6 steps to creating a customer feedback program.
A survey program gives a voice to your customers and will help you make better decisions. It can be easy to get caught up in running your business and lose touch with the day-to-day of how your customers are experiencing your brand, products, and services. If you do not have a survey program set up, you can easily find out problems when it is too late and when problems have escalated. Customers are savvy and word of mouth is everything so you need to utilize the customer voice to drive your decisions and ensure you maintain the quality of your brand.
Step 1: Identify your goals.
It is tempting to jump right into selecting a survey platform but there are a lot of choices out there and your business objectives should define the platform you select. You can easily select a platform that is too robust and expensive for your current needs or one that will not scale quickly enough for your needs.
As part of defining the objectives of your survey program, questions that should be answered include:
What is driving our desire to create a survey program?
What are we wanting to know from our customers?
What will we do with the information if we find large issues?
Who has strategic ownership of this program?
How will this information affect our strategic decisions moving forward?
Step 2: Select your audience.
Take a look at your customer base and segment your audiences for who you want to focus on surveying. It can be by personas, transaction types, products, etc. Be specific and focus on how this audience can help you answer the questions you answered in step 1.
Step 3: Review your data.
Most survey programs are triggered off of batch or live data. You will need to work with your data team to identify if you have a way to send the data for the selected audiences and actions. You can start off with manually sent surveys but this quickly becomes difficult to scale and you lose the immediacy with your customers. Evaluating your data before you start selecting your platform will ensure that your solution will support your requirements.
Step 4: Select your platform.
You should compare at least five different survey vendors as part of your due diligence. Before you begin reviewing systems, define what your platform requirements and needs are to avoid getting distracted during the sales process and to ensure a thorough comparison between platforms.
Step 5: Design your survey.
The way you design your survey will impact your completion rates and customer fatigue so it is important to take your time. Some elements that should be included as part of the design include:
Questions should be short and easy to understand.
Fatigue rules (how many times someone can get a survey in a set period of time) should be established.
Length of the survey.
Format of answers such as open text or multiple choice.
Step 6: Create an action plan.
Your organization needs to determine ahead of time who will be responding to negative and positive surveys, what is done with the data, reporting, and how your organization will act on the information you receive. By agreeing on this information ahead of time, you will ensure that your investment will be leveraged and there will be ownership after implementation.
