Welcome to a guide that’s all about making sense of those stories hidden within your survey data. Whether you’re a seasoned CX professional or just dipping your toes into the waters of customer feedback, this article is your friendly companion in turning those responses into actionable insights.

We’ll walk through the essentials and gradually go a bit more detailed in survey analysis, ensuring you’re well-equipped to elevate your customer satisfaction, boost sales, and fortify brand loyalty. From uncovering the basics to tackling common challenges, we’re here to help you navigate through the fascinating journey of customer feedback analysis.

Why Voice of Customer (VoC) Matters

To kick things off, we should first understand why Voice of Customer matters and how it affects your business. Customers are an integral part of any business’s success. Obviously, businesses wouldn’t exist without them! So it’s important to listen closely and understand what customers want from brands – that’s where the voice of the customer comes in.

Whether it be through surveys, focus groups, or even social media, businesses have access to valuable feedback on their products and services. This feedback helps inform how they operate going forward. And remember, feedback isn’t just about addressing criticisms—it’s also about recognizing and building on what you’re already doing well.

In one Gartner research, leveraging the data obtained from direct customer feedback can increase the chances of upselling and cross-selling by 15-20%. This shows the tangible, bottom-line benefits of listening to your customers.

Additionally, a well-executed VoC initiative also helps enhance customer retention, resulting in higher customer loyalty scores, reduced customer turnover, and increased customer lifetime value through repeat purchases. A ripple effect will occur – those businesses able to stay in tune with customer desires will have an advantage over their competitors. After all, if you know what your audience wants before they do – you’ll be miles ahead!

Why Analyzing Survey Results is Essential: Addressing Common Business Challenges

Imagine you’re running a bustling café in a busy city center. You pride yourself on the quality of your coffee and the ambiance of your space. To understand your customers better, you conduct a survey asking for feedback on everything from the coffee to the service. But what happens next is crucial. If you merely collect these responses without thorough analysis, you might miss key insights that could drive your business forward.

For instance, let’s say many customers subtly mention that they love the coffee but find the seating uncomfortable. Without proper analysis, you might overlook this feedback, focusing only on the positive comments about your coffee. This oversight could lead to a decrease in repeat visits, as customers choose other cafes with more comfortable seating.

This scenario highlights a common pain point for businesses: the gap between collecting customer feedback and effectively analyzing it to uncover actionable insights. Just as a chef needs to skillfully combine ingredients to create a gourmet meal, businesses need to adeptly analyze survey results to transform raw data into strategies that enhance customer satisfaction and drive growth.

When you know how to properly analyze survey results, you’re uncovering the story behind your customers’ experiences. It is this insight that enables you to make informed decisions, such as rearranging your café’s seating arrangement or tailoring your services to better suit your customers’ needs.

Categories of Questions to Ask in Your Survey

Okay, so now you understand the importance of not just collecting but also effectively analyzing your survey results. But where does this process start? It all begins with asking the right questions. Let’s shift our focus to the heart of any survey: the questions themselves. When creating surveys, asking the right questions is the key to unlocking meaningful insights from your customer feedback.

By asking relevant and targeted questions, you can create a comprehensive picture of customer sentiment and gain valuable insights into what customers want from your brand. Let’s check out the types of questions that can supercharge your VoC surveys.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) question: This is a popular metric used to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction. This particular question seeks to gauge how likely a customer would be to recommend a company’s products or services to their friends, family, or colleagues. Customers are asked to rate the company on a scale from 0-10, with higher scores indicating higher customer satisfaction.

A high NPS score is a strong indicator of customer loyalty, which can drive repeat business and positive word-of-mouth referrals, thereby contributing to your company’s growth and reputation.

Customer Satisfaction questions: are designed to assess a customer’s overall satisfaction with the product or service they received, as well as their entire customer experience. How customers rate these questions can provide insights into how effective a business is, at meeting the needs and expectations of its customers.

In a nutshell, high CSAT scores often correlate with customer retention and loyalty, directly impacting your bottom line.

Demographic questions: These questions gather information about the respondent’s age, gender, income, education level, and other demographic information that can be used to segment and analyze the data. Knowing the demographic makeup of customers can help identify trends and correlations between certain demographics and customer satisfaction.

When conducting a survey, it’s essential to avoid any questions that could be seen as discriminatory. We should also make sure the collected data is relevant and our respondents understand how their information will be used; all while adhering to legal/ethical guidelines around demographic info collection!

It can be tempting to ask a ludicrous amount of demographic questions, to truly understand your customer and where they are coming from. Unfortunately, these can be tiring to fill out from a user’s perspective.

Remember that each additional question you have in your survey will decrease the amount of responses you get, sometimes only by a little bit, but they add up! Try to ask questions for things that you aren’t already tracking in your CRM or other business tool so that the information is important and the survey is kept light.

Behavioral questions will give you the bigger picture and help you assess how customers interact with a given product. This includes how often they use it, how much they spend, and how long they have been a customer.

What’s more, behavioral type of questions can help you customize your products and services accordingly.

Examples of some behavioral questions:

• How do you go to your workplace?
• How often do you buy travel tickets?
• Do you pay by card or cash?

Open-ended questions on the other hand, help you understand customer sentiment. It provides insights into customers’ thoughts and feelings that would otherwise remain hidden.

With these questions, customers can express their opinions and frustrations in more detail than with a structured question. The most exciting part? It may reveal underlying customer sentiments, helping you identify potential areas for improvement and innovate your offerings based on real customer feedback.

Examples of some open-ended questions:

• What were the main reasons you chose our product?
• How would you describe your experience with us?
• How can we make our product better for you?

Common Ways to Analyze Survey Data

Now that we’re all on the same page in the kind of questions to ask, let’s discuss the ways to analyze it. Analyzing survey data can be an overwhelming task, but with the right approach, it’s possible to extract meaningful insights from customer feedback and develop actionable strategies for improvement.

One such tool that can help is Lumoa, the first CX platform to offer GPT. thanks to its propriety AI, employees can now tap into any customer feedback, get clear answers, and take actions with a positive influence on KPIs.

In this section, we’ll explore some of the most common techniques used to analyze survey results, all of which can be easily performed using Lumoa. We’ll also provide screenshots from the Lumoa platform to give you a visual understanding of how these techniques work in practice.

From basic analysis methods to more advanced techniques, you’ll gain a better understanding of how to unlock the potential of your customer feedback.

1. Frequency analysis: This involves counting the number of times a particular response is given to a question. It helps to identify patterns and trends in the data, such as which options are most popular or least popular.

   In the visual above, we see the frequency of responses to a question like “What region are you from?” This illustrates how frequency analysis can provide a clear snapshot of the distribution of responses, revealing patterns and trends.

   For instance, you can easily identify the most and least represented regions among your respondents. This logic can be replicated for each question in your survey, helping you understand the most and least common responses.

   Understanding these patterns can help you prioritize improvements and capitalize on what’s working well.

2. Sentiment analysis: This is a method of using natural language processing and text analysis techniques to determine the emotional tone behind a customer’s response. It can be useful for identifying positive, negative, and neutral sentiments in open-ended survey responses.

   In the visual above, we see Lumoa’s AI in action, determining whether parts of a comment are positive, negative, or neutral. In this example, the AI has identified a portion of the comment as “positive.”

   With this information, you can address specific areas of concern and build on what’s working well to enhance customer satisfaction.

3. Regression analysis: This method is used to identify relationships between different variables in the data and can help to identify patterns and trends over time.
   Here, we see an example of Lumoa’s AI performing regression analysis. In this case, the AI is determining that when people use the word “Price” in their open text response, they often do so when they are from regions like “Mexico” or when speaking to certain team members through support.

   This information will help you identify specific factors that influence customer feedback, enabling you to tailor your strategies and responses accordingly. For instance, you might decide to provide additional training for certain team members or review your pricing strategy for specific regions.

4. Cluster analysis: This method groups similar responses together, which is useful for identifying patterns or segments within the data.

   In this case, Lumoa’s AI is showing us that when people mention “price” in their open text response, they often use the words “account” and “banking” in the same comment.

   The smileys represent the sentiment when those words are used. This insight identifies common themes or issues in customer feedback, enabling you to address specific areas of concern.

   For instance, if customers often mention “price,” “account,” and “banking” together in a negative context, you might decide to review your pricing strategy or improve your account management and banking services.

5. Text mining: This method extracts useful information from unstructured text data, such as open-ended survey responses. It’s used to identify common themes or keywords in the data.

   In the visual above, we see an example of Lumoa’s AI performing text mining. In this case, Lumoa has created overall groupings of themes found in open-text responses. These groupings, called “Topics”, can be managed and edited by your organization.

   This is beneficial in identifying common themes or issues in customer feedback, enabling you to address specific areas of concern.

   For instance, if a particular topic frequently appears in negative feedback, you might decide to focus your improvement efforts on that area.

6. Data visualization: This method displays data in a graphical format, such as charts, tables, and graphs. It can be used to make the data more understandable and to identify patterns and trends that may not be immediately apparent in the raw data.
   In the visual above, we see one example of how Lumoa can help you make sense of your data.

   Lumoa offers a variety of graphs and charts for different purposes, such as determining trends and recurring issues, as well as tracking issues over time.

   By presenting data in a visual format, you can gain a clearer understanding of your customer feedback, making it easier to identify areas for improvement and monitor the impact of your actions over time.

Best Practices for Interpreting and Utilizing Survey Insights

Having the right approach to analyzing survey data is essential for unlocking its potential, but it’s also important to know how to interpret and utilize the insights you uncover. Check out some best practices for interpreting and utilizing survey insights.

From understanding customer sentiment to developing actionable strategies, we’ll go over all the key steps involved in creating a successful VoC program.

1. Clearly define your research objectives: Before beginning the survey, be sure to establish clear research objectives that will guide the design and analysis of the survey.

2. Use a representative sample: Make sure that the sample of participants is representative of the population being studied in order to ensure the validity of the survey insights.

3. Use open-ended questions: Open-ended questions allow customers to provide detailed feedback in their own words, which can provide valuable insights into their thoughts and feelings.

4. Use data visualization: Use data visualization techniques such as charts, tables, and graphs to display the data in a way that is easy to understand and identify patterns and trends.

5. Use statistical analysis: Use statistical analysis techniques such as frequency analysis, cross-tabulation, and regression analysis to identify patterns and trends in the data.

6. Use text mining: Use text mining techniques to extract useful information from unstructured text data, such as open-ended survey responses.

7. Look for patterns and trends: Look for patterns and trends in the data that can help identify areas for improvement or opportunities for growth.

8. Identify key drivers: Identify key drivers of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and behavior that can be used to improve the customer experience.

9. Prioritize your findings: Prioritize your findings based on their importance and potential impact on the business.

10. Act on your findings: Use the insights gained from the survey to make data-driven decisions that will improve the customer experience and achieve organizational goals.

To illustrate the practical applications of analyzing survey results and implementing changes based on VoC insights, let’s look at a real-life example.

Huel, a popular meal replacement company, recognized the need to better understand their customers’ experiences and improve their Net Promoter Score (NPS). Before, they tracked NPS without taking any significant action. However, as the company decided to make NPS a key business KPI, they needed a scalable and efficient way to analyze and act upon customer feedback.

This led Huel to adopt Lumoa, a platform that enabled them to analyze NPS data, answer customer questions, and create targeted strategies. Lumoa’s intuitive interface and text analytics allowed everyone in the company to better understand customer sentiment, making NPS a more accessible and successful KPI.

One of Lumoa’s most impactful features for Huel was the ability to segment NPS data by different customer segments. This allowed them to track customer lifecycles and understand how perceptions and pain points evolved over time. As a result of implementing Lumoa, Huel saw their NPS score increase by 10 points and their global response rate increase by 164%, which significantly improved their customer experience and decision-making capabilities.

This example illustrates the power of effective survey analysis and the impact it can have on a company’s success.

Creating an Action Plan

Creating an action plan based on survey results is an effective way to turn customer feedback into meaningful insights. This will drive your business forward. It can help you identify key drivers of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and behavior so that you can make informed decisions and create strategies that improve the customer experience and achieve organizational goals.

1. Identify Key Insights: Start by reviewing your survey results and identifying the most important insights. Look for patterns, trends, and key drivers that stand out. You can find out where customers are most satisfied or dissatisfied, what common themes are in open-ended answers, and what correlations there are between them.

2. Prioritize Based on Impact: Not all insights will have the same potential impact on your business. Rank your findings by their potential to drive customer satisfaction, loyalty, and business growth. Consider the number of customers affected, the severity of the problem, and the potential for improvement.

3. Set Clear Objectives: For each priority insight, set clear objectives. These should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). For example, if customer service is a common complaint, you could aim for a 25% reduction in wait times within six months.

4. Develop Strategies: Next, develop strategies to achieve your objectives. It may involve improving processes, investing in new tools or training, or making changes to your products or services. Consider investing in more customer service staff, implementing a new platform, or improving self-service options to reduce wait times.

5. Assign Responsibilities: Assign responsibility for each strategy to a specific person or team. In this way, accountability is ensured and a clear point of contact is provided.

6. Create a Timeline: Develop a timeline for implementing your strategies. To keep everyone on track, you should set key milestones and deadlines.

7. Monitor Progress: Regularly monitor your progress toward your objectives. Tracking metrics, doing follow-up surveys, and getting feedback from customers and staff could be part of this process. Be prepared to reassess your strategies and make changes if you’re not making the progress you expected.

8. Communicate Your Plan: Finally, communicate your action plan to all relevant stakeholders. This includes not only your staff but also your customers. You can build trust and improve customer satisfaction by letting them know you’re taking their feedback on board.

Wrapping up

Customer-centric businesses need to understand their customers’ needs, preferences, and pain points. Surveys are great tools for collecting this information, but their real value comes from analyzing and acting on it.

Throughout this comprehensive guide, we’ve explored why Voice of Customer (VoC) matters, the importance of analyzing survey results, the types of questions to ask in your survey, and the common ways to analyze survey data. We’ve also covered how to interpret and use survey insights, as well as how to create an action plan.

Remember, the goal is not just to collect data, but to transform it into actionable insights that drive your business forward. Getting the right approach to your survey data can boost customer satisfaction, sales, and loyalty.

Now, armed with this knowledge, you’re ready to take your survey analysis to the next level. No matter where you’re at with customer feedback, these strategies and techniques can help you get more value out of it.

So, don’t wait! You’ll see the impact it can have on your business when you apply what you’ve learned today. Remember, every piece of customer feedback is an opportunity for growth and improvement. Take it on, act on it, and watch your business grow. If you need more ways to boost your CX strategies, how about you check out the State of Customer Experience 2023? Download your copy now!

The post How to Analyze Survey Results: A Guide to Mastering Customer Feedback Analysis appeared first on Lumoa.

Here, we’ll discuss some best practices for designing effective surveys – everything from creating questions that elicit actionable responses, to logic-checking your data to ensure accuracy. 

So grab a pen (or popcorn) and let’s dive into the world of survey design! 

Carlos Del Corral is an expert on crafting quality surveys. With a track record of working at tech giants like Microsoft and Nokia, he offers top-notch advice to boost response rates while generating deeper insights from survey responses. In this video, Carlos imparts his knowledge gained through extensive experience in market research and product/service design – giving you all the tips needed for successful survey creation!

Survey Design Best Practices

Principles of Survey Design

Designing surveys is an important part of market research, and it requires a great deal of thought and care. It’s essential to keep principles of survey design in mind when constructing questionnaires or polls.

These principles include being aware of respondents’ behaviors, making sure questions are phrased clearly and objectively, ensuring the survey is reliable and relevant to demographic characteristics, as well as minimizing bias.

Additionally, testing survey questions beforehand to ensure they make sense is important before asking respondents to answer them. Those who are responsible for designing the survey should also consider how long a questionnaire should take and whether certain questions are worth asking in light of the target audience.

A well-designed survey has the potential to bring about valuable insights that can be used for future decision-making.

Here are things to keep in mind when creating a survey design:

• Start with the end goal in mind
• Simplify
• Avoid bias and priming
• Optimize for automated insight generation

Start with the end goal in mind

When it comes to surveying design, the most important principle to keep track of is to start with the end goal in mind.

This means that before you even begin constructing your survey, you should take some time to think through and clearly define what result you want to achieve with this survey.

The goal that you set for your survey will define every aspect of the survey, including its complexity. Here are some things to consider:

• Who do you need to interview?
• What kind of results are you trying to get?
• Are you looking for feedback on a new product or service?
• Are you trying to understand customer preferences?
• Are you trying to measure public opinion on a certain issue?

Answering these questions will help guide the design of your survey and ensure that it is tailored toward getting the insights you need.

Simplify to maximize response rate and reduce work

Once you have a well-designed goal, remember to keep things simple when designing your survey. Too many questions or overly complex questions can confuse participants and make them less likely to complete your survey.

Survey fatigue can also be an issue if too much time is required for participants, so keeping your surveys concise and relevant will reduce participant fatigue and increase response rates.

Structure your survey to avoid bias and priming

Avoiding bias and priming is also essential when designing surveys. Bias refers to any question that may lead respondents towards one answer over another, while priming occurs when a participant’s answers are influenced by previous questions or statements in the survey.

Here are 3 simple steps that will help you along the way:

1. Start with a screener
2. Continue to generic questions and concrete questions
3. End with classification questions

Screener – Knowing who should take your survey is essential to getting the results you want. That’s where screener comes in – they help you identify specific demographics so that only those who fit the criteria will respond to your questions. Knowing the demographics for example is a common criterion used for screening surveys – whether it be online or offline market research.

Ask generic questions first and then concrete questions – Start by posing broad questions to understand the overall subject matter before getting into more specific details. This can help ensure meaningful conversations and efficient use of time.

“In Lumoa’s case, if we were interested in knowing more about customers’ overall relationship with the brand, we would first ask about their relationship with us. Only then would we ask about other topics afterward.” Carlos Del Corral

End with the classification questions – These are questions about demographics. For example, age, gender, household income, etc.

These questions are at the end of the survey for two main reasons:

• By asking classification questions at the beginning, people may wonder “why do they want to know all these things about me?”. It’s better to start with questions that are close to the surface of the things you’re interested in.
• Second, this type of classification question is usually very clear to the respondent. For example, an age of a person is extremely easy to determine. And when you don’t have to make an effort to answer the question, they’re quick to get answered, and the drop rate will be smaller.

Remember: Being aware of potential biases, avoiding leading questions, and testing out questions on potential respondents prior to launching surveys can help guard against biased results.

Optimizing survey design for insight generation

Finally, optimizing for automated insight generation is key when crafting surveys. The main point here is that in most cases, you can actually go by, or solve with a simple Key Performance Indicator (KPI) and a “Why?” question.

By asking “How satisfied are you with our product?” and “Why?”, you don’t need to ask multiple different questions about the different features of the product. You’ll find out in the “Why?” question.

“This way of asking questions, (“Why?”) hasn’t been used since there haven’t been tools to analyze those open-ended questions properly. But now that you have tools like Lumoa, you don’t need to ask for many concrete things.” – Carlos Del Corral

Utilizing features such as branching logic (showing different sets of questions based on earlier responses), sentiment analysis (measuring how positive or negative customers feel about particular products or services), and open-ended text analysis (allowing respondents to type in their own explanations) can all enable richer data collection and provide more valuable customer experience analytics into customer behavior or public opinion.

Different Types of Questions in a Survey

By now, we know that surveys are one of the most efficient ways to capture accurate data, which can then be used to inform decisions. But having too many (or few) questions on your survey can have a negative impact and make it difficult for you to collect meaningful insights.

That’s why it’s important to carefully consider all the different types of questions you should include in a survey so that you can get reliable and valuable responses from your respondents.

Here are some common types of questions in a survey:

• Behavioral type of questions
• Attitudinal type of questions
• Classification type of questions

Behavioral Questions

Behavioral questions focus on the actual behavior of respondents, such as what they have done in the past or what they’re currently doing. They’re designed to provide information about how people behave. Some examples are:

• “How often do you visit the doctor?”
• “How much spread do you buy in a typical week?”
• “How often do you purchase groceries online?”

NOTE: It would be ideal if you already know your customers’ digital behaviors. For example, how often do they access a particular service (Google Analytics), or how much do they purchase (CRM), etc. Thus, these questions aren’t really needed in your survey.

Attitudinal Questions

Attitudinal questions seek to uncover how people feel about a given topic or product. These questions help researchers understand a respondent’s attitude toward an issue or concept:

• “How would you rate our product?”
• “How likely are you to recommend…?” (e.g. typical NPS questions)
• “Why did you give us that score?” (open-ended questions)

Open-ended questions are important since they allow you to express your feelings, emotions, and sentiments. They’re not just saying that they love your product, but also answering why. This is different from just getting a score of 9 in an NPS rating. Getting insights from the data is easier because it’s richer.

NOTE: Whoever is designing a survey should be careful to ask neutral attitudinal questions that don’t lead in any one direction.

Classification Questions

Classification questions ask respondents to identify themselves in terms of their demographics such as age, gender, race, and other categories. These types of questions help researchers understand their target audience better.

NOTE: In today’s “woke culture” we need to ensure that these questions are phrased in a non-discriminatory manner.

Creating Questions Do’s and Don’ts

Survey designs should always aim to keep surveys concise and easy to understand so that respondents are more likely to complete them. Let’s go through some do’s and don’ts when creating questions.

Avoiding Bias: Symmetrical Scales

The most commonly used scale for surveys is the Likert Scale, which is a symmetric 7-point scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Survey designs should have question-wording that reflects this symmetry.

For example, if the question is “I’m satisfied with my purchase”, then the Likert scale should have seven points ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” and not just three or four points.

Avoiding Bias: Leading respondents

Leading questions are those that suggest a particular answer to the respondent and will influence their response. Survey designers need to be aware of this and should ensure that their questions are neutral, and framed in a way as to not lead respondents toward a particular answer.

Ask One Question at a Time

One should avoid asking more than one question in the same statement. This can confuse you and your respondents. Leading them to give inaccurate or incomplete responses.

Simple, Specific, and Short Questions

Surveys should be kept simple and on point. Remember to make the questions as easy to read and clear as possible while avoiding the use of complex language or jargon. Survey respondents have limited attention spans and will be more likely to finish the survey if the questions are straightforward and easy to understand.

Avoid Jargon and Acronyms

Following the above note, avoiding jargon and or abbreviations that may confuse respondents should be avoided. If terms have to be used, they must be explained clearly in the survey question itself.

Avoid Questions that Require Respondents to Perform Calculations

Questions that require a respondent to calculate an answer should be avoided as much as possible unless necessary. Because it can lead to inaccurate responses. A workaround would be providing ready options for respondents so that they can select the answer with ease.

Optimize open-ends for rich results

We know already that open-ended questions are a great way for survey designers to get more detailed feedback from respondents, but they can be difficult to analyze. So remember to make sure that the questions are phrased in such a way as to ensure that the response can provide useful insights.

BONUS: Metric Selection – Optimizing for impact within the organization

Selecting metrics and scales can be controversial. On the other hand, remember that there is no one-size-fits-all. Consider what type of business you have and what works for you and everyone who’s involved in it. Let’s quickly discuss the two.

Metric Selection

There are many different metrics to choose from, such as CSAT, NPS, and CES. KPIs can be optimized for different touchpoints, and there’s a lot of theory about how to do that.

Our recommendation is to simplify rather than optimize for marginal improvements. Using fewer metrics and scales, as well as being consistent with those metrics will help make the process as simple as possible.

“As far as metric selection is concerned, Lumoa has a very pragmatic approach to it. We believe that your organization should drive impact in whatever you do.” – Carlos Del Corral

Achieving change within an organization and driving customer-centricity is already challenging, especially in larger organizations. Every time you add a layer of complexity, it becomes more complex.

For example, If you only have NPS, you only need to explain one metric to your stakeholders, or the organization. Adding more to the equation may result in a loss of understanding of what they mean, and practicing becomes more difficult.

Remember these and thank us later:

• Simplify
• Be Consistent
• Reduce the number of metrics in use

NOTE: NPS is not the only metric; there are other widely known/used metrics that can be used instead (NPS is not without its pitfalls)

Scale Selection

Scale selection generates much debate in market research. To achieve consistency,  you should measure across touchpoints and business areas using the same scale, if possible, across all touchpoints.

Just focus on improving, but keep the scale consistent so you can compare and measure improvements.

The scale will be largely determined by the KPI you will choose. Some use standard scales like NPS (1-10).

In selecting a scale, we strongly recommend avoiding creativity. If you do this, it’s impossible to follow the benchmarks. It’s recommended that you stick to the definition of a standard metric or KPI if you choose one.

It may be necessary to force a choice in some cases. Suppose you want to force your customers to tell you if they’re happy or not. If this is the case, a 4-point scale is a good option, since you can have very dissatisfied, dissatisfied, satisfied, and very satisfied. The key again is to be consistent and keep measuring improvement and change.

Generating Insights from Results

With Lumoa, it’s never been easier to gain powerful insights from customer feedback. Whether you’re looking at surveys, transcripts of phone calls and chats, or collecting online reviews – everything can be integrated into one platform!

Forget manual work as all the touchpoints are organized for you in an instant. You’ll also benefit from real-time analytics in over 60+ languages so nothing goes unnoticed. But that’s not all – after gaining your insight, use Lumoa to close the loop by following up on tasks and making sure everyone is held responsible for the voice-of-customer.

Conclusion

Designing surveys is essential for market research but it can be difficult to know where to start. By keeping the principles of survey design in mind, you can create questionnaires that are simple and easy to understand, which will result in more reliable data.

With the help of Lumoa, collecting and analyzing customer feedback from a variety of sources becomes easy. Moreover, you can get the insights you need to make informed decisions about your business.

Now, we can say that you’re definitely ready to start creating your own survey!

The post Survey Design Best Practices And Guidelines appeared first on Lumoa.

One tool businesses can use to capture valuable insights is the transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS). This metric measures the likelihood of a customer recommending a business or product after experiencing it firsthand, revealing key information about customer satisfaction. 

In this article, we’ll look at tNPS in depth, explaining how it works, how you can use it to understand consumer sentiment, and how it can help in improving your customer experience.

What is a transactional NPS (tNPS)?

Alright, we get that it’s important for businesses but, what exactly is Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS)? Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS) is a measure of customer satisfaction. It’s a collection and the result of gathered data and feedback about an individual’s experience with a business or service.

TNPS surveys are usually sent out immediately after a customer makes contact with the business. These surveys provide valuable insight into how the interaction went, and whether it was either satisfactory and likely to result in customers promoting the business further.

“TNPS surveys ask the right questions to your customers at the most critical moment – after a transaction,” explains Colin Palfrey, CMO of Crediful. “By asking your customers how they feel immediately after interacting with your business, you can gain a truthful insight into their customer journey. TNPS gathers touchpoint-specific data to give you an overview of the strengths and weaknesses within your business.”

By quickly sending out tNPS surveys to customers and analyzing the results, companies can easily identify where their customers fall on the scale of Promoters, Passives, or Detractors based on their responses.

This type of feedback allows executives to adjust and quickly pinpoint customer satisfaction success or failure, as well as anticipate future areas that require improvement.

How to calculate transactional NPS (tNPS)?

Going back to the basics, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a way to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. It does this by asking customers to rate their experiences based on a scale of 0-10, with 0 being the least satisfied and 10 being the most.

NPS divides customers into three categories:

• Promoters: are very satisfied with the company they’re talking about and will highly recommend it to others; they rate 9 or 10 on the scale.
• Detractors: are not satisfied at all – they typically give a rating between 0-6.
• Passives: are somewhere in-between, giving ratings of 7 or 8.

By measuring the ratio between these different segments of customers, companies can get an idea of how their services are performing and how loyal their customers really are.

Calculating tNPS is straightforward – just subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. That’s it! Knowing these stats can be really useful in helping you quickly identify up-and-coming trends and feedback from customers.

What is the difference between transactional NPS (tNPS) and Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

We now know that the Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS) is a simple way to get a snapshot of how your customers feel about the transactions they’ve had with your company. But what is the difference between tNPS and NPS?

Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) are two common measurements used to understand customer feedback. While they’re both useful, they measure different facets of the customer experience.

TNPS takes a closer look at individual customer interactions and helps to identify potential issues that need resolving in order for companies to keep their customers happy.

On the other hand, NPS looks more broadly at the overall satisfaction of customers. This score provides an indication of how well a company is doing as a whole by asking customers for ratings and collecting survey results.

“Sending a tNPS survey to a new customer is a great way to see if your business is driving away potential customers,” says George Tsagas, Owner and Founder of eMathZone. “Asking new customers to complete a tNPS survey will reveal whether your onboarding process is effective. You can use tNPS for any interaction you have with your customers to check if your clients are happy.”

Traditional NPS surveys ask the customer how likely they are to recommend a business without asking detailed questions. NPS surveys ask simple questions such as “how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?” This type of survey can tell us whether the customer is happy or not but without the finer details.

Meanwhile, a typical tNPS question may ask, “Based on your recent free trial, how likely are you to recommend our products to a friend?” Targeted questions through tNPS surveys can identify specific pain points your company fails to address.

By using both tNPS and NPS, businesses can get an idea if any specific issues are affecting customers’ opinion of them as well as get an understanding of how satisfied people are with their service in general.

Using tNPS to improve your Customer Experience

“Exceptional customer service plays a vital part in the growth of any business. 89% of customers say they are more likely to complete a purchase after a positive customer service experience,” explains Jim Pendergast, Senior Vice President of altLine Sobanco. “Customers are more likely to forgive mistakes after receiving excellent customer service. Using TNPS can help you enhance your company’s CX and prevent customers from leaving.”

Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS) is a great tool for improving your customer experience. With tNPS, you can measure your customers’ satisfaction as suited to their individual experiences with you and use this feedback to hone in on where additional efforts should be made.

From gathering feedback on the efficiency of delivery, to learning what product features are most appreciated by customers, using tNPS helps companies uncover insights and make improvements, which leads to happier customers who will be more likely to trust in a brand’s products or services.

Types of transactional NPS (tNPS) surveys

The main goal of tNPS is to gauge customer satisfaction with the transaction and to identify any areas where the company can improve its service. On the other hand, there are various types of tNPS surveys.

These surveys provide valuable insights into how well a company’s products or services meet customers’ expectations and can be used to improve customer experience, drive product innovation, and build better customer relationships. Let’s check out each one of them.

Post-purchase Surveys: Post-purchase surveys are sent to customers after they’ve made a purchase from the business. This type of transactional NPS survey allows businesses to measure how satisfied their customers are with their purchase decision. It also helps them find out what areas could use improvement, such as product features, delivery speed, product value, customer service, etc.

Post-purchase surveys give companies an opportunity to create more meaningful customer relationships by acting on any feedback they receive quickly and effectively.

Post-service Surveys: Post-service Transactional NPS surveys are sent to customers after they’ve received a service from the business. This type of survey is helpful for measuring customer satisfaction with the quality of service delivered and allows companies to identify areas of improvement for future services or products.

Acting on this feedback quickly gives companies the chance to build trust with customers and make sure that each customer experience is positive and memorable.

Event-specific Surveys: Event-specific Transactional NPS surveys are sent out after an event has taken place, such as a conference or trade show. These surveys allow businesses to track audience sentiment in real-time and understand how successful the event was in terms of delivering value to attendees.

The insights gleaned from event-specific Transactional NPS surveys can be used to inform future events, ensuring that each one maximizes its impact on attendees while providing the business with maximum ROI.

Follow-up Surveys: Follow-up Transactional NPS surveys are sent out at intervals after a purchase or service has been delivered in order to track long-term satisfaction levels over time.

Companies can use these kinds of surveys to get detailed feedback about various aspects of their offerings and make sure that their products or services remain relevant and up-to-date according to changing customer needs over time.

By proactively taking action on any negative feedback received through follow-up Transactional NPS surveys, companies can stay ahead of any potential problems before they become full-blown issues down the line.

“Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors is a vital part of building your CX strategy,” says Jarret Austin, Owner of Bankruptcy Canada Inc. “If your customers are choosing your competitors, then you need to find out why. Looking at their customer feedback will help you understand their products, services, and customer service abilities and why customers rate them higher.”

What are some factors that influence transactional NPS (tNPS)?

The factors that influence tNPS scores can vary greatly depending on the business’s product or service offering, but in general, they can be broken down into three categories: customer experience, brand awareness, and product reputation.

Customer experience encompasses everything from ease of use to customer service; improving this will have a direct impact on TNPS scores. Brand awareness refers to how familiar customers are with your company and its offerings; if they recognize your brand, they’re more likely to be satisfied with their purchase or service.

Finally, product reputation reflects the opinions of existing users; if their experiences have been positive, then this will have an effect on TNPS scores as well.

Improving your tNPS score isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of task; it requires a comprehensive approach that takes into account all of the factors mentioned above. To start off, make sure you focus on providing an excellent customer experience through quality products/services and top-notch customer service – no one will want to recommend something that didn’t meet their expectations!

Additionally, leverage social media and other channels to spread awareness about your brand and its offerings – letting potential customers know why you’re different from competitors.

This will help build positive impressions before they make a purchase decision. Finally, make sure you pay attention to what existing users have to say about your products/services.

Responding quickly and appropriately when issues arise can help ensure that those users remain satisfied with their purchase decisions even after using them for some time.

“Obtaining a TNPS score of 100 is impossible for any business to achieve,” explains Kyle Zien, Director of Growth Marketing at Felix. “Getting a positive TNPS score is possible for businesses who use customer feedback to their advantage.

Asking your customers to give feedback also shows that you value their opinion. Giving your customers a voice will strengthen customer relationships and turn loyal patrons into brand ambassadors who will recommend your products.”

Having a high TNPS score has numerous benefits for businesses both small and large alike. For starters, it serves as an indicator of how loyal your customers are which can provide valuable insights into future growth strategies (e.g., which areas should be emphasized for improvement).

Furthermore, having high marks in terms of customer loyalty means that more people may be willing to recommend your product or service – leading to greater word-of-mouth advertising without any extra effort on your part!

Key Takeaways

•TNPS is a metric that measures the likelihood of a customer recommending a business or product after experiencing it firsthand, revealing key information about customer satisfaction.

• TNPS surveys are usually sent out immediately after a customer makes contact with the business and provide valuable insight into how the interaction went.

• NPS divides customers into three categories: Promoters, Passives, or Detractors based on their responses.

• Calculating tNPS is straightforward – just subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

• Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) are two common measurements used to understand customer feedback but measure different facets of the customer experience.

• Post-purchase Surveys, Post-service Surveys, Event-specific Surveys, and Follow-up Surveys are all types of tNPS surveys businesses can use to gather feedback about various aspects of their company in order to improve customer experience.

The post What is tNPS? Understanding Transactional NPS appeared first on Lumoa.

Here’s the reality, gathering online feedback is not as easy as it may seem. In a perfect world maybe, but chances are, that user has already left the chat, closed the tab, or deleted the SMS sent asking for feedback that the user may receive. It is relatively easy to create a survey but convincing your audience to take more time to click through that feedback form can be tedious. Let alone knowing where it will drive value and engage your audience till the end.

So how do you do it? What can you do to trigger a response from your target audience without making them feel that they are forced to answer and still get valuable and actionable results?

To analyze and bring answers to how to collect feedback that drives powerful results, we interviewed Christian Lelo de Larrea Gaudiano, Customer Engagement Manager of giosg, to tell us about their practices. A partner of Lumoa, Giosg is a software solutions company that combines data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) with feature-rich technology, delivering intuitive, automated solutions that help organizations to become more effective.

Where should feedback be collected on the website in a non-intrusive way?

Not all website users are there for the same reason and because of this, it is important to define the goals to help you understand which customer journey to target. This way, certain feedback requests will be shown to the right user at the right time in a non-intrusive way.

For example, if the goal is to improve the service (or the chat service), then a good place to add the feedback request is in your chat and not during the checkout process as this is a different part of the customer’s journey. In many instances, getting feedback might imply that the user should go through the whole customer journey to be able to give valuable feedback, but this isn’t always the case. If the goal is to improve or identify bottlenecks, then these can be found anywhere in the customer journey. Knowing what kind of form will show at the right time and the right place will not only make the trigger more effective but will also save time in categorizing the data that is being collected.

What is the best way to do it?

Links to surveys can work in feedback collection but based on our experience, we found out that the best way to do it is to show a pop-up to the right user at the right time. Pop-up surveys have become the tool of choice nowadays for getting user feedback and these widgets we see on a website page are a special form of feedback surveys. It can “pop up” depending on which customer journey you want it to show.

From the previous example, with the same goal of wanting to improve service or the overall experience with the chat, a pop-up trigger will be activated at the end of the chat. Additionally, a good option is when operators add a “feedback process” where they ask the user to provide feedback at the end of the chat.

Meanwhile, using a link to a survey is a reactive method for users to provide feedback. We also noticed that triggering the feedback form automatically as part of the customer journey is left unanswered more often. With our service improvement example, the pop-up will trigger after the user closes the chat window.

While both methods can be used accordingly, the only way to know what will work is through testing. A/B test, try a link, or use a different method to show the feedback form aligned with your goals and which part of the customer journey you want to focus on. Furthermore, be open to changes that will give signs of whether your method is working. Make tweaks along the way and do another test to be sure. In the end, all this data will show you the most optimal place, time, and method that works best.

What type of questions should be asked?

Before we dive into this, take note of the following questions:

1. What is the goal?
2. What are we trying to improve?
3. Are we ready to take action based on the results of the data?

Once these are taken into consideration, we can now move forward with the feedback questions. There are 3 things we can measure within the different areas of a customer journey, and these are:

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) – This tells us how satisfied or unsatisfied customers are with the product, service, etc.
• Customer Effort Score (CES) – This is about the ease of their experience
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) – One kind of a Likert scale where we ask how likely you would recommend this to a friend or colleague.

Going back to our live chat improvement example, we can therefore ask:

1. Was the agent helpful?
2. Was the inquiry solved?
3. Did we exceed their expectations?
4. Any additional comments about the chat?

Note that keeping the feedback form short and straightforward will keep your audience’s interest in answering it. Furthermore, the data will yield more logical and powerful results that will help your company consider the actions needed to be taken later on.

What is the difference between feedback about the website and feedback about the product/service?

Remember that the main idea with the feedback is to align the goals/s with the customer’s journey. So, it is important to ask for feedback at the correct phase of a particular journey. Having a defined goal will help in understanding the purpose of the feedback.

Two key points that will help in analyzing which feedback is for:

1. If it’s about the website, it’s about the user experience (UX); the ease of their experience, was the user able to find what they’re looking for? How smooth was the overall process? Etc.
2. If it’s about the tangible or intangible product, questions such as their satisfaction level of the product, and in-depth questions like, was it what they needed? Was the service helpful? etc. that focuses more on the major topic of question or interest by the user.

How is the feedback used to drive powerful results?

During your planning stage where goals are defined, you need to take into consideration the benefits it will provide the other departments. It is wise to include them in the project to not only deliver powerful results but also to empower everyone’s opinion. This way, you can combine what is specifically needed to collect, and ensure actions are delivered for the improvement in different departments whenever necessary.

The purpose of getting the opinion of the users on your website is to better understand, connect, and communicate with them more humanly. By doing so, you’re giving the user the power to be involved in change management and feel that they are an important part of the company’s growth.

Keep in mind that before anything else, specific goals should be defined during the planning stage to keep track of what you need to do. There is no one-size-fits-all formula to get powerful results, so testing the feedback, trying different methods, and placing it at the right time and place while making necessary changes along the way will enhance the effectiveness and the results of the collected data.

Finally, it is important to keep the feedback short and simple while also considering the other departments in defining the right goals for feedback collection. Once the goals are defined, it is easier to trigger the feedback pop-up at the right time of the customer’s journey, so that it will engage users to answer and drive a powerful result that is measurable and actionable.

The post Collect feedback that drives powerful results – Interview with Christian Lelo de Larrea Gaudiano appeared first on Lumoa.

If this process isn’t tailored to your company, you’ll set inaccurate survey response rate benchmarks and compromise all future evaluations. To avoid this, you need to understand how these benchmarks work, research average survey response rates in your industry, and create an organized strategy.

In this article, we’ll define internal and external benchmarks. We’ll also share the areas of your CEM system you can record and provide general steps to help you benchmark your performance.

What Is Your Survey Response Benchmark?

In order to fully grasp this process, it’s important to understand the definitions of survey response rate and benchmarking separately.

Survey response rates refer to the percentage of customers that reply to your surveys versus the number of potential respondents. This statistic includes positive as well as negative interactions and creates an average rate that’s expressed as a percentage.

Benchmarking, in the general sense, is the process of documenting a company’s performance during any given period with the goal of comparing it to another period, often in the future. The concept of benchmarking can be as broad or as granular as required. This means that it can be applied to specific process flow or entire departments alike. 

As you may have deduced already, the survey response rate benchmarking process consists of documenting the performance of your CEM system. The idea is to record your current performance and the processes in place. Then, make improvements and assess the impact of these adjustments by measuring the future performance against the prior benchmark. 

While benchmarking can be applied to a wide range of activities, this process can either be categorized as internal or external.

Internal benchmarks

The internal benchmarking process allows you to see how your current performance measures up to the past as well as future production of your own company. This can help you determine how much your company has grown over specific periods of time.

Keep in mind that this process measures the same statistics as its external counterpart. The difference is that, as long as your benchmarking process is sound, the results you get should be exact. The reason for this is that you have all your performance metrics readily available, which allows you to perform specific calculations.

External Benchmarks

The main challenge with external benchmarks is that you need to collect data from the main competitors in your industry. 

Since most enterprises don’t disclose detailed reports on their internal statistics, collecting external data is often challenging. For this reason, the values collected need to be treated as estimates rather than concrete statistics. 

Nevertheless, the external benchmarking process provides insights and holds immense value, whether it’s performed by growing businesses or established enterprises.

Types of Customer Service and Experience Surveys

Creating an effective CEM system is crucial, but the first step is collecting enough survey responses to create a benchmark.

A corporate marketing and research teams have spent decades collecting information from consumers via surveys. 

However, customer experience surveys have evolved a lot since their verbal and print forms, which means that companies can now leverage a wide range of techniques to collect data. Here are the main types of customer service and experience surveys that you can benchmark.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score surveys first emerged in 2003 and they are a simple, yet effective way to assess your customers’ collective sentiment. It consists of asking customers one question: how likely are you to recommend this product/service to a peer or colleague?

NPS surveys can also include optional questions for customers to answer after providing the first response. If you want to know the typical survey response rate for NPS surveys for your type of company, industry-specific reports are always a great place to start.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

 Perhaps the most common type of survey in the customer service industry, CSAT evaluations ask customers to rate their satisfaction on a 1 to 5 or 1 to 10 scale, with the highest value meaning completely satisfied. 

Benchmarking CSAT surveys is simple, unless you switch your rating scale. In this case, you may have to adjust the previous values to maintain the data’s integrity.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer effort score or CES evaluations attempt to measure how much effort customers had to go through to complete a specific action. It’s usually used to measure the performance of customer service or customer success teams. That said, it can also be used for complex conversion flows and similar instances. 

As with CSAT, CES surveys can be difficult to benchmark if you change the questions being asked, so make sure to account for this discrepancy when creating your benchmarking process.

Visual rating

Visual rating surveys are another type of evaluation that can be recorded but can also change over time. If your CEM system employs this time of feedback collection, verify that it has remained standard or create a method to standardize feedback across all formats.

Custom or Free-Response Format

Custom or free-response formats ask customers open-ended questions. However, the unique process of learning how to create customer surveys and their unstandardized nature make them difficult to track. In these cases, you may need to leverage a next-generation customer insights platform that provides actionable data, like Lumoa. 

Note that free-response surveys include a wide range of evaluations, including:

• Product or service development 
• Post-purchase or point-of-conversion
• Usability questionnaires

If you want to learn more about customer experience metrics and KPIs, check out this article: 6 Most Popular Customer Experience Metrics and KPIs Explained Simply.

Customer Survey Response Benchmark Estimations

If you’re setting survey response benchmarks for your different customer survey channels, you’ll probably see a huge discrepancy between the values of each channel. 

Our observations show that the average response rate across all channels and industries stands between 17% and 20%.

However, remember that different target audiences have distinct behavioral patterns. This means that you have to set a benchmark for each channel and industry.

Survey Response Benchmarks for different types of surveys

Remember, the values above are estimates based on our internal and external research. This data may be used as general benchmark values, but you can also conduct industry-specific research to get more accurate results for your organization.

How to Set Your CEM Survey Response Benchmarks

Every organization is different, so there is no “one-size-fits-all” method to set benchmarks for your company. 

You’ll need to determine which feedback collection channels you currently have open, ensure that you have enough data available on each one, and create a plan to set individual benchmarks. You should also develop a method to grade the performance of your entire CEM system through a single metric that’s tailored specifically to your company. 

If you’re asking yourself “how many survey responses do I need?” the answer is not that simple. 

You’ll have to take context into consideration to ensure that you have a statistically-valid survey response rate. For example, call centers that receive thousands of daily interactions will need to collect more data than facilities that handle a much smaller volume. 

You can read our article on how to calculate sample size to determine how many interactions you’ll need. 

With the above in mind, here are general steps you can adapt and follow to benchmark your CEM system. 

Record Your Current Flows and Processes

Many organizations opt for simple benchmarking, where only the performance data is assessed. Instead, you should also document the flows and processes you currently have in place. This includes all documented flows as well as steps that individual agents take to cater to their different clients. This data will help you figure out the impact of the adjustments you implement.

Collect Analytical Data

Once you have described all processes in detail, you can turn your attention to the analytical data. Try to be as granular as possible in order to have a comprehensive view of your CEM system and don’t be afraid to include the exact ratings for each question in every survey format.

If you are performing an external benchmark, you also need to detail your main competitors’ performance. As we mentioned before, limited access to competitor data makes it difficult to have exact values. 

To overcome this challenge, most companies compile as much external data as possible and create a set of metrics that represent the entire competition. 

Ensure that You Have Comprehensive Performance Data Available

Whether you’re performing internal or external benchmarking, you need to have enough information about your company for the process to be successful. 

However, it’s impossible to get a comprehensive view of your performance if you’re not tracking the right metrics. 

Besides the number of interactions and potential interactions, you should also document additional details for each channel. For example, if you’re running surveys via email, you should also benchmark metrics like the:

• Amount of time receivers spent without opening an email
• Email click-through rates
• Number of monthly subscribers

Document Your Benchmarks

Now, it’s finally time to start documenting your benchmarks. You should avoid making major changes right before you start benchmarking because they may sway the data. The best alternative in these cases is to measure your current performance and use the benchmarking process to assess how the changes impact your performance. 

Benchmarking databases look different in every company. With this in mind, most firms and organizations condense them into reports that are easier to digest by executives. 

Organizations that are creating external benchmarks also need to document competitor/industry performance metrics and ensure that this data is included in the reports as well. 

Implement Changes and Collect New Performance Data

The last step is to make adjustments based on the benchmarks you already have. You should use these statistics to identify areas of improvement, determine what changes may have a positive effect, and implement these adjustments.

Additionally, you should also create a benchmark and evaluation schedule where you record your current performance and go through the process again. 

Looking to Improve Your CEM System? Leverage the Data Collected with Lumoa

Improving your CEM system is an ongoing process and having an accurate benchmarking mechanism will help ensure that you stay on the right track. The general tips above can help ensure that you benchmark the right types of surveys and zero in on metrics that provide actionable insights.

If you want to learn more about Lumoa and how it can help you assess the data you collect through all of your surveys, contact us today or start a free trial.

The post Average Survey Response Rate You Should Aim For appeared first on Lumoa.

It seems in any given group of friends there are a number of casual experts. Maybe one is really into movies or music. Or, perhaps, there’s a “foodie” in the group. Since we don’t have direct access to lots of experts, those people in our lives tend to be who we consult if we’re curious about that topic.  

However, what would happen if you found out your movie expert friend had only ever seen Twilight movies?

Their credibility with you would probably fade. It’s nothing against vampires or teen romance. It’s simply that movies are a complex art form and in order to have a sophisticated understanding, you probably need to see lots of movies. Five (yes, there were five Twilight movies) is simply not a large enough sample size. 

What is a sample size?

Companies can ensure that their customer feedback is a reliable source of information for making decisions by accurately estimating the characteristics of their larger population. Sample size calculation accomplishes this, taking into account factors like variability and confidence level to make sure surveys are representative and results are significant. Doing so empowers businesses to better understand opinions and needs – allowing them to provide even more satisfying experiences!

The sample size is a term commonly used in market research that refers to the number of respondents to a survey. It’s referred to as a “sample” because it’s a small group that’s meant to represent a larger population or target audience. 

For example, you may be interested to know how Americans feel about a certain topic. Since it’s not possible to survey the entire population, you gather a small group, or sample, of the population that’s representative of the whole and survey them to get an understanding of general sentiment.  

How to determine sample size

There are a number of different things you may consider when you’re trying to determine how large a sample size you need in order to get reliable data. If your sample size is too small, the data may not be relevant and possibly misleading. 

On the other end of the spectrum, if you try for too large a sample size your study could get very expensive and needlessly complicated. With that in mind, it’s paramount to your success that you’re able to properly determine the correct sample size for a given project. In order to do that, there are four areas to consider. 

Determine sample size variables

1. Population size – This number refers to the total number of people in your target audience. For example, you might be interested in SUV owners. For population size, it’s best to be as detailed as possible. For example, you might only look at people who currently own SUVs. Or, perhaps you want input from anyone who has ever owned an SUV. In either case, clearly defining those parameters is the only way to accurately understand your population size.
2. The margin of error (confidence interval) – This number refers to how closely your sample size accurately represents your target audience. Having a smaller margin of error means a higher level of accuracy. Conversely, a larger margin of error means being less accurate. There will always be some margin of error, but you can control how big, or small, your sample size is. 
3. Confidence level – Related to the margin of error, confidence level refers to how accurate you feel your results are. Your confidence level, which is expressed as a percentage, states how sure you are that the mean falls somewhere within the margin of error. Generally speaking, most use a confidence level of 90%, 95%, or 99%.  
4. Standard deviation – This number refers to how many individual responses will vary between each other, and the mean. If there’s a low standard deviation, it means scores will all be clustered near the mean, so not much variation. A larger standard deviation means when plotted on a graph, responses will be more spread out. Standard deviation is expressed as a decimal, with 0.5 being a good standard deviation to set to ensure a proper sample size. 

Calculate sample size

After you know the answers to the four above variables, you should be able to calculate your needed sample size.  

However, if you don’t know your population size you can still figure out your sample size. You’ll need two more pieces of information: a z score, and the sample size formula. 

1. Determine Z score – Your z score is simply the numerical representation of your desired confidence level. As mentioned above, 90%, 95%, and 99% are the most common percentages.
   
   Below are the Z scores for those percentages:
   
   90% = 1.645
   95% = 1.96
   99% =  2.576
   
   If you’re interested in using a different confidence level than the above three, you can use this Z score table. 
2. Use sample size formula – Once you have your Z score, you have all the data needed to fill out the sample size formula which is: 

Example of calculating sample size

So, let’s say you’re interested in a confidence level of 90%, decide to use the recommended standard deviation of 0.5 and are comfortable with a margin of error of +/- 5%.

This is what your initial equation would be: 

Which equals 270 and is your needed sample size to satisfy the conditions mentioned above. If you want to use a smaller sample size, you can lower your confidence level, or increase the margin of error you’re willing to accept.

That said, both of those adjustments could negatively impact the accuracy of your results. So, depending on what your study is for, it may not be the most advisable strategy. 

Understand your dimensions

If you’ve calculated your sample size to be 350, but then want to further analyze the data by looking into specific parts of the data – you have to remember that the sample size is not enough to give you accurate results.

It’s only accurate when considering all the responses together. 

For example, let’s say you calculate your sample size should be 400 to give you accurate results. When looking at all 400 responses together, you have an accurate representation of the target audience.

However, let’s say you break the results down by country. You collected 200 answers from the US and 200 from the UK. These sample sizes are not enough to give you an accurate view of the results in each country. You can make statements about the entire response pool, but you could not calculate a specific result from one of these countries. 

With that being the case, you should determine upfront what dimensions you’re interested in for your study. 

1. What are the dimensions you want to see your data from?

Realistically, there is any number of ways you could segment your data and endless dimensions you may be interested in. That said, there are a few that are more common you should consider prior to running any study.

For example, you might be interested in a dimension around demographic information such as location, age, or gender. If you run an e-commerce site you may also be interested in segmenting data based on different customer attributes like if they’re a first-time buyer, the size of their purchase, or their CSAT score. 

2. How often do you want to have reliable results?

The cadence –regular interval of time between surveys– of your surveys is also an important factor to consider. If you want to look at your data to see if there are any changes from one month to another, you need to have a regular cadence for running surveys. 

For example, let’s say you’ve calculated that your sample size should be 400. This means that you have to receive 400 responses monthly to be able to compare results month by month. If there’s a fluctuation between months, you won’t be able to reliably compare the results.

General rules for sample size

As we’ve mentioned throughout this post, there are lots of variables to consider when generating your specific sample size. That said, there are still a few general rules to know when creating a sample size to get the best results possible. 

Rule 1: Balance cost and confidence level 

In order to increase your confidence level, or reduce your margin of error, you have to increase the sample size. Larger sample sizes almost always mean higher costs. So, be deliberate when picking your confidence level and margin of error. 

Having a 99% confidence level may sound attractive, but depending on your study you might be better-served saving resources for other aspects of your project by accepting a slightly lower confidence level, or slightly higher margin of error. 

Rule 2: Not all surveys need statistically significant results

Depending on your target audience, it may not be possible to get enough responses to cross the threshold into having your results be “statistically significant”. Depending on the type of study you’re running, that may matter. 

However, if it’s just for your own research and not something with a wider bearing, that may not be that big of a deal. It’s important to remember that any feedback you get is useful. If it’s from a smaller group you may want to show some restraint in how you apply the feedback, but it’s still valuable. 

Rule 3: No matter the sample size, ask open-ended questions

You should always seek out text-based feedback. Though it can be harder to quantify, it’s incredibly valuable and something you should ask for in all of your surveys. The right open-ended question can add a lot of insights you may not otherwise get if you only ask close-ended questions. 

Conclusion 

Calculating the correct survey sample size can be tricky, but it’s an important step for ensuring successful surveys. Understanding your audience is an important aspect of running a successful business. Sending out customer surveys, like CSAT, or NPS are a great place to start but if you really want to get a strong pulse check, you need to have a sufficient sample size. 

Moreover, keeping in mind general rules such as balancing cost and confidence level, understanding that not all surveys need statistically significant results, and including open-ended questions will help you get reliable and meaningful results. With a clear understanding of your target audience, you’ll be better poised to serve them and grow your business.

The post How To Calculate Survey Sample Size: A Simple Guide appeared first on Lumoa.

Collecting qualitative data is necessary when improving customer experience, and customer service, or when you want to maximize sales, and business growth. While numbers and ratings from research are easy to analyze, businesses require insightful qualitative data to have a complete picture of their customers. 

What is Qualitative Data?

Qualitative data is data that describes qualities, patterns, and characteristics, usually in the form of descriptive words. 

Unlike quantitative data, which generally gives you numerical values that you can see at face value—qualitative data is a narrative. It allows you to create implications and recognize patterns based on in-depth responses to questions. 

Businesses need data to back up their decisions. From sales and marketing to customer experience, your business must collect feedback to recognize patterns and understand where you need to make improvements.

Qualitative data gives you a more complete picture of customer behavior. It shows you the perspective of the customer and the reasons for their decisions. If you can find out why your customers consistently behave the way they do, you can understand how to provide better service for them. 

Examples of Qualitative Data

To get qualitative data, you must conduct some form of meaningful qualitative research, such as collecting feedback with surveys where your customers have the option to freely express their thoughts. 

Researchers say, “Qualitative research can help researchers to assess the thoughts and feelings of research participants, which can enable the development of an understanding of the meaning that people ascribe to their experiences.” 

That means that if you collect qualitative data it will provide insight into the feelings and meaning behind the behavior of your customers.   

Examples of qualitative data include:

• Responses to interview questions 
• Written responses from customer questionnaires/surveys
• Notes from focus groups

These methods’ responses are written descriptions, narratives, and short answers that will tell you more about your customers.

What is the Difference Between Qualitative Data and Quantitative Data?

Both qualitative and quantitative data have pros and cons that will determine which one is best to use in a specific case to gather the information you need. 

Quantitative data

Quantitative data is usually in the form of a numerical value. 

When customers fill out a survey with a rating scale or ask your customers to answer a poll, both of these research methods will give you a numerical value or a percentage. 

This information is easy to graph, and you can use this information to predict customer behavior. 

Quantitative data is excellent for computing numerical information. It provides concrete evidence to test a hypothesis and prove specified conditions. 

Quantitative data lacks the ability for your respondents to elaborate on their answers. With numbers, you can’t tell why you’re seeing the behavior and decisions on the respondent’s part. 

Qualitative data

Qualitative data are narrative responses that tell you why customers do what they do.

It will tell you how customers feel so that you can understand their behavior and why they behave that way. Qualitative data gives you the customer’s point of view and allows you to identify strengths and weaknesses. 

Qualitative data provides a direct customer perspective with narrative answers, so you can understand how customers feel. It allows you to understand the customer’s perspective to develop customer empathy. 

Collecting qualitative data can take time. Since it does take time, it is usually more difficult to gather from a larger sample size. Also, since you make the conclusions from the qualitative research, there is more room for error when trying to understand customer behavior, due to the subjective nature of the data. 

Why collect Qualitative Data 

Qualitative data is useful when you want to track particular behaviors. The key to getting value from your qualitative data is using it to identify patterns, repeat responses, and commonalities between customers. 

By collecting qualitative data, you understand things like customer empathy, customer loyalty, and customer engagement. Responses to questionnaires or short interviews will tell you how the customers feel about your brand, why your customers stay with you, and overall, why they enjoy your products or services. 

You use qualitative data when you want to analyze your customers’ behavior or if you need insight into the motivations and feelings your customers have behind their decisions. Qualitative data is also useful when you want feedback about your performance. Your clients can give you direct reports about how business is going from their side. 

You can also use qualitative data to understand how customers are emotionally connected to your brand. You can use it to determine why they give you brand loyalty and how your brand stands compared to the competition. 

These are all forms of qualitative data that you can gather through a few research methods. 

How to Collect Qualitative Data 

The most common ways to collect qualitative data are through:

• Observations
• Interviews
• Surveys & Questionnaires

Observation

Observations are when you observe a particular behavior and identify factors that affect that behavior. You might observe a customer call where a customer is troubleshooting a problem with one of your employees. You can take note of customer responses and behavior. Notice how your employees tend to service different issues. This qualitative data will help you understand how to keep up the quality of customer service that you provide. 

Interviews

Interviews are another way of collecting qualitative data. The most important part of the interview is asking the right questions to get the answers that address the behavior in question. You want to ask a question that guides the customer to giving you an informative answer. Take notes on what customers say and keep in mind similar responses from different customers. 

Surveys & Questionnaires

Finally, there are surveys and questionnaires. Surveys help you ask a series of questions and get insightful answers quickly. If you’re taking a qualitative approach with surveys and questionnaires, make sure that the questions are open-ended questions that require the customers to explain or describe. Refrain from using multiple-choice answers designed to get a numerical value in your results. 

Questionnaires and surveys typically allow the respondents some space to type their answers in a few sentences. You can think of surveys and questionnaires as a way of asking the same interview questions to a larger sample size. It’s a great way to collect qualitative data at scale.  

Observations, interviews, and questionnaires will give you responses that are elaborate and that provide perspective. Take note of the patterns you notice in responses and use qualitative data and quantitative data to show customers that you value their business and want to serve them better. 

Have a mixed approach – collect both types of data

While qualitative data plays the role of showing you the emotions, motivations, and points of view of your customer, it’s crucial to also collect quantitative data when conducting research in a mixed methods approach. Experts define mixed methods as utilizing both quantitative and qualitative methods of research to get more complete results. 

Your quantitative research will essentially tell you what your customers are doing and tell you how satisfied your customers might be. Your qualitative data will tell you why your customers are doing what they do and how they feel about it. 

Using this mixed methods approach allows you to make better marketing, sales, and customer service decisions in the future. Ultimately, both methods inform your customer empathy and help you bring more value to your clients. 

With NPS you collect both qualitative and quantitative data

For example, you send an NPS survey to your customers where they can motivate their answers. The written answer in this case would be qualified as qualitative data, and the number they picked would be equal to quantitative data. 

Collecting qualitative data is a great way to gain insight into why customers like certain products, your strengths, and weaknesses, which products need improvement, and ultimately how to make good decisions for better service in the future. 

Analyzing customer feedback that contains qualitative data

Analyzing qualitative data can be challenging and time-consuming. Qualitative data is almost always unstructured, which makes the analysis hard since there are no clear patterns or ways to group your data. 

However, nowadays there are tools like Lumoa that allow you to analyze customer feedback automatically for you. 

Lumoa Customer Experience Analytics will automatically find the most important insights and key drivers from your qualitative data, which means that you don’t have to manually analyze and search for insight patterns in your data. 

You can find out more about Lumoa here.

The post What is Qualitative Data and Why You Should Collect it appeared first on Lumoa.

This exploration is not just about understanding what rating scales are, but also about unlocking their potential through strategic application, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses, and recognizing their critical role in shaping customer experience strategies.

What is a Rating Scale?

A rating scale is a closed-end survey question that is used to evaluate how survey responders feel about a particular product or statement. This method is particularly enhanced by AI technologies which can analyze and interpret large volumes of data from these scales to provide deeper insights into customer satisfaction and behavior. Incorporating a customer experience strategy template helps in structuring this process, ensuring that the analysis of customer surveys is aligned with broader business objectives.

Responders are typically asked to choose from a range of options — which are scaled between two extremes— from Excellent to Terrible. The rating scale is a variant of the well-known multiple-choice question.

Rating scales are popular for their ability to allow quantitative measures to be applied to more abstract, subjective sentiments. Satisfaction, experience, perception, and feeling are all difficult to quantify, but when done well, a rating scale is useful for measuring performance or effectiveness and has application in personality research. The addition of AI in customer experience management can further leverage these quantitative measures, transforming them into actionable insights to improve overall customer satisfaction and engagement.

Types of Rating Scale

You can roughly divide rating scales into two categories: ordinal scale and interval scale.

Ordinal Scale

An ordinal scale is a variable measurement scale that presents the answers in an ordered manner. The scale is presented in the natural order, but the intervals between the scale are not fixed. 

Example – Ordinal Scale

What is your experience level with computers?

• Advanced
• Intermediate
• Basic
• Novice
• Zero

It follows a clear hierarchy; however, the difference between advanced and intermediate, or novice and zero are not fixed measures.

The time it may take an individual to go from Intermediate to Advanced is unlikely to be equal to the time it would take an individual to go from Zero to Novice. Therefore, we can say these are not fixed or exact intervals.

Interval Scale

An interval scale has similarities to an ordinal scale. The question’s answers also follow an innate order, but they contain an equal and meaningful value between the intervals.

Example – Interval Scale

How satisfied were you with our service?

• Very satisfied
• Somewhat satisfied
• Neither satisfied nor dissatisfied
• Somewhat unsatisfied
• Very unsatisfied

Here, the difference between somewhat satisfied and very satisfied is mirrored by the intervals between somewhat unsatisfied and very unsatisfied. These intervals are equal, which differentiates it from the ordinal scale above.

Popular Types of Rating Scales

When conducting a survey, there are four types of rating scales that can be used effectively:

• Graphic rating scale
• Numerical rating scale
• Descriptive rating scale
• Comparative rating scale

Graphic Rating Scale

The Likert scale is a familiar example of a graphic rating scale.

Typically depicted in a table or matrix, the responder can select either a number (e.g., 1-3, 1-5) or a worded response (Very satisfied – Very unsatisfied) along the top of the matrix or table that corresponds to a list of items being asked.

For example, in a question about a restaurant’s service, we see this grid where the item in question is represented on the left-hand side, meaning the responder can select their appropriate sentiment in the corresponding box.

Numerical Rating Scale

A numerical rating scale uses numbers instead of words. This is one of the simplest and most common types of rating scale and will be familiar through its use as a numeric pain rating scale, which measures 0-10 — with 0 as no pain and 10 as the worst pain imaginable.

Descriptive Rating Scale

The descriptive rating scale does not require numbers, instead offering responders the choice of descriptive statements. 

For example, the question “How happy were you with our service?” could be answered by either Unhappy, Neutral, or Happy.

Comparative Rating Scale

A comparative rating scale is used when a researcher employs a point of comparison, like McDonald’s, to compare with a different fast food restaurant like Burger King.

For example: Rate Burger King in comparison to McDonald’s.

• Excellent
• Very good
• Good
• Both are the same
• Poor
• Very poor

A comparative rating scale allows the researcher to interpret the resulting data in relation to another company or product.

How to Use Rating Scales When Measuring Customer Experience

Net Promoter Score

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is often used as a representation of a customer’s loyalty for a business, product, or service. Also used to gauge their brand loyalty, this scale looks to find the net percentage of customers who are likely to promote or engage with a service.

Its key is in its simplicity, using just a single question that asks a customer: 

“How likely, on a scale of 0-10, are you to recommend <insert company> to your friends, family, or co-workers?”

Customers are then assigned a category based on their score; a score of 0-6 are Detractors, 7-8 are Neutrals, with 9-10 being Promoters.

To calculate NPS, the percentage of Detractors is subtracted from the percentage of Promoters.

For example: If 70% of respondents scored your business between 9-10, and 10% scored between 0-6, that is 70 – 10, which equals an NPS of 60.

CSAT 

The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a straightforward piece of customer satisfaction methodology. It measures customers’ happiness with a service, product, or experience by using one direct question like: 

“How happy were you with our service?”

This is then assigned a worst-to-best scale like 1-5 or 1-10.

You can get this functionality in-built within your customer support email software. The survey can be triggered automatically right after the query is resolved.

CES 

The Customer Effort Score or CES is a single-item metric that is used to evaluate how much effort a customer expends when engaging with a company. This can be related to dispute resolution, purchasing or returning items, and requests or questions.

A CES question may use a scale of “very difficult” to “very easy,” giving researchers, for example, an idea of problem areas that need to be addressed.

5-star review 

The 5-star rating will be familiar to most due to its ubiquity on Netflix, Amazon, iTunes, Uber, etc. Again, these are arranged with 1-star being the worst, and 5-star being the best.

One noted issue with the 5-star review is the tendency of users’ responses to cluster around either 1 or 5. These feast or famine distributions tend not to be a reliable representation of customer sentiment. So supplementing it with a comment box that allows open-ended feedback tends to produce more useful and representative data.

Likert Scale

The Likert scale is another type of survey scale. Frequently referred to as the satisfaction scale due to its suitability in measuring satisfaction, these scales ask a question like “how happy were you with our service?” and offer a scale from “very happy” to “very unhappy” with a scale of three, five or seven points used.

Getting the most out of rating scales

Each of these methods has its advantages and disadvantages. The simplicity of a scale can induce a higher volume of customer response, but some measure of attention must be paid to the quality of the feedback gathered. Simple closed-end questions can constitute a missed opportunity to really hear your customers.

Adding a comment box that allows customers to communicate their open-ended feedback is a great chance to find out what customers really think of you, in their own words, and not only within the artificial restrictions of the scale you have imposed on them. These insights have the power to tell you much more about what is or isn’t working for them, outside of statements that they are “very satisfied” or “very dissatisfied.”

However, many are often at a loss as to how to manage this uncategorizable data from a comment box. Numbers are neat and tidy and easy to scale up. Words are not. Everyone wants the insights, but not everyone is prepared to spend the days or weeks it would take to transcribe or outsource these comments. One particularly 21st-century solution is artificial intelligence.

Particularly, AI-powered text analytics software that is geared toward customer experience management. These text analytics can sift through this data, and pick out trends and critical points that require immediate attention, irrespective of the size of the survey. By incorporating customer experience analytics and conversational analytics, these systems not only identify trends and critical points but also enhance understanding of direct customer interactions, enabling real-time responses and improvements to the customer journey.

Summary

Rating scales are a quick and straightforward way to engage customers with surveys. They’re intuitive and easy to navigate if occasionally lacking in real depth. The trade-off in data richness can be countered with a simple piece of open-ended feedback, which unleashes a world of customer feedback analytics that can be used to power growth, change, and improvement.

If you want to read more about creating surveys, check-out: How to create better surveys: your business depends on it

The post Rating Scale: Survey Questions and Examples appeared first on Lumoa.

However, although widely used, multiple-choice questions alone are not always able to produce the helpful data you need to make smart business decisions. This is where employing a customer experience strategy template comes into play, aiding in the structured analysis of survey responses to distill actionable insights. By complementing these with methodologies for analyzing customer feedback, such as text analysis and leveraging AI for customer experience management, businesses can gain a deeper understanding of customer sentiments and behaviors.

In this handy guide, we’ll share tips and best practices on how to use multiple-choice questions in surveys to get actionable customer insights. We’ll explore how integrating these with a customer experience strategy template can enhance the survey analysis process, ensuring that the insights gathered are aligned with broader business objectives. This strategic approach not only enhances the quality of data collected but also ensures that the insights generated are directly actionable, guiding strategic decisions to improve the customer experience effectively.

What are multiple-choice questions?

Multiple-choice questions are questions constructed in such a way that respondents are presented with several answer options to choose from. Most of the time, these types of survey questions allow users to select either a single answer or multiple answers. 

What are the advantages of posing multiple-choice questions in surveys?

Why are multiple-choice questions common to use in surveys? The reason why this particular form of questions is so popular is that they are straightforward, and it doesn’t require much effort from the respondent to answer the questions. Other advantages include:

1. Results that are simple to analyze

Multiple-choice questions allow you to organize and make sense of responses fairly quickly and efficiently. For certain problems and lines of inquiry, collecting quantitative data is a simple way to collect basic demographic information about customers. Dedicated customer experience analytics will make the process even smoother.

2. Easy to complete on mobile devices

According to recent estimates, around one in five people complete surveys on mobile devices such as cell phones and tablets. Such devices tend not to come with a traditional keyboard, meaning it is rather easy for respondents to answer multiple-choice questions using a touch screen.

What are the disadvantages of multiple-choice questions?

Although multiple-choice questions have their advantages, there are some significant limitations to be aware of. Disadvantages of using multiple choice questions include:

1. Manipulate the respondent to answer in a certain way

This is one of the most common problems with multiple-choice questions. When a question is presented with a defined set of answers, respondents may be forced to answer in a way they otherwise would not have.

The survey designer will provide options that he or she thinks are the most relevant ones for the question. However, in practice, those answers may not be the most obvious choice for the respondent. The respondent might have something else in mind. Since the respondent is limited to a set of predefined answers, the respondent may even skip the question or choose an answer that might not represent the truth. 

2. Focused on collecting quantitative data

Multiple-choice questions are designed to produce quantitative data. This can be limiting if you want to find out about a customer’s personal experiences with your company. Only collecting quantitative data will just give you an overview of how the responses are allocated, and you will not have any insights into why the result looks like it does. 

3. Time-consuming to design

Although multiple-choice questions are fast to process, they can take up your precious time. This is because coming up with effective questions is trickier than it sounds, and it can be difficult to ensure you have covered every possible corresponding answer.

How to use multiple choice questions in surveys

Multiple-choice questions are great to use in surveys if you use them in the right way. Here are a few tips to get you started:

1. Choose a type of multiple-choice question that works for you

The two main varieties of multiple-choice questions are multiple-answer and single-answer. The former allows respondents to select a few answers to one question, while the latter only allows them to select one. 

Multiple-answer questions can help find solutions to problems that could have several contributing factors. For example, if you want to find out demographic information and your customers could fit themselves under several categories related to their age or background, allowing for multiple answers will give you a better overall picture of the type of customers you attract. 

Single-answer questions, on the other hand, are suitable for binary answers (such as yes/no), nominal scales, or questions with ratings. Put simply, they are best used for questions with only one possible answer for each participant.

For example, if you want to evaluate the efficiency of a service or product, you could ask respondents to rank its efficiency on a scale of one to five. Alternatively, you could use NPS which asks respondents to rate how likely they are to recommend goods and services to a friend. Other typical examples of single-answer questions are, CSAT or CES. 

2. Always add an open-text question

If you are going to use multiple-choice questions in your survey, you should always add an open-text question. By including an open-text question option, you allow customers to comment and motivate their answers.

The open-text question will provide you with valuable qualitative data, that you can use to improve your product or services. This type of feedback is called open-ended feedback and is incredibly useful for gaining customer insight into issues you may not even have considered. This option will prove useful even if you think that the question can only be answered a few ways – you may not have thought of everything. 

How not to use multiple choice questions in surveys

It is very easy to make mistakes when designing surveys that include multiple-choice questions. Here are a few tips to prevent you from falling into common traps:

1. Do not make things too complicated

Respondents are more likely to answer your survey if the process is quick and simple. You should avoid making surveys with 10+ different questions just to make sure that you are getting feedback on everything you want to cover.

Instead, you should only use one multiple-choice question in your survey, such as NPS, CES, or CSAT, and complement it with an open-text question. By keeping the survey short and simple, the user experience will be better and you’re able to increase the response rates. 

2. Try not to offer ambiguous answers

Sometimes, multiple-choice questions can be unintentionally confusing. For example, if you ask the respondent to indicate which age range they fall into and you provide answers that overlap (e.g. 0-15; 15-30; 30+), people who fall into two of the categories will not know which answer to select. 

Start your survey journey today

As you can see, creating surveys that produce useful information is an art. It’s easy to get carried away by including more and more questions in a survey. It’s important to remember what the goal of the survey is as well as finding the right balance between questions and user-friendliness. Utilizing a customer experience platform can streamline this process by providing the tools necessary to design effective surveys that engage customers and provide actionable insights. Additionally, conducting a customer experience audit can help identify areas of improvement and ensure that the survey content is aligned with the overall customer experience strategy.

After all, it is vital that your customers can respond and have the option to include their thoughts and opinions. At Lumoa, a customer feedback analytics platform, we always recommend creating surveys that include:

• 1 multiple choice question
• 1 open-text question

It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that!

If you want to read more about surveying then check out the article: How to create better surveys: your business depends on it. 

The post Multiple Choice Survey Questions: Advantages and Disadvantages appeared first on Lumoa.

Different surveys help you measure the experience appropriately at all customer journey touchpoints, and there is no one-size-fits-all. Gathering feedback as frequently as possible is very important, as 52% of customers believe companies should be taking action on their feedback. 

Imagine being a customer buying a train ticket. You’ll be researching the tickets, narrowing down your purchase, buying a ticket, getting ready for your journey, and then taking your trip. Each of these customer touchpoints are important for the company to get right. Throughout this experience, you should receive surveys asking you to rate the experience. Instead of asking you how the whole experience went, companies can get more information by offering surveys along the way. They might ask you how easy it was to purchase your ticket, how the boarding experience went, and then the day after your trip ask if you’d recommend them to a friend or family. 

Focused feedback at each touchpoint provides more actionable data. Here’s how to measure the customer experience at different customer touchpoints along the way.

Five Customer touchpoints to measure along the customer journey

“Building a good customer experience does not happen by accident. It happens by design,” 

Clare Muscutt, Founder of CMXperience. 

Gaining feedback is all about learning from your customers’ experiences and making plans to improve. According to Microsoft, brands that proactively solicit feedback are viewed more favorably by customers. 

With 34% of businesses now implementing customer journey mapping, it’s becoming even more important to understand how to measure it. Using customer surveys is the most common way to gather feedback from your customers throughout the customer journey.

 Surveys should be integrated into the overall customer experience, using a customer journey map based on your different customer personas. Here are the five stages to think about when you’re mapping out your customer feedback strategy:

Stage 1: Awareness

Strictly speaking, a customer is someone who has already purchased your product, but we shouldn’t limit ourselves to asking only those people for feedback. It’s important to understand why some people never become customers at all.

“Customer success starts even before someone is a customer,” says Steli Efti, CEO & Founder of Close. Awareness is the touchpoint before your customers even become a customer, and it’s when customers are thinking about why they might need your type of product.

This isn’t the right time to send a survey, since you’ve had very little contact with these customers, but you can analyze comments made on social media or offer a feedback widget on your website. You want to figure out why some customers never contact your brand but instead are turned on to your competitors.

Best survey: Focus on public comments and social media or website feedback widgets. Some text analytics tools allow you to measure these comments, so you can use this to measure this part of the journey. 

Stage 2: Research & consideration

Research & consideration is where a flicker of interest in your products may become serious engagement. At this point, customers are developing a deeper interest in potential products or services.

In this stage, customers are actively researching different brands and considering alternative products using search engines. Customers may take time to give feedback on their web experience, or talk to your customer service and sales teams. 

Maybe customers simply aren’t ready to buy your products but they were happy with the overall service. If prospective customers visit your website, here you can ask them for their feedback using an exit popup, such as “How did we do?”. If customers have talked with customer service during their evaluation period, you can send them a CSAT survey to see how their interaction went. 

Best survey: CSAT. Asking the customer to rate your site and your service, even if they don’t buy anything, can be an effective measure of performance. 

To learn more about different customer experience metrics, check out the article 6 most popular customer experience metrics and KPIs explained simply.

Stage 3: Purchase

This customer touchpoint is when customers are buying your products and you are acquiring new customers. Unfortunately, 74% of customers will switch brands if they find this process too hard. Abandoned shopping carts are a huge issue, so you can ask customers why they left using an exit popup survey, and combine this information with data from Google Analytics. 

94% of customers with low effort experiences expressed intent to buy again, versus 4% with high-effort experiences. Surveys like Customer Effort Score (CES) are a powerful predictor of purchase intent, and you need to be sending them out regularly to your customers at touchpoints where they may run into friction.

After a successful purchase, you now have the customer’s contact information, so you can choose where best to contact them. Here are some examples of where you could measure the customer experience: 

• Add a survey link to the post-purchase confirmation email
• Deliver a separate survey email
• Contact your customer via SMS
• Send an in-app survey

“Customer service is the experience we deliver to our customers. It’s the promise we keep to the customer. It’s how we follow through for the customer. It’s how we make them feel when they do business with us,” says Shep Hyken, Customer Service & Experience Expert. Take this opportunity to survey your new customer and find out how you could be doing even better. 

Best survey: CES or CSAT. CES asks your customers how easy it was to complete an interaction. CSAT helps to evaluate more complex purchase decisions. 

Stage 4: After purchase 

Customers are actually using your products but perhaps they haven’t reached out for support yet. You want to find out how they are getting along with some well-timed surveys. You need to proactively reach out to the customer to find out how they’re experiencing your products. 

• First-usage – does the customer have the ability to gain immediate value? 
• Onboarding – is there good availability of training resources and documentation?
• Experienced usage – do long-term customers have their needs met by the product?

Here is your chance to prevent customer churn by finding out where the trouble spots are and taking steps to correct them. Because customers have now experienced your product, it’s also a good time to get a more holistic measure of their perception. How do they feel about your company? What pain points have they run into? Do they see value in your product? 

Best survey: CSAT or NPS. Customer satisfaction surveys can be adapted to different specific use cases, while NPS can help understand the customers’ overall perception of your business at any point.

Stage 5: Service and support

Customer support is a crucial part of retaining your customers, and bad experiences are a leading cause of lost customers. “After-sales service is more important than assistance before sales. It is through such service that one gets permanent customers,” says Kōnosuke Matsushita, founder of Panasonic.

There are a huge variety of channels that customers can use to contact your support team, and most of them can be used to solicit feedback.

If customers have called you with their sensitive or urgent problem, make sure you follow up with the option to give feedback through email or SMS. Similarly, if a customer has contacted you on a digital channel, let them give feedback through email, chat, text message or in-app. 

Best survey: CES or CSAT. CES is a quick way to measure how difficult an interaction was. CSAT works for more complex interactions. 

Summary

“Customer experience is the next competitive battleground. It’s where business is going to be won or lost,” says Tom Knighton, the executive vice president of Conversant. Measurement is a key part of creating an outstanding customer experience that has your customers turning into raving fans. 

There are many customer touchpoints at which point you can send a survey to gather feedback on the customer experience. Keep your surveys short and sweet, making sure they’re relevant to the touchpoint. Customers now expect you to solicit their feedback but you have to make it easy for them with streamlined, elegant surveys. 

The post 5 Customer Journey Touchpoints to Measure appeared first on Lumoa.

It shouldn’t be this way.

There are a few major problems that B2B surveys often experience – on the one hand, you may struggle to collect enough responses to your surveys, raising problems with sample sizes and statistical validation. This means you don’t have enough actionable data to improve your Customer Experience (CX).

On the other hand, maybe customers are sharing their thoughts and feelings with you, but you don’t know how to act on it! You’re overwhelmed with a flood of amorphous feedback that leads you nowhere fast.

Neither situation is good. Fortunately, the problem is frequently one of process, and CX tools that don’t allow you to be flexible, adaptable, and agile. This process is important – and very much possible – to get right – that’s why more than half of customers globally expect businesses to take action on their feedback. Businesses know this, but the problems persist.

Why Customer Surveys Fail 1: too little data, too seldom

The problems become really entrenched when you only conduct your surveys once or twice a year. With that route comes the tendency to ask all the important questions at once. Every team wants to get their share of feedback! Customer surveys stretch to several pages, reducing the likelihood that your customers will find time to complete them. They might give halfway through, or click random buttons to get to the end.

Surveys also just aren’t as effective if they’re not timely and relevant. Take the highly significant issue of customer churn. By the time you’ve analyzed your customer data in two months, or even longer, unhappy customers have either already churned, or are past the point of recovery. That’s an even bigger issue when you consider that 67% of customer churn is likely to be preventable if you resolve an issue the first time it occurs.

Why Customer Surveys Fail 2: not acting on feedback

Sometimes, asking for feedback and failing to provide a response can be more damaging than never reaching out in the first place. When your surveys are conducted on a small scale, it may be quite easy to identify customer trouble spots, and take action.

Then, as time goes on, it may seem like you’re winning when lots of customers are filling out your surveys. The big “but” is that someone needs to sort through that feedback and assign an action. Unfortunately, the bigger your company gets, the harder it is to cope with the volume of feedback. There’s just no time to analyze all that data manually. It becomes tempting to make wild guesses that just aren’t bringing ROI.

When companies don’t appear to listen to feedback, this damages the customer experience, and makes customers less likely to offer feedback in the future. That’s a lose-lose scenario for everyone.

Don’t worry, though. That’s where state-of-the-art CX platforms powered by AI come in.

Solving the Problems with B2B Surveys

Customer feedback needs to be addressed in two ways:

• The individual customer’s feedback needs to be resolved and addressed.

• The company needs to ensure the feedback is addressed systematically.

 In CX strategy, this is called closing the inner loop and the outer loop.

Closing the inner Loop

The Net Promoter System® creates an Inner Loop within the company that is designed to connect customer feedback with the right person in the company.

Source: Bain & Company

If the marketing team or the Voice of Customer team is running a survey, they might get responses that are looking for technical help, disappointed about the sales process, or suggesting a new product feature. How do you ensure the customer is connected to the person or team who can take action on it?

You can make effective use of automation to streamline your customer feedback processes, as well as integrate all your important tools into one system. Build your feedback systems to facilitate the information flow to every part of your business.

Lumoa is a CX platform that can create automatic alerts that send notifications to the right people when a specific criterion is met. This is what we mean by closing the Inner Loop.

For example, you might send out an NPS® survey to your customers. The results are rolling in, and you receive some negative feedback – say, a Detractor score of between 0–6. Along with the negative score, the Detractor has also explained that they are having trouble making some account changes. Lumoa will forward the response to your customer service team who can immediately respond, and hopefully save your customer!

Closing the Outer Loop

Now that you can be assured every customer has the best chance of receiving a timely and effective response, it’s time to interpret the overall feedback trends and analyze the data. This part of the process typically has to be more centralized, perhaps led by the Customer Advocacy Office (CAO).

The aim of this process is to match your company values with customer insights, making sure you’re staying on track overall. You need to check that what you’re striving for as a business is reflected in the experience that customers are having with your brand.

Data can tell you how well you’re succeeding in your mission by helping you assign a monetary value to particular initiatives. Being able to place a number on how well something is working allows you to gain more stakeholder support within the business, and make the case for more budget allowance by prioritizing initiatives more effectively. It’s money well spent furthering the goals of your organizations.

Text analysis is another way you can make sense of the reams of qualitative data you may collect through surveys like NPS® (Net Promoter Score) and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction). You will discover trends and insights you may never have thought to look for, and refine your strategies. “The more information you can learn about the customer, the better you can serve their needs, and the more valuable the relationship becomes,” says Tien Tzuo, co-founder of Zuora.

Designing a more worthwhile B2B survey

So we’ve already identified the two main problems: not sending enough surveys, and the possibility of drowning in data. You can turn these issues into opportunities by implementing the right CX platform and leveraging the powers of AI.

A better survey design and regularly sending out short surveys will help you gather more actionable feedback. Combining your surveys with a solid CX platform that collects and controls data solves problem one. Then, closing your inner and outer loops means you will be managing the volume effectively.

Lumoa brings all your customer feedback into one place, aggregating from sources like surveys, social media, chat, calls, customer support and app reviews. It no longer becomes segregated by channel, an approach that encourages siloed attitudes towards customers in general. You shouldn’t have a social media team and a survey team – you just place the focus squarely on the customer.

Avoid survey fatigue by regularly sending out short, standardized surveys that ask for a rating, and include an open-ended question for follow-up information. This is possible to do with both a CSAT survey (which you can send out after every support interaction) and an NPS® survey which you can send less regularly. Ensure your surveys are contextual and reach the customer through the same channel in which they have initiated contact with you.

For example, 72% of B2B businesses think a website that is simple to use is one of their most valuable selling points. If you want to gather feedback on your website design, make your survey appear on your site (in context) and ensure that it’s easy to fill in. Lumoa will still collect all your feedback, and it will appear within the centralized dashboard along with analysis based on AI.

Final remarks

Collecting customer feedback properly is essential in an era of rising customer service expectations. In the future, 89% of businesses are expecting to compete on Customer Experience alone, and for that to be successful, you need data – not intuitions and guesses. You may be right in theory, but the numbers are harder to ignore, and they win you stronger support internally.

When internal stakeholders see how easy it is to collect meaningful data and take action on it, they will become more and more motivated to make it a central part of every initiative. The more data you collect, the more relevant and effective your responses to customers will be.

The post B2B Customer Surveys 101 appeared first on Lumoa.

With all of the chatter about customer experience, it can sometimes be easy to gloss over some of the foundational elements that will enable you to deliver a great experience, such as learning how to effectively survey customers.

One often forgotten piece in creating a great survey strategy is remembering that there are two fundamentally different types of surveys: relationship surveys and transactional surveys. Each type is designed to measure something different, and just as you wouldn’t use a ruler to measure the height of the Eiffel Tower, you shouldn’t use a transactional survey to measure relational health (or vice-versa).

Let’s take a look at each type, when to use them, and how to implement them well.

Transactional surveys

Transactional surveys are designed to measure something about a specific interaction with a customer. Such interaction could, for example, be product delivery, a specific website interaction or customer support interaction. Whether you realize it or not, you’re probably pretty familiar with transactional surveys. They often include questions like:

• How would you rate your experience with our support team?

• On a scale of 1-10, how happy were you with your purchasing experience?

• How much do you agree with this question: It was easy for me to find what I was looking for?

Each of these examples is honing in on a specific interaction a customer had with your organization – a support call, a purchase, and so on. With transactional surveys, you’re attempting to understand how the customer feels about something that occurred at a specific point in time.

Strengths and weaknesses

Transactional surveys are excellent for providing you quick and actionable feedback on the specific interaction you’re surveying about. Ask one hundred customers what they think about your support team, and you’ll get a very clear view into the common trends they like and dislike.

However, transactional surveys can sometimes cause problems when they are used to try measuring the health of your customer relationships. One moment in time isn’t always indicative of the customer’s future behavior.

Does each touchpoint with a customer affect their overall relationship with you? Absolutely!

Is it possible that a truly terrible interaction with your brand could cause them to cancel your service? Of course.

Transactional surveys can help uncover areas for improvement and prevent awful customer experiences before they happen. However, beware of reading more into transactional survey results than is actually there.

Sometimes customers have a bad day. Sometimes your software has a major outage. And while these types of situations may result in negative survey results, they probably aren’t true reflections on your customers’ overall view of your brand and product.

Common ways to use transactional surveys

If you’re an astute observer, you may have noticed that the example questions above are representative of the two most common ways transactional surveys are used: measuring Customer Satisfaction and Customer Effort Score. These two metrics are popular across industries, and they are a great way to get started on implementing transactional surveys.

Relationship Surveys

Whereas transactional surveys measure specific customer interactions, relationship surveys attempt to measure the overall health of your relationship with your customers. They typically focus on quantifying things like customer loyalty or referral likelihood. Some examples of common relationship survey questions include:

• How likely are you to maintain a relationship with [Company]?

• On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend [Company] to a friend or colleague?

• Please rate your overall satisfaction with [X Brand]

These questions aim for a higher-level response than transactional surveys. While the last interaction a customer has with your brand will influence their overall satisfaction, the hope of relationship surveys is to get beyond each unique interaction and gauge their overall perception of you. You typically survey the entire customer base when conducting a relationship survey, whereas in transactional surveys you only survey a part of your customer base.

Strengths and weaknesses

As you would expect, the strength of relationship surveys is their ability to give you a big picture view of how your customers view your brand or product. Data like this can be very helpful for identifying at-risk customers or for quantifying how recent product changes or advertising have impacted your brand.

The biggest weakness of relationship surveys is that they can sometimes lack actionable data. The data they provide is very useful, but it often requires doing a deeper dive to uncover why certain segments of your customer base are happy or unhappy.

It may be helpful to think of relationship surveys like doing an annual wellness check-up with your doctor. Your wellness check is meant to help you uncover if something is moving in the wrong direction – such as your blood pressure suddenly being high – but it’s not going to tell you why your blood pressure has gone up. Additional tests and diagnostics with a specialist will help provide this information and help you understand what lifestyle changes you need to make in response.

Common ways to use relationship surveys

You’ll see relationship surveys showing up in a variety of ways, but there is one customer experience metric that dominates the relationship survey conversation: Net Promoter Score. Commonly referred to as NPS, this metric looks at the likelihood of a customer referring your product to their friends and colleagues.

A lot has been written about NPS over the years as it is widely used across many industries. If you’d like a way to get started, check out this complete guide to using and improving NPS.

Conclusion

There are a lot of factors to consider when you’re crafting a survey strategy. As we’ve seen, both relationship and transactional surveys serve very important purposes in shaping your customer experience.

A number of best practices apply across the board for both relationship and transactional surveys. In closing, we’ve summarized a few of these key best practices below:

• Stay focused – Know what you’re trying to measure and don’t get distracted from it. It’s common to feel pressure to make surveys longer so that you can capture as much data as possible. That’s understandable, but longer surveys can also cause customers to get bored and drop off, leading to lower response rates. It’s generally better to keep surveys short and focused, and then follow up with customers if you need to gather more information in specific situations.

• Beware of over-surveying – It’s easy to send out surveys, and that means it can be tempting to survey your customers nonstop. Resist this temptation. It’s probably okay to send out a transactional survey each time a customer contacts your support team, but other types of surveys – especially relationship surveys – should be sent out more sparingly.

• Contextualize – Whenever possible, serve your surveys up to your customers through their preferred channel. That means if a customer contacts you via live chat, send them the survey through chat as soon as the conversation ends. If users regularly log in to your tool, consider serving them up a survey within your tool instead of emailing them.

Learning how to create effective customer surveys is a skill that will pay huge dividends in your attempts to create a better customer experience.

The post The Difference Between Transactional Surveys and Relationship Surveys appeared first on Lumoa.

Customer experience (CX) plays a crucial role in business success, with 99% of CX leaders acknowledging its positive impact. However, only 3% of companies are truly customer-obsessed. Businesses that prioritize CX are more likely to be relevant, profitable, and successful.

Unhappy customers can have significant consequences, as they are more likely to switch to competitors and share their negative experiences. Consumer demand for better service continues to rise, and trust in brands is influenced by quality, personal experiences, and consistency.

Customer feedback analytics are essential for understanding and improving CX, yet many companies fail to regularly collect and analyze customer feedback. Metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES) are commonly used to measure CX.

Organizations with a customer-centric approach outperform their competitors, but there is a need for improved CX skills and cross-team collaboration. Customer service and support channels, such as email and phone calls, are critical for delivering a seamless experience.

In summary, customer experience and feedback analytics are vital for businesses to thrive and retain customers in today’s competitive landscape.

Find the latest stats on customer experience trends

• 99% of Customer Experience and Success leaders believe CEM has a positive impact on their business. (Lumoa, 2018)
• In 2019, customer experience will continue as a major factor in how companies do business. (Forrester, 2018)
• Over 80% of organizations expect to compete mainly based on CX, meaning that the skill of realizing benefits will be in high demand. (Gartner, 2018)
• According to customers, in 2022, only 3% of companies are customer-obsessed — putting customers at the center of their leadership, strategy, and operations — a decrease of 7 percentage points from the prior year. (Forrester, 2022)
• 80% of CEOs believe they deliver superior customer experience. Only 8% of their customers agreed. (Bain, 2005)
• 87% of marketers say they are delivering engaging customer experiences. (Acquia, 2019)
• 78.5% of CMOs agree or strongly agree that amazing customer experiences provide a powerful competitive advantage. (Martech Alliance, 2021)
• Nearly half (48%) of survey respondents said the customer experience they deliver falls below or significantly below their customers’ expectations. Just 31.5% believe they are exceeding expectations. (Martech Alliance, 2021)
• Customer-obsessed businesses expect to be 7x more relevant to customers, 5x more likely a top provider of products, and 4x more profitable. (Forrester, 2016)
• 55% of CX professionals believe their companies will be too slow and face disruption from more innovative, nimble, and customer-focused competitors. (Oracle, 2018)
• Optimizing customer experience is the most exciting opportunity for 19% of businesses, ahead of data-driven marketing that focuses on individuals (16%) and content marketing (14%). (Econsultancy, 2018)
• 91% of senior executives agree/strongly agree that the C-suite recognizes the importance of the digital experience for growth. (Adobe, 2022)
• 75% of marketing & CX practitioners have observed a surge in existing customers using digital channels (Adobe, 2022)
• 74% of CX professionals say creating a seamless customer journey across assisted and self-service channels is “important” or “very important.” (Gartner, 2021)
• 8 in 10 consumers report that businesses are meeting or exceeding their expectations for service, compared to 67 percent in 2014. In fact, 40% say businesses have increased their focus and attention on service, a significant increase in just three years (up from 29% in 2014). (AmericanExpress, 2017)
• Only 43% of CX executives are highly confident in their company’s CX proficiencies and preparedness for the future. (Oracle, 2018)
• 53% of organizations don’t believe they make it easy for customers to handle their issues/requests. (Gartner, 2022)
• 87% of organizations agree that traditional experiences no longer satisfy customers. (Accenture, 2018)
• By industry, supermarket chains provide the best customer experience, while TV and Internet service providers provide the worst. (Temkin, 2018)
• Just 34% of respondents report they have three or more years of experience developing end-to-end journey maps, and 83% report their organization struggles to use customer journey maps to identify and prioritize CX efforts. (Gartner, 2022)
• CX programs that exceed management expectations are 2.3 times more likely to have CX efforts in marketing not primarily focused on the path to purchase but on the journey after acquisition. (Gartner, 2022)
• Customer experience is a ‘significant’ or ‘critical’ priority for 69% of organizations. 77% have a centralized customer experience group, and 68% have a senior executive in charge of customer experience across products and channels. (Qualtrics, 2022)

Happy vs. Unhappy Customers

Learn how promoters differ from detractors

• 86% of consumers will pay more for a better customer experience. (Oracle, 2011)
• Businesses have a 60 to 70% chance of selling to an existing customer while the probability of selling to a new prospect is only 5% to 20%. (Marketing Metrics, 2010)
• Increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits anywhere from 25% to 95%. (Bain, 2014)
• 54% shared bad experiences with more than five people and 33% shared good experiences with more than five people. (Zendesk, 2013)
• 89% of consumers began doing business with a competitor following a poor customer experience. (Oracle, 2011)
• Customers who had a very good experience are 3.5x more likely to repurchase and 5x more likely to recommend the company to friends and relatives than if they had a very poor experience. (Temkin, 2018)
• After a bad experience, 22% cut their spending with the company and 19% stopped their relationships with the company completely. (Temkin, 2017)
• After a bad experience, 30% of consumers tell the company, 50% tell their friends, and 15% provide feedback online. (Temkin, 2017)
• 48% of consumers expect specialized treatment for being good customers. (Accenture, 2017)

Consumer demand better service from companies

• More than 60% of customers say they now have higher customer service standards. (Zendesk, 2022)
• 54% of customers who report positive emotions like feeling happy, valued, and appreciated are willing to forgive brands that make mistakes. (Forrester, 2022)
• In 2022, an average of 59% of customers trust the brands they interact with, 2 percentage points higher than the 57% of customers who trusted brands in 2020. (Forrester, 2022)
• Nearly half of consumers say brands don’t meet their expectations. (Acquia, 2019)
• 78% of people believe brands can do more to deliver happiness to their customers and 91% said they preferred brands to be funny; this number increased among Gen Z (94%) and Millennials (94%). (Oracle, 2022)
• The top three reasons a consumer would trust a brand are the quality of the product (66%), personal experience with the brand (53%), and consistency (32%). (Forbes Insights, 2020)
• Two-thirds of customers could not recall when a brand exceeded expectations. (Acquia, 2019)
• It’s a high-stakes game—61 percent of customers would now defect to a competitor after just one bad experience. Make it two negative experiences, and 76 percent of customers are out the door. (Zendesk, 2022)
• The large majority of consumers said they would switch to a competitor after three poor experiences or fewer. UK consumers are slightly more likely to leave a brand (90%) than their US counterparts (81%). (Emplifi, 2021)

Want more data?

We asked 100+ CX leaders about the future of customer experience.

Check the latest State of Customer Experience Report.

Customer Feedback and Surveys

Find all about customer surveying and feedback

• 39% of companies don’t regularly ask customers for feedback about their interactions — the most basic form of CX measurement. (Forrester, 2016)
• The average email survey response rate is 24%. (Fluid Survey, 2014)
• 75% of people complete surveys on their mobile. (IMImobile, 2018)
• 77% of companies say that they don’t model the drivers of CX quality regularly, leaving them in the dark about what matters most to their customers. (Forrester, 2016)
• 60% don’t regularly track operational data that reveals what really happened during interactions to help explain why customers felt the way that they did. (Forrester, 2016)
• 63% of CX professionals use customer feedback to prioritize investment in better products, services, and customer experiences. (Oracle, 2018)
• 79% of consumers who shared complaints about poor customer experience online had their complaints ignored. (Oracle, 2011)
• 79% of consumers who complained are still not happy with the way their complaints are handled. (CCMC, 2017)

Customer Experience Metrics and Data

Learn how to measure Customer Experience

• 21% of companies have developed their own KPIs to track customer experience. (Lumoa, 2018)
• Only 11% of companies have strong CX metrics programs and 62% of companies cite the lack of taking action based on CX metrics programs as the key problem. (Temkin, 2017)
• 78% of companies expect customer interaction history to become an increasingly important source of insights, and only 33% feel the same about multiple-choice survey questions. (Temkin, 2017)
• 65% of companies measure NPS compared with 44% that measure CSAT and 14% that measure CES. (Lumoa, 2018)
• Only 32% of CX professionals feel they have access to the information they need to understand customers’ needs and previous interactions, and can apply it to improve their experience. (Oracle, 2018)
• Industry leaders reported that they improved their customer satisfaction KPI metric target by 47.1% over the last two years, 2.4 times higher than lagging organizations, which improved their customer satisfaction KPI metric target by 19.4%. (IDC, 2022)

Net Promoter Score

Utilize your NPS Better

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the most popular customer experience metric and is measured in two-thirds of companies. (Lumoa, 2018)
• In 2022, that is still true as 69% of CX Leaders are using NPS as a core CX metric. (Qualtrics, 2022)
• 32 is the Net Promoter Score of the Net Promoter System. (Lumoa, 2018)
• Compared with the detractors, promoters are 4.2x more likely to buy again, 5.6x more likely to forgive a company after a mistake, and 7.2x more likely to try a new offering. (Temkin, 2017)
• 83% of customers would trust recommendations from the people they know: colleagues, family, friends, etc. and 66% would trust other consumer opinions posted online. (Nielsen, 2015)
• An average NPS increase by 7 points correlates with a 1% growth in revenue. (London School of Economics, 2005)

Customer Effort Score

Is CES worth your attention? Short answer: YES!

• 96% of customers with a high-effort service interaction are more disloyal, compared to only 9% with low-effort interactions. (Gartner, 2018)
• 94% of customers going through an effortless experience are likely to repurchase vs. only 4% of those who went through a high level of effort. (Gartner, 2018)
• 81% of customers going through a high level of effort are likely to share their bad experience with friends vs. only 1% of those who went through an effortless experience. (Gartner, 2018)
• 17% of CX Leaders are using CES as a core CX metric. (Qualtrics, 2022)

Business Impact of CX

Find out how customer experience can influence your business KPIs

• Organizations that lead in CX outperformed laggards on the S&P 500 index by nearly 80%. (Watermark Consulting, 2018)
• Only 14% of companies measure the ROI of Customer Experience. (Lumoa, 2018)
• 61% of consumers would pay at least 5% more if they knew they would receive outstanding CX. (Emplifi, 2021)
• Experience-driven businesses grew revenue 1.4 times faster and increased customer lifetime value 1.6x more than other companies in the past year. (Forrester, 2018)
• Companies embracing service as a value creator achieve 3.5 times more revenue growth than those managing it as a cost center. (Accenture, 2021)
• Companies receive 10X+ higher revenue growth when they  involve their service organization in the development of new products. (Accenture, 2021)
• 64% of business leaders say that customer service has a positive impact on their company’s growth. (Zendesk, 2022)
• Almost 20% of consumers say they usually (if not always) abandon a purchase because of a single poor customer experience. (Emplifi, 2021)
• Organizations with a cross-team approach with a customer at the heart of all initiatives are nearly twice as likely to exceed their business goal by a significant margin. (Econsultancy, 2018)
• 62% of CX leaders think that their organization needs to make major changes to the customer experience to meet their customer strategy. (PwC, 2017)
• 60% of CX leaders see larger returns from CX initiatives relative to other initiatives in their organization. (PwC, 2017)

Customer Centricity

Are you obsessed with your customers?

• 56% of CEOs and 66% of top managers are involved in Customer Experience activities according to the employees. (Lumoa, 2018)
• 26% of CX teams experience a lack of skills and are not sure how to deal with the new consumer mindset and constantly changing market. (Lumoa, 2018)
• Only 13% of companies believe that HR has an impact on Customer Experience activities in the company. (Lumoa, 2018)
• 90% of experience decision-makers agree that the CMO should be the internal advocate for their customers. (Accenture, 2018)
• Forty-five percent of businesses manage the customer experience through their customer care organization, while 30% have marketing manage customer experience. (Genesys, 2017)
• Only 19% of businesses report that they have a dedicated customer experience team to manage the experience. (Genesys, 2017)
• 55% of companies suffer from organizational silos, incl. slow internal processes, and unwillingness to change. (Lumoa, 2018)
• Getting buy-in from the executive team, knowing about available resources, and justifying the need for those resources are among the main challenges for the customer support teams. (Support Driven, 2018)
• 72% of companies don’t review customer experience metrics or share them with all employees regularly. (Forrester, 2016)
• 39% of companies don’t keep a documented list of customer experience projects that are currently underway. (Forrester, 2016)
• 79% of employees in CX leading companies are engaged, compared with 49% in the companies with CX below average. (Temkin, 2018)

Customer Service and Support

Customer experience can’t go without customer service.

Channels

• 54% of customers used email customer service channels making it the most commonly used digital customer service channel. (Forrester, 2018)
• 9 in 10 consumers want absolute omnichannel service – they expect a seamless experience when moving from one communication method to another, such as phone to text or chat to phone. (NICE inContact, 2018)
• 59% of customers had a conversation with a customer service representative or agent via telephone, making phone calls the most commonly used customer service channel. (Forrester, 2018)
• 87% of customers find it frustrating to repeat themselves in multiple channels, and 73% question doing business with that brand as a result. (Precisely, 2020)
• 93% of consumers will spend more with companies that offer their preferred option to reach customer service (ex: chat) (Zendesk, 2022)
• 89% of consumers will spend more with companies that allow them to find answers online without having to contact anyone. (Zendesk, 2022)
• More than 70% of customers expect agents to have access to all information relevant to their account and query. (Zendesk, 2022)
• 63% of customers are happy to be served by a chatbot if there is an option to escalate the conversation to a human. (Forrester, 2018)
• 90% of customers prefer to talk to a live service agent over a chatbot. (NICE inContact, 2018)
• Contact center performance drives both loyalty and churn. 90% of consumers said they are likely to stay loyal after a positive call center experience; 73.7% said they are likely to switch after a negative call center experience. (CallMiner, 2020)
• Approximately 50% of consumers will use mobile messaging apps for customer service and support. Another 28% are willing to give mobile messaging a chance.  (Genesys, 2018)
• 68% of customers worry their query gets lost or misunderstood by fully automated services. (Forrester, 2018)
• 76% of customers want human contact to remain part of customer service. (Forrester, 2018)

Speed

• Slow response time (37%) was rated as the leading contributor to a negative experience, followed by a lack of 24/7 customer service support (23%). (Emplifi, 2021)
• 52% of consumers said a fast response within one hour is expected. 1 in 10 consumers wants a response in less than 5 minutes. (Emplifi, 2021)
• Earlier, 50% of consumers give a brand only one week to respond to a question before they stop doing business with them. (Oracle, 2010)
• 73% say that valuing their time is the most important thing a company can do to provide them with good online customer service. (Forrester, 2016)
• 77% of customers believe it takes too long to reach a live agent and consumers will wait on hold for an average of 11 minutes before hanging up. (RightNow, 2010)
• 69% attributed their good customer service experience to quick resolution of their problem. (Zendesk, 2013)
• 72% blamed their bad customer service interaction on having to explain their problem to multiple people. (Zendesk, 2013)

Relationships and Emotions

• 81% of consumers say that getting a satisfactory answer is a very important part of servicing satisfaction, and 74% want a knowledgeable professional. But nearly half also say that personalized service (47%) and appreciation for them as a customer (45%) are very important in providing excellent care. (AmericanExpress, 2017)
• Nine out of 10 consumers value when a business knows their account history and current activities with that company, and seven out of 10 value having the same representative or agent help them each time they interact with the company. (Genesys, 2017)
• 51% of consumers felt like they received nothing after a customer service interaction. (CCMC, 2017)
• 56% of customers with a problem experienced rage. (CCMC, 2017)
• Commonly used practices in customer service, that consumers hate: misuse of automated phone technology e.g. no live person option, outsourcing service abroad, upselling, having to repeat information already given and talking too fast. (CCMC, 2017)

Personalization

Learn how customers value the personalization of service

• 56% of customer experience professionals aim to improve and personalize the customer experience. (Lumoa, 2018)
• 83% of consumers are willing to share their data to enable a personalized experience. (Accenture, 2017)
• Personalization at scale can drive between 5 and 15% revenue growth for companies in the retail, travel, entertainment, telecom, and financial services sectors. (McKinsey, 2017)
• 33% of consumers who abandoned a business relationship in 2016 did so because personalization was lacking. (Accenture, 2017)
• 58% of consumers would switch half or more of their spending to a provider that excels at personalizing experiences without compromising trust. (Accenture, 2017)
• 64% of millennials value anticipation and customization of the experience using their transaction data over privacy concerns. 46% value personalization using preferences and contact info over privacy concerns. At the same time, 45% of baby boomers (age 55 and over) value privacy over personalization. (Genesys, 2018)

Customer Experience Technologies

Find out what technologies CX leaders use

• By 2021, 15% of all customer service interactions will be completely handled by AI, an increase of 400% from 2017. (Gartner, 2017)
• By 2019, over 85% of new packaged customer service and support software will be delivered on a cloud-based model. (Gartner, 2017)
• 48% of CX professionals said that although their companies embrace digital, they don’t think they’ll keep pace with the speed of technology change. (Oracle, 2018)
• 79% of contact center leaders plan to invest in greater AI capabilities in the next two years. (Deloitte, 2021)
• 80.1% of leaders fully automate their data validation, data access policies, and data set management processes, while only 3.2% of lagging organizations fully automate these processes. (IDC, 2021)
• 53% Of CMOs said a lack of skills/knowledge of the technology and/or data management was one of the biggest barriers to realizing their CX vision. (Martech Alliance, 2021)
• Nearly 70% agreed that customer experience would be drastically improved by introducing a customer data platform (or better managing an existing one). (Martech Alliance, 2021)
• 70.5% of CMOs say data compliance, privacy, and ethics are vital to achieving customer experience success. (Martech Alliance, 2021)
• More than 24% of companies report experiencing a lack of customer insights in marketing/customer experience organizations. (Adobe, 2022)
• Technology spend is expected to have substantial expected growth throughout 2022, with notably less spend expected for both facilities and T&E. (Gartner, 2022)
• Over 50% of CX professionals say their organization is planning to use predictive analytics and artificial intelligence ‘somewhat’ or ‘significantly’ more than they were doing so last year. 44% of respondents’ organizations plan to use journey analytics more, as well. (Qualtrics, 2022)
• 31% of organizations have already invested in technology like AI to outpace the competition. (Accenture, 2018)
• 76% of collaboration leaders are investing or expanding their emerging technology investment. (Accenture, 2018)
• 26% of companies leading financially use CX technologies, compared to 7% of laggards. (Bain, 2018)
• Predictive analytics and Artificial Intelligence are in the most demand among CX professionals. (Bain, 2018)

The post 100+ Customer Experience Stats to Know in 2023 appeared first on Lumoa.

Existing customers cost less and spend more. In fact, it costs at least five times more to attract a new customer than to keep an existing customer. And they’re much more likely to make a purchase. If you’re looking to make a sale, you have a 60-70% chance with an existing customer versus just 5-20% with a new customer.

So how do you leverage your existing customer base? By making sure you’re listening to them and meeting their needs, which means that you need to learn about and connect with them. And one sure-fire way to do that is by sending customer surveys.

But beware: not all customer surveys are created equal. If the thought of sending surveys (let alone responding to one) makes you cringe, you’re not alone. That’s because many surveys aren’t thoughtfully designed, which makes taking them a painful experience. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Done right, surveys can be almost effortless for your customers and can be an invaluable resource for your business.

Tips for How to Send effective Customer surveys

Keep it Focused

Long, boring customer surveys lead to survey fatigue, which means customers will get bored and drop out before reaching the end. A ten-question blitz won’t be nearly as effective as a shorter one. Keep things to the point and limit your survey only to what’s most important. And don’t ask questions you already know the answer to! If you are sending the survey to their email on file, you already know all of their account details and past orders – they shouldn’t have to fill them in.

On a similar note, be wary of sending too many surveys per customer, as this can also lead to survey fatigue. Customers will get worn out and stop responding, essentially drying up the well of insights that you can get from your surveys.

One exception is when sending satisfaction surveys following interactions with your customer support team. It’s acceptable to send a survey every time a conversation has been closed. These communications were initiated by the customer, and they’ll understand that this is an attempt to ensure there’s nothing else they need from you.

Recommended reading:
How to conduct B2B customer surveys that provide ROI
How to calculate sample size: a simple guide

Choose the Right Question Structure

There are a lot of options for how to structure your questions including multiple-choice, rank order, or closed-ended. It’s important to choose the right one. These closed question types, while useful for organizing large data sets, can be influenced by your own assumptions and can skew your results. Limit them to follow-up surveys or other instances where you’ve already collected a lot of information from your customers and have a very clear understanding of what they want.

Generally, the best place to start is by asking for a rating, then asking one open-ended question as a follow-up. For example, “What’s the reason for your rating?”  While it’s important to limit the number of questions in a customer survey, don’t shy away from including this open-ended question. Otherwise, you won’t have the full story about their experience.

Recommended reading:
The difference between transactional surveys and relationship surveys
Survey design best practices

Make it Contextual

If you can, work the customer survey into a channel where the customer is already engaging with you. This makes it all the more seamless for them and allows you to gather data across more touchpoints. For example, to gauge how a customer felt about a specific interaction with your team, send a survey through email, or live chat at the end of the conversation.

To get your customer’s thoughts on things like the design and functionality of your website, you can ask them directly within your website. It’s perhaps even more important than with surveys sent through other channels to keep these ones short. Customers likely have a goal in mind when visiting your website, and it’s best not to keep them from that goal, especially if they intend to make a purchase.

Timing is Key

Another big factor for an effective survey is timing. Before you send one, make sure your customer has had enough time with your product that they can form an opinion. On the other hand, if you wait too long, your customer won’t clearly remember their experience, and their feedback will be less specific and actionable for you.

A common benchmark is 30 days after receiving a product or service, but this might shift slightly depending on the specifics of your business and what you’re trying to learn. A good rule of thumb is to think about whether or not the survey will make sense from the customer’s perspective. For example, if you want to understand how customers feel about your ordering process, then wait until a customer places an order before asking.

NPS: a Customer Survey Standard

You can reach out to your customers and get their opinions on anything you’re interested in knowing more about, like how they feel about your pricing or their top new feature requests.

That said, a gold standard in customer surveying is the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey. NPS is a very popular measure of loyalty, based on a customer’s likelihood to recommend you to others. And it’s popular for good reason: NPS can predict revenue growth, with leaders growing twice as quickly as their competitors.

NPS asks customers how likely they are to recommend you to others. Based on their response, they’re separated into three categories: promoters, passives, and detractors.

Promoters are your most loyal customers. They’re your advocates who will refer others and keep coming back to do business with you. On the other end, detractors are actively unhappy. Passives are somewhere in the middle, generally happy but easily lured away by competitors.

NPS always customers to rate, on a scale of 0-10, their response to this question: “How likely would you be to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” As recommended earlier, including a comment field here will allow you to gather more information about the driver behind each rating and equip you with the knowledge you need to serve the customer.

Closing the Loop

While it’s important to set up for success by creating an effective survey, it’s even more important to act on the results. That’s the way to truly make sure you’re meeting your customers’ needs and keeping them loyal to your business.

As you collect responses, you’ll uncover individual opportunities to follow up. In the case of NPS, you can reach out to advocates to further encourage them to refer their friends and family. Passives can be converted to advocates if you can connect with them and improve their experience. Detractors are a prime opportunity to fix something that’s gone wrong and turn things around. And these are big opportunities to boost loyalty because, in some cases, customers can become more loyal after a mishap than if it had never happened.

Regardless, always take the time to thank your customers and let them know they were heard. Personal outreach is best, but at the very least, send an automated note that encourages them to reach back out if there’s anything else they’d like to add. This lets customers know that you’re doing something with their feedback and will encourage them to provide more in the future.

From Insights to Action

You’ll also start to notice trending pain points that affect your customer base at large. As new feedback comes in, you can place it into categories based on common themes. This can be time-consuming, but a customer feedback software like Lumoa can help you do it at scale. To dive deeper into issues, you can set up customer interviews to explore their thoughts in more detail. A two-way conversation is a great way to make sure you have a problem clearly defined.

Armed with this information, you can work across your business to better meet your customers’ needs, doing more of what makes them happy and less of what makes them unhappy.

As you make changes, keep an eye on survey responses to see if what you’ve done has made a positive impact. Contact customers who have complained to see if they’re satisfied with the changes you’ve made.

Don’t stop sending surveys — serving your customers is a continuous improvement cycle. Be sure to keep track of responses over time and regularly review commentary. Your business is ever-changing, and so are your customers’ expectations. Stay on top of what customers are saying so you can stay aligned with them. And when you stay aligned with your customers, they’ll reward you with their loyalty, helping your business thrive.

The post How to Create Better Customer Surveys appeared first on Lumoa.

Surveying customers by email is undoubtedly one of the most popular ways to receive customer feedback. NPS email surveys are one of the most preferred ways to collect customer feedback. That is because NPS usually portrays the perception of a brand as a whole, rather than transactional satisfaction (where CSAT is most widely used).

Often, companies ask their customers to provide feedback again and again, yet all their efforts end up ignored and the response rate stays below 5%. The average response rate of email surveys is 24% according to Fluid Surveys. How does one get higher to the golden rate of 30-40%?

Sure, the relationship with the brand and customer experience itself plays a huge role in that. But it also very much depends on the survey design – from both operational and visual perspectives.

We have created a list of 15 tips that will make your NPS email survey response rate go up right away.

1. Keep up to the NPS formula

NPS consists of 2 questions which are:  “How likely are you to recommend X to a friend or colleague?” on a scale from 0 to 10 and “Why did you give the score?”

Stick to the standard design, wording, and scale to get the results accurate and actionable.

2. Brand your NPS Email surveys

It has become a widespread practice to customize the NPS email survey template to correspond to the brand assets: brand colors, logo designs, fonts.

Don’t forget to adjust the communication style to the brand style if needed.

Take a look at these two examples from Apple and Slack.

Both companies are using their logos, neutral colors, and brand fonts.

Apple keeps to its brand values of simplicity and adds a product image on the side.

Slack, on the other hand, is known for close friendly relationships with customers and an informal style of communication.

3. Personalize the NPS email surveys

Don’t underestimate the power of personalization and the first name, as it is a key email marketing trend that delivers impressive results. Which of the following questions are you more likely to respond to?

Most people would prefer the upper message. No surprise that 74% of marketers say targeted personalization increases customer engagement.

4. Why-question

My first advice is… don’t forget it! Surprisingly too many companies forget to ask for text feedback from their customers by focusing on a score. Understanding why a customer gives you a particular score is vital for sustainable customer experience management.

“The number is useful, but I can’t act on a number. Somebody gives me a six. Then somebody gives me two. Then somebody gives me a ten. I don’t know what to do with a number. All of the value in actually improving a given customer’s experience, or even understanding in aggregate, what customers think of our experience, is from the written feedback.“ – shared Michal Redbord, VP of Customer Service at Hubspot, in our recent interview.

5. Don’t add new questions

The more questions you ask – the less likely customers are to finish the NPS email survey.

Keep it short. The standard NPS survey consists of 2 questions: “How likely are you to recommend X to a friend or colleague?” and “Why did you give the score?”. These 2 questions are enough to give you a detailed picture of the whole customer experience without over-complicating and losing on the response rate.

No matter how tempting it might be to add more questions, keep up to a standard when surveying your general audience.

6. Go Mobile-friendly

According to customer experience statistics, 75% of people complete surveys on their mobile. Test and optimize your survey for mobile. Nothing could be more ironic than a customer who couldn’t leave feedback because of a bad user experience.

Modern email marketing service providers usually have it covered as they develop templates that are mobile-friendly.

7. Send from a person

Creating a real connection with your customer can be significantly enhanced by sending your NPS email survey from the email of an actual employee of the company, rather than a generic mailbox like feedback@acme.com, or even worse, noreply@acme.com. Elevate this personal touch further by incorporating an interactive email signature. This signature should go beyond just showing the sender’s name and position; it could include dynamic elements such as links to start the survey with one click, social media icons for direct engagement, or even a short video greeting from the sender. This approach not only humanizes the interaction but also makes taking the survey as easy and engaging as possible.

Let’s get back to Slack once more. Their NPS surveys have been sent from an email of CMO, Bill Macaitis. We asked Bill what was his best finding when sending out NPS email surveys.

That’s what Bill shared:

“I found when you run really generic bad surveys, they sound like a canned robot wrote it. Who would want to answer “Flight 374 requests feedback”? I noticed that unsurprisingly people are not responding much to those. Also, if you write surveys that have 50 questions in it, people generally don’t respond to those either.

I learned the best NPS email surveys that people respond to are those arriving from a unique person. When we wrote an NPS survey, we would actually say “Hey! This is Bill. I am the CMO from Slack. Your feedback is really important to us and I read every one of your comments.”

8. Schedule according to the customer journey

There are 2 types of NPS surveys:

• Transactional NPS

Transactional NPS is triggered at a particular event (e.g. customer service interaction or use of a new feature) and is sent out immediately. This allows you to find out what people think of the process initially, get fresh and relevant feedback about their feelings after the interaction.

• Relationship NPS

Relationship NPS measures the overall satisfaction and advocacy level of a customer. It is recommended to send the primary survey within 7 to 30 days after the customer subscribed or used your service or product. To track changes in the consumer’s fulfillment, survey them regularly, every 3, 6, or 12 months.

Recommended reading:
The difference between transactional surveys and relationship surveys

Here’re the basics of survey timing 

If you work in SaaS or have a subscription service model, your schedule might look like:

• Initial survey: 15 to 20 days from initial conversion (or if you have a long onboarding process, 30-45 days may be more appropriate).
• Second survey: 90 days from the initial survey (consider 180 days if your customers do not engage with your product frequently).
• Ongoing survey: Depending on what you decided for your second survey, your ongoing surveying should align and recur every 90 or 180 days moving forward until they are no longer a customer.

If you work in e-commerce or retail:

• Initial survey: 5-10 days from their first delivery.
• Second survey: 90 days from the initial survey (This assumes there has been at least one purchase after their initial purchase in this time frame. You might also consider creating separate email marketing campaigns for ‘frequent’ customers and ‘casual’ customers, increasing the number of days between surveys for the latter).
• Ongoing survey: Similar to the survey lifecycle for a SaaS model, your ongoing surveys should automatically recur at the same interval as your second survey as long as the customer remains active in some form.

The timing is different as it reflects the customer journey. Think well before deciding on the final schedules for the NPS email survey. If you send surveys too frequently – customers will likely get annoyed and that will hugely impact your response rate. If you send not enough surveys – you will lose data and might not be fast enough to react to a major issue.

9. Understand the Time of the day / Weekday

Knowing the times when your customers are the most active is crucial for effective communication. Find out when your customers are the most likely to open and read your email, test different times, and weekdays.

At the same time, the studies say that the best time of the week to send emails is Tuesday at 10 am. Other popular days are Thursday and Wednesday, and the most popular times include 8 pm, 2 pm, and 6 am. Note, the time zone should correspond to the majority of your customers’ timezone, or ideally, modern technologies allow scheduling communications based on each person’s timezone individually.

10. Send a Reminder

The lifespan of an email is terribly short, which makes following up incredibly useful tool. Follow-up emails are worth the effort. Most emails get lost after 24 hours and if you didn’t hear back then, the best practice is to follow up. If you utilize email marketing software, there’s a 21% probability of receiving a response to your second email in the event that the first one remains unanswered. At Lumoa, we send one reminder in 3 days after the initial survey which has doubles the response rate of our NPS email surveys.

11. A/B Test your NPS email surveys

A/B tests are not only for your marketing or product design team. Use A/B testing wisely to find out the right approach to your customers.

A/B testing can be valuable because different audiences behave, well, differently. Something that works for one company may not necessarily work for another. In fact, conversion rate optimization experts hate the term “best practices” because it may not actually be the best practice for you.

 What is A/B test itself? A/B testing or split testing is an experiment where you split the audience into two and more groups and test variables (titles, call-to-action, description, pictures, so on) to see which performs better.

What can you test when sending an NPS email survey?

Here’re some ideas:

• Email subject line
• Email sender (account manager vs. marketing manager)
• Survey wording
• Frequency of survey
• Style of message
• Incentive / no incentive
• Email signature

Note, before you start testing, you should think through the goals of the test campaign. Determine your sample size and split your groups randomly and equally. Once you have prepared the basics, test the campaign simultaneously. Day of the week or even time of the day can heavily influence the results. Remember you can test only one variable at a time.

Only one thing is constant – testing itself.

12. Don’t ask more than you can process

There is nothing more upsetting than neglected and ignored customer feedback. When a customer leaves feedback, they expect it to be read.

Some companies go through each customer comment, others randomly select a patch of comments and read-only through them. I’ve seen companies that even collect feedback, but then just store it in the database without ever touching it. Feedback for the sake of feedback.

Don’t ask for feedback if you know you won’t be able to pay enough attention to the results.

“What should I do if I get 10.000+ customer comments each month? Should I read it all?” – you might ask. Here’s where text analytics technologies utilizing natural language processing (NLP) come into help.

With software, like Lumoa, you can analyze a massive amount of customer feedback in minutes. The software will give you an extensive overview of all the factors that influenced the feedback and will help you to create an action plan including all your customers.

13. Say thank you (individual follow-up)

Say thank you to each customer that has shared their opinion. If you get 20 comments, make sure to reach back to every person individually. If you get 10000 comments, schedule an official follow-up.

Some survey tools allow you to customize the end message depending on the users’ input. If the feedback was positive, then a customer is redirected to a “review us”-page and if it’s negative, the customer is directed to customer service.

Make sure to tag critical feedback and reach out to the unhappiest customers. If they left negative feedback, you should be able to reach out right away.

14. Offer an incentive

One of the biggest problems you may face is the low response rate of your survey. Offering an incentive sounds like a win-win, it can be too good to be true. If you’re not careful, your incentive could attract the wrong type of responders who’re there only for the incentive instead of giving you honest feedback.

Check this Guide on Using Survey Incentives to find out the best practice for your company.

15. Follow up (strategic follow-up)

Individual follow up is important to prevent individual churn, but what is even more crucial for business development is to catch the customer churn and encourage customer advocacy on a scale.

Following up on the scale might be an issue if you’re getting thousands of replies. If you can manage to calculate the NPS score by yourself armed with excel, things get tricky when you try to assess all the text feedback.  Some companies go through it all manually, translating, reading through, and tagging all the comments themselves, some read a random selection of those, and some even ignore the comments completely (we highly recommend not to do that).

If you wonder how modern technologies can help, take a look at text analytics. Text analytics can analyze your feedback and give an overview of the topics that require attention and things most loved by customers.

Bonus: Template for your NPS email Surveys

As a bonus, I wanted to share the email that we send to our users.

Here is how we implemented the tips above into our message:

• The email starts with the first name greeting
• We personalized the text based on the time the user has been with Lumoa (in this case, 30 days)
• We use a very friendly voice and communication style
• The sender is the account manager of the company, in this case, Carlos, Co-founder of the company, who has been onboarding the users earlier
• There’s a reminder follow up email in 3 business days to catch those, who missed our first message
• Depending on the reply of the person, the user is directed to “review us” or “contact us” page
• If the feedback is very negative, we reach out to the user
• Finally, we take all the customer feedback into account when developing our product further.

The post 15 Tips On How To Send NPS Email Surveys You Can Implement Right Away appeared first on Lumoa.

In the customer experience field, Bill is often praised for growing Slack with the Net Promoter Score. Bill calls himself a “self-emitted NPS geek” and is a true advocate for better customer experience. We had a short conversation earlier this year to find out what is the secret of these companies (hint: customer experience).

1. What does customer experience mean for you?

 “I noticed in life that incentives drive people. My dad used to say to me: “having a small incentive is all you need for people to change their behavior.

When I started to buy a lot of software as a CMO, I noticed that there were so few great customer experiences. If I would want to watch a video I would have to fill in 20-field forms, then I would get called and keep getting harassed. And when I would finally buy the thing, I’d be “Ok, how do I use this?” and everyone would run away.  If I needed support, I couldn’t find anyone, I couldn’t find the links to helpdesks and it would take me three weeks to get a response. I was confused: this was absolutely the worst experience. Why were all these companies and teams doing this?

And I thought about it. The traditional metrics that are assigned to teams are the number of leads or number of deals closed. Customer success is often judged on how much more did they sell to customers, support is judged by how little is spent on support…

We are just minting out all these horrible experiences and yet like we want to go faster, we want to get more people to recommend us, talk about us and buy more… I thought that we can re-write all the metrics toward experience-based metrics and encourage employees to give a better experience.

I like NPS, it’s the sum of all these experiences that you have. It’s not just product marketing experience but your experience in from marketing, sales, support, legal to how fast the pages load. It’s everything, right? At Slack, we intensively used NPS and CSAT, we surveyed everyone, and we had a very specific methodology. You have to be proactive and when people responded, we would reach back out to them. It was an incredible learning experience. I fully recommend it.”

2. What is so special about Net Promoter Score?

“NPS gives you so many incredible benefits that it can fundamentally change your company growth. With NPS you can fundamentally change your company’s direction. If you’re a customer-driven company, and you’re not measuring NPS yet, that is one of the best things you can do to finally transform your company.”

3. Would you reach out to every single customer with an NPS survey?

“I like the methodology starting with the simple premise that we really want to help people to know how to use us. If there’s an issue we want to provide the addressee before they turn, we want to be minting our promoters, so we want to understand everyone in the company.

From just a pure marketing and sales point of view, you need to understand who the champions of your accounts are. They are your best advocates and they are the ones who are speaking on your behalf and introducing you to other people.

They are going to go to battle for you internally. You are never selling to only a person buying from you, they have to get through legal, procurement, IT, compliance. I believe that you should survey everyone.

Now with that said, I don’t like surveying anyone more than twice a year. You have to be careful about that, and at the same time automate the surveys so that they are always happening and you get feedback in real-time. It is extremely important to have an understanding of how every single person or organization feels about you and be corrective about that. Use all the data that comes from the NPS surveys to shake product roadmap and to improve your service.”

4. How do you increase the response rates of NPS?

“I found when you run really generic bad surveys, they sound like a canned robot wrote it. Who would want to answer “Flight 374 requests feedback”? I noticed that unsurprisingly people are not responding much to those. Also, if you write surveys that have 50 questions in it, people generally don’t respond to those either.

I learned the best surveys that people respond to are those arriving from a unique person. When we wrote an NPS survey, we would actually say “Hey! This is Bill. I am the CMO from Slack. Your feedback is really important to us and I read every one of your comments.” I did read them.”

5. Did you go through every single feedback comment even if there were thousands?

“Definitely. I think that a huge part of the role of CMO is to understand your customers’ pain points. The best thing with NPS is its one-sentence question “How likely are you to recommend, in this case, Slack, to a friend or colleague?” on a scale from 0 to 10.

The most important thing when you run the surveys is to ask the “why”-question. And once you get to all those why-questions you understand what the top reasons why people love us are (also, the top reasons why people hate us).

And many times your job in marketing or sales is to describe the company and a lot of times marketers tend to use their own more visionary words. If you just put it in the words that customers are saying, you will get a lot further.

For example, for Slack, it could be: “I feel that I am more productive, I am getting less email, I have more transparency with my company, more alignment…” We try to use the phrases they use to help us shape our value proposition.

On the flip side, we used a lot of the reasons why the detractors did not like us to shape our roadmap. And at the time we were building a lot of advanced features, but the feedback was just “Hey, you know I want the upload to go faster, I want your basic search to work better”. In the end, we decided to fix those more basic things. The data that customers give us is so important: it helps in shaping your value proposition, your messaging, your product roadmap and it’s just so valuable to just understand how your customers feel about you.”

6. How would you encourage promoters?

“One of the most important things is to just understand that these promoters are your fans, your champions, the folks that love you and are spreading the good word.

They are really an incredible part of your growth story and you have to understand who these people are, and show them some love, give them a platform to share their word. At Zendesk, we asked people to write a public review or sometimes we invited them to come to the office, meet some of the team. Sometimes we asked them to be interviewed for our next roadmap or to make a testimonial for us.In some cases we even said something like: Hey I’ve noticed that you love our product, would you mind introducing us to another department that you think would be a good fit for our company?”

There are so many great ways to kind of step into that evangelism and I think it’s just critically important. You want to understand and help these accounts, find who are these people, what are the problems they are facing and fix them.

One of the things that we and a lot of software companies would run into is how many cycles do we give towards fixing bugs vs. just developing new features. Of course, new features are always shiny, beautiful and everyone wants them, but the bug is like the pebble in your shoe, a little annoying at first but when you walk with it for a week it would be extremely uncomfortable. NPS gives you the answers.  Sometimes you may need to pause on building out new features and take care of some of these bugs that are causing a really bad experience.”

7. Last question, how would you measure ROI of customer experience management with NPS?

 Let’s say you have an average NPS score of 10. Now you embark in this customer-centric philosophy, you address a lot of issues, your delight your customers. So your score goes up to 40.

This means that if you have ten people in the room, in the past, when the score was 10, only 1 person was actively recommending you out of 10. Now your score is 40 and you have 4 people that are actively recommending you.

Then model this, find out how your advocacy actually increased. You can measure that by sending out the survey to the new users asking, “how did you hear about us?” People trust other people and so the word-of-mouth is converting much better and probably has a higher CLV, better deal size. Now you can attribute all this growth that is coming into investing in experience. If you look at the most successful companies in history, just from the purest perspective they all have like incredible NPS scores: Amazon, Netflix… These companies are fanatic about their experience and crazy about their NPS scores. We should all look up to that.”

The post 7 Questions About Net Promoter Score Surveys – Bill Macaitis appeared first on Lumoa.

It’s not that easy.

Now, consumers are overloaded with surveys and content from businesses more than ever.  The typical customer survey response rate is often below 2%. How can you make sure that your response rates are actually higher than that?

Beware of timing

Timing is crucial. Often companies send out NPS surveys right after a customer has ordered a product. And… they get results on how good their online store is designed, not how good the product is. To evaluate feedback on your product properly, send an NPS survey after 1-2 weeks since the product has been delivered. Although there are no standards, the usual timing for NPS initial survey is 30 days after the start of the use of software or an app. Otherwise, timing largely depends on your business model, onboarding setup, engagement, and relationship with your customers.

Make it a habit

Ideally, you would be sending NPS surveys daily, checking up with both new and loyal customers. Although the timing for the first initial survey depends on what kind of business you have, later the surveys could be sent every 90 days or would depend on your customer lifecycle. The reasoning behind sending the surveys quarterly is that on average a detractor needs at least 90 days to leave for good and you need to follow up if you want to prevent this from happening. Plus, you’re not intrusive with everyday surveys and leave space for your customer to think about his experience.

Use a multi-channel approach

It might be confusing to figure out the most effective channel to ask for feedback. Should you send out e-mails? Or make a pop-up notification inside your software?

The truth is that reaching out to your customers by e-mail might lower the response rate, but stands out for more qualitative responses, and vice versa when it comes to the in-app surveys. However, an in-app survey would help you to find detractors better and will give you a chance to follow up and improve the experience of a user. After all, the customer comes first –  keep your relationship with them in mind when deciding which channels would be the best. Most often the best channel for feedback is the one your customer is used to when being in contact with you: in-app if they use your app, SMS if you ask for feedback about the phone customer service, etc.

What about copywriting?

Find a creative approach to market your surveys and get higher response rates. You could ask or hand it over to your marketing team. After all, the success of your surveys sometimes lies in such small details as head titles and subject lines of e-mails, as these are the first words to capture attention and are the only words a user sees on the mobile device. Still, don’t get too creative when wording the NPS question itself. Net Promoter Score is always asked in a standard way.

No additional questions

Adding more questions to NPS could cut the response rate in half. Consumers will tell you what drives their behavior and what is truly important. Make it easy to share opinions. Remember, that with each added click or question, your chances of someone finishing a survey drop by 50%.

If the additional questions are a “must”, do it outside your NPS survey. Target specific customer segments who might be impacted by the topic.

Be careful with incentives

As much as it might be tempting to offer an incentive to receive more responses, consider it carefully. Incentives can cause some bias in the results because some consumers would not think about the responses but just click through in order to get the prize. However, it is more important to get some feedback with a small bias than to get no feedback or very little feedback with no bias. So if you have a hard time convincing your customers to provide you feedback in a timely manner, a small prize can help. Luckily incentives are not normally needed in NPS surveys. This is because NPS surveys are short and easy to answer. Companies doing long customer research surveys are more typically forced to use prizes to get their response rates to a reasonable level.

And finally…

Golden rule #1: Make it personal & follow-up

If you send surveys by e-mail, make them personal. Starting with the e-mail design, insert the name of the person you are going to ask. Then, send an e-mail from an individual instead of a “no-reply” e-mail. The chance that you’ll get an e-mail reply is still low, but it makes a psychological difference.

After you have received a reply, do a follow-up. Ideally, you would respond to every single customer manually, but in order to save time, you could write automatic replies for each category of customers, depending on their scores and feedback. Building personal relationships with your customers will both raise the response rates in the future and the scores themselves.

The post 7 Ways to Increase Response Rate of NPS Surveys appeared first on Lumoa.