8 steps to improve your customer feedback survey

Most customer-facing organisations run feedback surveys; but are you making the most of yours?

This 8-step MOT from ServiceTick will help you turn your customer feedback into profit.

1.     First things first

Make sure that the metric you ask about first is the one that is most important to your organisation. This may be NPS (net promoter score) or a general feedback question about satisfaction with a particular transaction. By asking the key metric first you ensure you capture feedback even with part-completed surveys.

2.     Short and sweet

Your customers are busy people. They may be happy to give up a couple of minutes of their valuable time to offer feedback but don’t push your luck. Questionnaires that probe every single aspect of a transaction or brand relationship and go for longer than 2 minutes will see high fall-out rates.

3.     Keep it simple

New survey technologies have been designed to simplify the survey process and ensure you get better quality feedback from respondents. Try not to confuse people by using different scoring scales for different questions; and above all preserve a logic flow to your questionnaire structure. The public assumes that you are a seamless organisation and your survey structure should reflect that.

4.     Keep it fresh

Consistency of question format and survey structure is vital for reviewing trends. But you also need to ensure that your questions remain relevant and topical. Avoid the twin traps of not regularly reviewing your survey or doing something ‘because that’s how we’ve always done it’.

5.     Check under the bonnet

Research often identifies a problem but fails to explore the reason why that problem exists. To help get to the root of the problem use open-ended questions that let respondents explain the score they’ve given you. Verbatim feedback gives a richness of insight that numbers never can; and new technology means those ‘voice of the customer’ comments can be captured as text and easily analysed.

6.     Fix problems now

Gathering feedback in real time is a good idea; but an even better idea is to respond to feedback in real time – particularly negative feedback. You can only do that if you have an effective alerting process – one that flags up an issue, to the right person at the right time. ServiceTick found that brand advocacy levels could be increased threefold by responding to a customer’s complaint within fifteen minutes.

7.     Audit. Analyse. Action.

Companies invest heavily in gathering feedback but often forget to reap the rewards. Make sure you gather data that pinpoints issues, provokes action and profits the business. Sharing data across your organisation is arguably more important than gathering the data in the first place. New research suggests only 56% of call centre operations report broken processes within their organisations.

8.     Learn from your MOT

An MOT often reminds you about how to get the best performance from your car. Feedback surveys can help you improve performance in a call centre. By analysing feedback for individual agents you can identify the best performers and clone their best practice across the team.