Best Practices To Gain More Value From Your Customer Experience Survey

From Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES) to Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), Churn Rate and Retention Rate. Beyond the Net Promoter Score® there are now many more metrics you can deploy with customer surveys to measure different aspects of and better understand your overall customer experience management efforts.

However, while these metrics will give you much greater clarity about your customer experience, there are also some best practice considerations you need to think about first if you’re going to maximise the value of running your customer experience survey.

We go on to explore some of the best of these below.

Five best practice considerations for CX surveys

1) Deploy different metrics to best track different stages of your customer’s journey

As already discussed, metrics have a vital role to play in measuring different aspects of your customer’s journey. If you’re relying on just a single metric, it will be difficult to get a complete picture of your customer’s satisfaction covering all their interactions with your organisation.

For example, while you could deploy a CES metric to measure how easy it was for a customer to complete a transaction on your website, a CSAT metric measurement would be much more appropriate for evaluating a customer’s satisfaction levels following a support call with one of your staff.

For more information about the metrics we’ve referenced in this piece and how they relate to different aspects of your customer experience journey, you may also like to read our ‘Looking Beyond Net Promoter Score to Measure Customer Experience’ piece.

2) Make leaving feedback as quick and simple as you can

Your customers’ feedback is crucial to enabling you to measure their customer experience, so you need to make the process of leaving feedback as quick and simple as you can for them.

Firstly, you need to keep your survey short, clear and precise, as customers won’t want to spend a lot of time answering your questions and could abandon it altogether if they find it too long and awkward to complete.

Secondly, you need to think carefully about your survey’s distribution channels. If your customers prefer using live chat software to reach out to you for support, don’t try to collect their feedback via a call centre representative or email campaign, think about how you can integrate your survey into their preferred channel instead. Implementing surveys into webchat applications is something we’re highly experienced at, having carried out many successful projects for our customers. A good example of this is the work we did for uSwitch, which you can find out more about in our uSwitch case study.

Finally, try not to annoy your customers with too many survey prompts. Instead, try to survey them only at the most critical points on their customer journey with you, which should also help to ensure you obtain only the most valuable information.

3) Focus your survey efforts on customers that bring the highest value

For some parts of the customer journey such as your website, instead of collecting feedback from everyone, it’s possible to focus on just your highest value customers. And in the case of website visitors these will be those who purchase your products or services at an increased frequency, while also spending more money when compared to your average customer.

The idea behind this, is that of all your customers, those who spend the most and keep coming back to you are probably the best placed to communicate about how well your organisation is performing in terms of customer satisfaction.

4) Measure customer experience frequently and consistently

If you’re to realise the greatest value from running your customer experience survey you need to be frequent and consistent with your metrics.

If you’re to improve your customers’ satisfaction levels, you need to be regularly collecting and evaluating their feedback, as only continuous and long-term measurement can reveal the information and any data trends from your metrics that you need to make those improvements.

Similarly, you won’t get any meaningful results if you keep changing the CX metrics you use to measure your customers feedback. To be able to effectively measure customer experience success for different periods, you need to be able to compare like-for-like metrics for those contrasting periods.

5) Define and prioritise the best CX metrics for your business

Not all the customer experience measurement metrics offer the same value for different businesses and can be influenced by factors including:

• Your business size
• Your business industry
• The goals you’re looking to achieve from the results that those measurements reveal

Instead of trying to incorporate every single CX metric, try to focus on those metrics that are most relevant and will provide the most useful information for your business. If you’re not sure what these are you need to consider what aspects your customers find the most important in their relationship with your organisation.

If you operate in the service industry, which is very much customer facing, it’s likely that your customers will be the most concerned with the quality of your customer service, which is best measured through the CSAT metric. So, if you’re using the right CX metrics and regularly surveying your customers to evaluate their feedback, you’ll be in the best position for dealing with their pain points and making the improvements you need to improve satisfaction levels.

Why it’s never been easier to resolve customer pain points with CX

Given the diversity of metrics that inform customer experience strategies – and that can help you better track a customer’s satisfaction throughout their journey with your organisation – it’s never been easier to discover your clients’ pain points.

However, you still need to employ the correct CX metrics at the right stage of your customer’s journey. If you can do this, you’ll never be in a better position to make the right improvements, with your finger continuously on the pulse of what your customers are thinking and need.