Benefits Of Effective Customer Feedback Surveys
You're likely reading this blog because you understand the financial perks of an enthusiastic customer base. Good news! Feedback surveys and metrics like NPS have risen to popularity because they help businesses improve customer enthusiasm in that lucrative way.
But how, exactly, do survey campaigns do it? Or, rather: how do businesses leverage the insights from survey data to generate untold wealth and personal satisfaction?
Those changes are qualitative. They happen in the day-to-day. And, in practice, they're quite traditional business moves. They just happen to be guided by cutting-edge applications of data and analysis.
Let's take a quick look at how optimized survey campaigns impact your business in profound ways...
Expand & Improve Your Customer Relationships
Effective feedback campaigns create a sense of conversation between a business and its customers. This is the result of thoughtful, optimized survey questions and consistent outreach, and active response.
It's an opportunity to remind people how valuable they are to your business. Customers notice: 78% of American shoppers noted favorable views of brands that seek out feedback.
As one AskNicely client noted:
"Customers may not always be happy but they will appreciate... how much your partnership means to your brand."
Prioritizing this level of engagement with customers also echoes in the office as well. When executives emphasize the importance of feedback metrics and share the feedback data across the office, it's a reminder that the customer is central to your business and for every team member's hard work directly relates to customer satisfaction.
Keeping happy customers engaged is not only a way to keep them coming back, but also an opportunity to get those promoter-level respondents actively promoting your brand to friends and family.
Spot Rising Trends With Open-Text Questions
Customer feedback data can show you valuable trends:
- Internal – emerging patterns in your customer service and products
- External – broad consumer trends in your industry and surrounding world
Let's say you sell bicycles. If customers start praising the modified grip on a certain model's handlebar, it might be time to make those grips more central to your branding. You get specific and unexpected insights like these with open-text questions on feedback surveys.
Open-text is an opportunity for customers to show you their world in detail. Intentionally or not, they might be showing you what your competitors are doing better than you. If a significant number of respondents include the phrase 'trailer' in open-text questions, and you don't sell bike trailers, you might investigate the growing popularity of trailer accessories for bikes.
This extends to service as well. Customers have increasingly sophisticated expectations for online customer service. Feedback survey respondents might start mentioning 'live chat' when your site doesn't feature any live chat support options. This is a broad customer service trend. And it's also exploring: do your direct competitors already offer live chat on their sites?
Smarter Changes Are Led By Data
Effective survey design starts with a clear point of inquiry. Identifying the exact elements that you wish to improve is a fundamental step toward generating feedback data your team can act on.
At its best, a feedback campaign asks thoughtful questions of a diverse (and segmented) group of customers. When you let their data guide the evolution of your business you're empowered to work smarter, not harder. How?
- More efficient use of resources. You can invest confidently in the areas that most directly impact customer satisfaction – and avoid wasting money on the others.
- Focus your time and energy on actionable strategy rather than broad guesswork. The data shows you what needs improvement. You can focus your creative energy on engineering specific solutions rather than building dozens of different campaigns from scratch.
Understand Your Own Story Over Time
Useful feedback campaigns require consistent data collection. (That's why automation is key for NPS campaigns at scale.)
It's a long term investment, and the longer you can maintain consistent data collection, the greater insights you'll get from the program.
Here are a few examples of ways you might analyze data:
- Your NPS today vs. last year vs. five years ago – How has it evolved? How does this trend chart with organizational and industry changes?
- Customer priorities today vs. last year – Are people's expectations changing? Are you shifting to meet them?
- Individual employee performance this quarter vs. last quarter – Have certain team members been applying strategy insights from previous team meetings? Have customers shown more or less satisfaction with them?
An optimized regimen is a way to be constantly improving.
Expand Your Customer Feedback Metrics
Customer feedback survey tools provide quantifiable data about customer experience. The benefits go beyond mere metrics, however. Long Term data collection and analysis allow your business to use its resources more precisely for improvement while also generating a stronger sense of brand identity and relationship to customer culture.
Of course, the most benefits are generated by customer feedback surveys that are optimized in design and consistently sent out to people. Creating and maintaining an ideal campaign requires a comprehensive management system. That's what we're here for.
