
How InMoment Can Help
If you’re ready to get started with surveying, InMoment can help today. InMoment’s customer listening solutions provide your company with the tools you need to create strong surveys that will reach your audience and provide your team with the insights you need. InMoment surveys are conversational and designed to reduce survey fatigue while ultimately capturing every customer story, so you can design products that will benefit them.
Once you have survey data, the next step is to analyze it and thoroughly glean insights from the responses. Being able to make sense of information is where you’ll be able to create opportunities to increase revenue. InMoment’s text analytics can help your company find actionable insights and feedback.
Overall, surveys come in every shape and form—each one offering your team a new way to understand your customers and improve your customer experience and brand loyalty.
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Schedule a Demo & Get Started on Surveys!
With InMoment’s solutions, you’ll be able to take full advantage of the benefits of surveying and really understand your customers and be able to use that for actionable insights and informed business decisions. Conduct surveys and improve your customer experience with InMoment today!
InMoment® assists alphabroder in improving the employee experience (EX) to ultimately improve customer experiences (CX) by establishing an action-based employee experience improvement program that focuses on communication, development, and acknowledgement.
alphabroder, an industry leader in the promotional products space, provides apparel and additional goods to promotional product distributors, athletic team dealers, and screen printers and employs thousands of associates throughout multiple facilities across North America.
“At alphabroder, we believe taking action on employee feedback demonstrates that the voice of the employee is valued, heard, and respected”, said Maria Koppy, VP of Organizational Development, alphabroder. “Above all, the greatest impact to our culture is the attitude of amazing associates, operating from a state of integrity while keeping both customers and coworkers top of mind in everything we do.”
The annual employee survey and engagement program is reaping many benefits for alphabroder. They have seen an increased employee satisfaction score by nearly 10% year-over-year, an increased survey completion rate to 86% employee survey completion, and after implementation of the program and feedback follow-up and action, 70% of those surveyed feel the company is providing good to very good corporate communications
InMoment and alphabroder previously partnered on their customer NPS program and continued their goal of improving experiences with an employee engagement program targeted towards associates leveraging the InMoment XI Platform and expert support team.
The approach of soliciting feedback at every level of the organization has yielded more valuable employee insights and actionable information than before. The employee responses and recommendations are in turn immediately shared with transparency companywide. The executive team and managers use the data to help them prioritize employee-based initiatives, create department-specific goals, and support short-and long-term business decisions that benefit both employees and customers.
Find out more about alphabroder’s employee engagement journey and how their approach is aligned with their strategic priorities of cultivating positive employee experience and customer experience by enhancing employee communication, development, and acknowledgement.
Customers are the lifeblood of any business, and providing them with a great experience can lead to increased loyalty, higher satisfaction, and improved brand reputation. It’s simple: every company needs customers, but what happens when there are so many brands to choose from? How can brands stand out? The customer experience (CX) is crucial for any business that wants to succeed in today’s highly competitive market. Great customer experience doesn’t just happen as soon as you send out a survey; it needs to be planned and designed purposefully.
In this article, we’ll discuss what designing an effective customer experience looks like, what makes it different from user experience and customer service, why it matters, the elements of customer experience design, and how to design a great customer experience from start to finish.
What Is Customer Experience Design?
To start, what is customer experience? Customer experience is every interaction your customers have with your company at any point. That experience affects how they view your organization and products, as well as their loyalty. Customer experience design is the process of creating the customer experience at all touchpoints, from the initial discovery phase through to the post-purchase phase. It’s what your company does to ensure a positive customer experience across all stages of the customer journey.
The goal of customer experience design is to create a positive, memorable experience for customers that meets their needs, exceeds their expectations, and strengthens their relationship with the brand. It’s a way to move your customers through their journey while actively working to make that a smooth and easy process. Customer experience design involves a multidisciplinary approach, including user research, journey mapping, visual design, and user experience (UX) design.
A great customer experience can lead to increased customer loyalty, higher customer satisfaction, improved brand reputation, increased revenue, and a competitive advantage. So focusing on customer experience design is a way to actively work toward creating that great customer experience and helping your company benefit from it.
Customer Experience vs. User Experience vs. Customer Service
Customer experience is often confused with other similar terms. While customer experience, user experience, and customer service are related, they are not the same thing and should not be discussed interchangeably. Understanding the differences between these concepts is crucial to creating a great customer experience. So, let’s dive into the differences.
Customer Experience
The customer experience encompasses the customer’s experience with the overall brand at all touchpoints before and after purchase. It includes all interactions with the brand, including marketing, sales, customer service, and post-purchase interactions. It’s every ad, every social media post or comment, every article that a customer reads, and much more. It’s even walking past your storefront or coming across your website. The goal of customer experience is to create a positive, memorable experience that will ultimately strengthen the relationship between a customer and your brand.
User Experience
User experience (UX) is specific to the experience of navigation, usability, and interface design of a specific product or service. It focuses on the user’s interactions with a product or service, including how easy it is to use, how it looks, and how it feels. Basically, it’s your customer’s experience with your product.
Customer Service
Customer service is the experience that customers have with your representatives about products or services. It includes interactions with customer service representatives, returns, and warranty claims. Again, customer service is a piece of the larger picture of your customer’s experience with your brand. Good customer service is crucial for creating a great overall customer experience because it helps customers feel valued and supported even after the purchase is complete and when something goes wrong.
Benefits of a Great Customer Experience Design
Let’s take a closer look at all of the benefits of dedicating time and effort to designing a great customer experience. A great customer experience design can lead to numerous benefits for your business, including:
Increased Customer Loyalty & Retention
A great customer experience design can create a strong emotional connection between a customer and your brand, leading to increased customer loyalty. Essentially, if your company can develop a real relationship with customers, they will continue to come back again and again. Loyal customers are more likely to make repeat purchases, recommend your brand to others, and provide positive reviews and feedback. Plus loyal customers are what makes running a business so rewarding.
Higher Customer Satisfaction
A great customer experience design can lead to higher customer satisfaction, as customers feel that their needs and expectations are being met. Higher customer satisfaction can lead to increased revenue and improved brand reputation. Plus you get the satisfaction of creating something that benefits people.
Improved Brand Reputation
When you provide a great experience for your customers, they’re going to spread the word. Satisfied customers are more likely to provide positive reviews and feedback, as well as recommend your brand to their friends. So if your customers have a great experience with you, that’s what your company will be known for.
Increased Revenue
A great customer experience design can lead to increased revenue. It’s a simple formula: satisfied customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and recommend the brand to others. This leads to more revenue for your company. Increased revenue can lead to business growth in the long run and help you have the opportunity to continue to provide excellent products and experiences.
Competitive Advantage
A great customer experience design can provide a competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace. There are so many brands for everything, but companies that provide a good experience are where people want to go. Customers are more likely to choose a brand that provides a great experience over a brand that does not. So to stand out and be chosen above a competitor, provide a great experience for your customers.
Elements of Customer Experience Design
Customer experience is so important, but what makes up the process of designing CX? These are the most common elements of customer experience design that are important to consider when crafting an excellent CX.
User Research
User research is the process of gathering information about customers to better understand their needs, behavior, and expectations. To understand how to provide a good experience for your customers, you need to understand who your customers are, what their problems are, and how to solve them. User research can include surveys, interviews, focus groups, and usability testing.
Journey Mapping
Journey mapping is the process of mapping out the customer’s journey from initial discovery to post-purchase interactions. It’s about knowing where your customers start and what leads them to an eventual purchase. It helps your company understand the customer’s perspective and identify any pain points that might hinder the journey. Journey mapping can be used to create a customer experience that meets the needs of the customer at every touchpoint.
Visual Design and UX
Visual design includes the look and feel of the product or service, including branding, colors, and typography. UX design focuses on the usability and functionality of the product or service, including navigation, information architecture, and interaction design. Visual design and UX design work together to create a seamless, enjoyable customer experience. When visual design and UX are prioritized, your company can create a website and products that are easy to use, meet customer needs, and provide customers with a great experience.
Designing a Great Customer Experience from Start to Finish
With those elements in mind, let’s look at the steps to designing a great customer experience, from start to finish.
Discovery Phase
The discovery phase involves identifying customer needs and understanding their behavior and expectations. This phase is when you utilize user research, market research, and analysis of customer data. It’s important to develop a deep understanding of who your customers are, their current journey, their pain points, and any areas for improvement when designing your customer experience.
Definition Phase
With a clear understanding of who your customers are, it’s time to define what success looks like. The definition phase involves defining goals, objectives, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your customer experience design. The definition phase helps ensure that your customer experience design is aligned with your overall business goals and customer needs.
Design Phase
The design phase involves creating a blueprint for your customer experience. You’ve come up with great ideas for what your customers truly need (hopefully revealed in the discovery phase), and you know what success looks like (thanks to the definition phase), so now you can make a plan for how to get from A to Z. You might prototype, test, and refine the design based on research and goals. The goal of the design phase is to create a customer experience design that works when you put it into action.
Development Phase
The development phase involves bringing the customer experience design to life. You get to take your blueprint and make it into the actual experience for your customers. This phase can include developing necessary systems, processes, and tools to support the customer experience design.
Deployment Phase
Once you have a developed plan, you can put it into action. The deployment phase involves launching the customer experience design. This phase can include training employees, communicating with customers, and ensuring that everything is working as intended. Now your customers will get to experience a deepened relationship with your brand.
Continuous Improvement
Simply executing a plan does not mean that your work is done. The continuous improvement phase involves monitoring, evaluating, and improving your customer experience design. You can seek out customer feedback and make any needed changes. The goal of the continuous improvement phase is to ensure that the customer experience design is always improving and meeting the real needs of your customers.
Design a Great Customer Experience With InMoment
The InMoment XI Platform offers a comprehensive suite of tools and services that allow businesses to collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback in real time. Businesses can use these tools to do necessary research about their customers and to evaluate CX design and work toward continuous improvement.
InMoment’s solution is also valuable when developing your CX design. InMoment provides businesses with actionable insights that can be used to identify and prioritize areas for improvement, design, and test new customer experiences, and measure the impact of changes on customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue.
In addition to its platform, InMoment offers expert consulting and professional services to help businesses develop and implement effective customer experience strategies that align with their business goals and customer needs. InMoment’s team of experts can provide guidance on user research, journey mapping, visual design, UX design, and more.
Final Thoughts
A great customer experience design is essential for any business that wants to succeed in today’s highly competitive market. In today’s competitive landscape, simply having an exceptional product may no longer be enough to win over customers. By designing a great customer experience, businesses can increase customer loyalty, improve brand reputation, and increase revenue. Designing a great customer experience involves multiple elements, including user research, journey mapping, visual design, and UX design—and it is a step-by-step process that includes multiple phases.
By using InMoment’s platform and services, businesses can create a great customer experience that meets the needs of their target audience and aligns with their business goals. InMoment can help businesses stay ahead of the competition by providing real-time feedback and insights that can be used to continuously improve the customer experience. Get started with InMoment to begin designing a great customer experience.
At Forrester CX EMEA, we heard from InMoment client Aegon, a Dutch public company for life insurance, pensions, and asset management. The key message throughout the conference was to be bold and ensure that organisations are aligned, focused, and ready for the future. Aegon are certainly delivering on this agenda and are continuing to succeed by connecting people and processes across the entire organisation to achieve shared goals and focus on growth.
Aegon’s ‘Connecting with Customers’ programme is an award winning programme which has delivered spectacular results for the business, colleagues and customers. Using a customer centric approach, Aegon has successfully enabled their teams to receive real-time feedback in order to drive change and as a result, are increasing customer satisfaction and accelerating growth.
Connecting With Customers
The experience programme ‘Connecting with Customers’, is successfully embedding a customer-focused culture throughout the business, underpinned by the strong CX & Insight framework run in partnership with InMoment. The programme reaches all parts of the business through online learning, customer talks, animated games and cartoons, podcasts, skills workshops, topic masterclasses, and more.
In their Forrester CX EMEA presentation, Aegon explained how their program has resulted in deeper customer understanding and colleague empowerment, which translates into measurably better outcomes for the customer and a healthier business. Keep reading for the top takeaways:
3 Key Takeaways From the Presentation:
Takeaway #1: Be BOLD
Set out to create a customer-obsessed culture, and get there! Aegon has taken the Connecting with Customers (CwC) roadshow to all locations and functions in the business. It is a very high profile campaign, an ‘all or nothing’ approach because the business knows the customer must come first.
The Board Directors have shown their support and CwC manifests in many different forms from a regular podcast to learning and development resources, an audio library of customer calls and customer feedback videos.
Making VoC a part of the entire business might seem like a bold move, but the effort is worth it. As a CX leader, you need to ensure the whole business is aware that every decision affects the customers’ experience.
Takeaway #2: Break Down Silos
Everybody has a role in serving the customer so be inclusive! Recently, a customer was invited into the Aegon offices where he met all those who had helped him on his retirement journey, both back office and customer facing. This event really brought it home how everyone at Aegon has a unifying purpose, to connect with customers.
Creating a customer focused culture throughout the entire organisation breaks down barriers and allows for better communication and understanding, and as a result, better customer outcomes.
Takeaway #3: Have Fun
Customers can tell when employees enjoy their role and connect with their purpose. Aegon threw a CwC 2nd birthday party recently with music, discussions, and games. And for the New Year’s quiz, Jenny Ryan from ITV’s “The Chase” was the guest of honour! Connecting EX and CX is massively important and by understanding that employee experience can have a positive impact on customer experience is key to creating a customer centric culture.
One final point that stands out from successes such as Aegon’s is how vital it is to have an inspirational CX leader with the charisma, vision and drive to elevate customer centricity to new levels. In Iain O’Connor, Head of Customer Experience & Insight, Aegon has one of the best, along with other great CX leaders such as Claire Tidey, CwC Programme Manager.
Want to hear from Iain as he speaks about understanding customers’ expectations? Check out this video!
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