This blog is an ultimate guide on how to plan and execute your customer feedback campaigns. Businesses who are operating in Dubai or anywhere else in the UAE are well aware of the ever changing demands of their customers and the high competitive dynamics of the market. It is extremely important for businesses to maintain the highest level of customer satisfaction and happiness. Businesses do invest a lot in customer satisfaction solutions, customer service and customer relationship management tools in order to improve customer happiness and customer satisfaction. The happy and satisfied customers are crucial for a long term success and higher profitability. The studies have showed that it is almost 9 to 12 times expensive to acquire a new customer comparing to selling to an existing one. That could make a huge difference. In order to satisfy the customers a businesses must have to fulfill their needs, desires and expectations.
It is wise to ask them directly about what they want, how they see you as a brand and what kind of opinion they have about your business, products/services, employees and all other touch points in the customer journey. The direct customer feedback can provide extremely accurate data and very in-depth insight to their mind and their opinion about the brand and all other relevant aspects. This will enable the businesses to lay down polices, make adjustments, plan for improvements and invest resources wisely to improve both the efficiency of the business as well as the customer satisfaction. Which is a guarantee to a long term success and growth. In this blog we will discuss how any business can and should plan and execute their customer feedback campaigns.
Set Goals for the Customer Feedback Campaign
For any reasonable customer feedback campaign the goals should be set realistically. If a business knows what its customers want and what its strength and weaknesses are, they are already way ahead of most of the competition. For any customer feedback campaign there should be a goal in mind. The customer feedback campaigns will provide data which will help businesses to understand a particular aspect of the customer interaction and customer journey. For example if a campaign is set to evaluate the behavior of the customer support staff, then the goal is to understand the work quality and work efficiency of the respective team. If the business is conducting a survey about the quality or features of the product then the goal should be to evaluate that particular product only. The customer feedback campaigns cost both efforts and money, it is important that the goals of the customer feedback campaign aligns with the goal of the business. The goals should be clear, attainable and the information you are intended to collect should return actionable data.
While setting up goals for the campaign it is important to analyze all the challenges you are facing and then prioritize them in an order according to their effects on the growth and sales. For example if your business is facing higher customer churn rate or if your business is facing issues with the customer support team then the goals should be set to reduce the customer churn rate by 3% to 5% per quarter and improving customer support team efficiency by 10% by the end of the year and so on. Such goals are attainable and realistic, when businesses set goals as per the challenges they are facing they can collect precise data just to evaluate the relevant aspects of the problem. This will help them identifying the areas of improvement and they can take steps and make strategies to prevent such problems in future.
Plan Resources for the Customer Feedback Campaign
As the popular saying goes ‘by failing to plan you are planning to fail’. That is so true in every aspect of our life. We have witnessed in Dubai and all around UAE when businesses failed either they don’t have a proper plan or strategy or their goals are unrealistic. We have already discussed how a business should set their goals for the customer feedback campaigns, let us talk about planning resources for the same campaigns. No matter how big or small a business is the person who is responsible for the customer feedback campaign always have limited resources and/or limited authority within the organization. In order to make the customer feedback campaign successful it is extremely crucial to utilize the limited resources intelligently and to have a plan of action in place before you execute the campaign.
For example, which channels would be used and what type of data will be collected, how it will be analyzed and to whom it would be shared with, these all things have to be planed before initiating any customer feedback campaign. It is extremely important that the right person receives the right data so that they can put it in use while making changes or doing upgrades to achieve the goals.
Design a Customer Feedback Campaign and Surveys
Now that all the challenges have been identified, resources have been estimated, it is time to design an actual customer feedback campaign and a survey. A campaign could have various different customer feedback surveys, and in some cases a customer feedback campaign have only one customer feedback survey. Different goals required different set of information, sometimes a business have to conduct multiple customer feedback surveys to collect the desired data. It is important that all the data that is being collected is sufficient and also provide the required information with maximum level of accuracy and quality. Most of the time when businesses execute a customer feedback campaign they end up with a tons of data, that is neither organized nor useable to compile reports. This is important too, as if the data that is being collected is not well organized, then it would be quite challenging to extract the required information for each stakeholder.
Here are some of the most commonly used customer feedback types which can help you collect required information in a very well-organized form:
- NPS Survey (Net Promoter Score)
- CSAT Score (Customer Satisfaction Survey)
- CES Survey (Customer Effort Score)
- General Rating Survey
- Customized Survey
1. NPS Survey (Net Promoter Score)
The NPS or Net Promoter Score is a very simple and straightforward customer feedback survey type. Whether businesses need to collect a huge amount of data or whether the customer feedback is supposed to be collected from a handful of customers the NPS Score is a great measure of the overall performance of the entire business or its branch. The NPS Score survey questions are asking the customer for their overall satisfaction with the brand or its products or it could be the customer service.
- How likely are you to recommend our brand/products or services to your family, friend or coworker? Please rate on the scale of 0 to 10
The NPS score is measured usually as a rating from 0 to 10, where 0 to 6 are the detractor, who never recommend, 7 to 8 are passive, there are very less chances that they will recommend and 9 to 10 are actual promoter who are most likely to recommend. That is how the NPS Score customer feedback campaign’s results are calculated.
2. CSAT Score (Customer Satisfaction Survey)
The CSAT Score is a general satisfaction customer feedback data type. It is usually a general question asking customer about their experience, interaction or satisfaction. The best practice is to use only a single question, but sometimes a follow up question can also be added. For a negative customer feedback businesses can also ask for their comments or suggestion in a plain box.
- How was your today’s interaction with our staff?
- How happy or unhappy you are with our today’s service?
The answer is usually a rating scale from 1 to 5. Where only 4 and 5 are considered as a positive rating and the remaining are taken as a negative rating. The number of responses with a 4 and 5 rating (satisfied) are divided by the total number of responses and then multiplied by the 100 will give you the CSAT Score.
3. CES Survey (Customer Effort Score)
The CES Survey or Customer Effort Score is a very important type of customer feedback data. It is a measurement or evaluation of the problems or the level of difficulty that customer had to face during any particular interaction. This help businesses to evaluate various business processes which are impacting customer experience and customer happiness.
- How easy of difficult it was to get the [service name] service?
The CES Survey results could be different in different regions and the business industry could also impact the results. The calculation is simple, but there are two standards. One is simple which a rating scale from 1 to 7 is and the other is a bit more complex with a rating gauge from 1 to 5. The first one is considered a bit more precise where answer ranging from 1 to 3 is taken as negative, the 4 is discarded, and the answer 5 to 7 is taken as a positive feedback. In the second standard or also known as CES 2.0 the answer with 1 to 3 is negative and the answer with 4 and 5 is considered a positive response. The calculation is same for both which is the total sum of all the responses divided by the total number of feedbacks/responses.
4. General Rating Surveys
The general rating survey questions are simple rating questions asking customer to share their opinion about a particular aspect of the customer journey or the features of the products or services and the general rating survey questions can also be used to evaluate the employee performance.
- How would you like to rate the new [feature name] feature which is absolutely free?
- Today you met [employee name], how would you like to rate him/her?
Basically the general rating is a traditional 5 star rating or a customized rating scale with value 1 to 5 where 1 is poor and the 5 means excellent. The calculation is different for different types of questions, however usually it is the total sum of the ratings divided by the total number of the options, in case of 5 star rating that number would be 5 and in case of 3 star rating that number would be 3.
5. Customized Survey
The customized surveys are usually a long customer feedback survey with multiple questions. The surveys are designed on the bases of requirement and the questions are set to improve the quality of the customer feedback data and to produce quantifiable results. However, in customized customer feedback surveys there are always two types of results some of them are quantifiable and the others are not. Businesses often use conditional logics, both close ended and open ended questions along with facility to allow the customers to input their remarks as a plain text. Hence the results produced from such surveys require in-depth analysis to produce actionable reports. The data is usually analyzed by nominal, ordinal, ratio and interval scales. In addition to that the results should be analyzed manually in order to produce quantifiable reports.
The above mentioned customer feedback survey types are most widely used by businesses all over the world. The customer centric businesses in Dubai and in other emirates of UAE are also following the above mentioned customer feedback campaign types to achieve desired goals. Once the customer feedback survey is designed as per the goals of the campaign, the next step is to reach out to your audience.
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Chose Right Channels for Your Customer Feedback Campaign
Selecting a right channel is the most crucial part for any customer feedback campaign. The important thing here is to understand that the primary aim of any customer feedback campaign is to get enough response which can assure the quality of the data. Obviously not everyone is inclined to take time to share their opinion, so the aim is to get as many responses as possible. For that it is very important that you are using right platform to communicate with your customers. The first step is to decide how many feedbacks are needed. For example for a product [XYZ] the total number of customers are 100 and you are aiming to ask 500 people about that product than the results would be not so accurate. It also depends on the type of the survey, for some surveys you might want to reach out to all of your customers or even non-customers too. Just make sure that the quantity you are getting is enough to determine the quality as well.
There are multiple channels to reach out to your customers for example, Emails, SMS, Mobile Apps, in-premises touch screens/tablets, web portals, calls, and one to one discussions or manual feedback collection. Let us take the example of the email surveys. For example your last email survey’s response rate was 20% and your sample size is 80, it means you think that if you got response from 80 customers your will be able to accurately evaluate whatever you want to evaluate. That mean your will have to survey 400 people or its better to keep this figure a little bit higher. In case if it is your first time for conducting customer feedback survey through emails then keep the same calculation and assume the response rate as 20%. Although 20% might not sound too good, but it is sufficient. Similarly the same calculation can be done for the other channels.
It is better to use a single channel at first then utilize multiple channels. Same customer feedback data can be collected from multiple platforms. Although the accuracy and the response rate would be different but the data can be collected. In such scenarios it is better to analyze the results of each channel separately and then merge them in the final report.
Here are popular customer feedback types with their suitable channels:
- NPS Score: In-Premises Touch Screens, Emails, Websites, Mobile Apps, SMS
- CSAT Score:In-Premises Touch Screens, Emails, Calls, Mobile Apps, SMS
- CES Survey:In-Premises Touch Screens, Websites, Mobile Apps, SMS
- General Rating Survey:In-Premises Touch Screens, Emails, Websites, Mobile Apps, SMS, Social Media Platforms
- Customized Survey:Emails, Websites, Mobile Apps, SMS
Close the Loop (Closed Loop Customer Feedback Campaign)
The closed look customer feedback campaign is the most reliable and fruitful customer feedback campaign. It not only generate actionable data to aspire actions but it also require the businesses to communicate those actions with their customers. Which is very helpful in improving business customer relationship and trust. The customer feedback loop is not a single process but it is multi-stepped operation which involves following steps:
- Customer Feedback Collection via Various Survey Channels
- Analyze Customer Feedback Data and Quantify Reports
- Share Relevant Customer Feedback Data/Reports with the Concerned Persons/Departments
- Take Actions and Build Strategy
- Communicate your Actions with your Customers
When a customer is taking time to attempt a customer feedback survey or sharing their opinion via on-premises touch screen, they are expecting some response from the business too. A thank you message might not suffice in the case of negative feedbacks. So, it is important that a business inform all its customers about the action that have been taken in response to the feedback their customers have submitted. This improve business customer relationships, give them a sense of empowerment, and they feel more connected to the brand. That is why it is important to close the customer feedback loop.
Conclusion
The customer feedback data is very crucial and it can provide a deep insight to the customers’ minds. The customer feedback data can tell businesses about their customers’ needs, expectations, problems, thoughts, suggestions and opinions. It is extremely important to execute a customer feedback campaign properly to ensure a positive outcome. There are several different types of customer feedback surveys, each one is effective for a certain set of goals and objectives, it is important to choose a right campaign type, with right survey, right questions and also the right platforms for those customer feedback type. In this blog we have covered all important aspects of executing a successful customer feedback campaign. If you want to learn more or need help with your future customer feedback campaigns, feel free to contact us through our Contact Us page or leave a comment in the comment box below and we will get in touch with you soon.
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