Think before surveying customers

A lot of my clients approach me asking for advice and support to launch surveys to gather insights and feedback from their customers.

That’s certainly a valuable approach to uncovering potential areas for improvement, identifying issues, and learning about what they are doing well and not so well.

Before taking the survey path, I typically check to see if they are already gathering customer feedback through other means, not necessarily formal surveys, but by listening and interacting with customers. Ultimately, what we want is to collect feedback from customers regardless of the specific method used.

The concern we should all have with surveys is what is known as ‘customer fatigue’, which is something to avoid as it can be significantly detrimental to our communications and our brand reputation.

Customers nowadays are inundated with an excess of surveys, asking them to take the time to provide feedback on support agents or to rate their shopping experience. It’s become quite overwhelming, with multiple surveys landing in our inbox every week. This persistence is often excessive and the feedback can sometimes be of little value.

So before sending a survey to your customers, you have to consider whether you absolutely need to ask those questions. Is there a way to obtain the answers without asking?

Very often, surveys ask questions that the company should already know the answers to, such as how frequently a customer makes purchases or the reasons for reaching out to support or filing a complaint.

Surveys should only pose questions that are necessary and cannot be answered in any other way than by asking the customer directly. Additionally, we should only ask about things that we are ready to take action on.

Data, for instance, is a powerful source of insights that should be examined before engaging with customers and potentially wasting their time. This includes their login history, interactions with support teams, complaints, purchases, and returns. Companies have access to a wealth of data that can provide valuable insights into how their customers behave and interact.

I personally love complaints. Having a good complaints process in place provides a company with valuable feedback, uncovers potentially harmful issues for a significant portion of customers, and most importantly, provides a clear list of issues to fix as soon as possible.

The marketing directors I often talk to love sharing successful stories. Dramatic case studies that began with negative feedback but ended with improvements for hundreds or thousands of customers are powerful stories to tell. Complaints can provide that kind of story. We only need a good process in place to receive, work on, take action on, and audit them. Once everything is resolved, we can proudly showcase them as solid case studies that demonstrate our commitment to customer experience.

In conclusion, it is beneficial to conduct customer surveys to gather their feedback about our brand. However, it’s important to note that surveys should not be the sole method of gathering customer feedback. We should integrate surveys with other strategies and resources to effectively listen to our customers.

Jaime Valle picture
Jaime Valle

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