Using Survey Platforms to Engage Your Customer Experience Touchpoints

With nearly two-thirds of respondents stating that personal experience has a major influence on their decisions about which brands they choose to do business with, the ability to provide a quality customer experience has never been more vital.

However, you won’t know how your customers rate the experience they’ve received from you or be able to effectively improve it unless you ask them first. And the online customer survey is the best way to achieve this.

Why it’s crucial to collect feedback across all customer experience touchpoints

With today’s sophisticated customer experience involving more touchpoints and interactions than ever before, the ability to capture feedback in a myriad of ways across both traditional and digital channels is critical. Tip: read our comprehensive guide to customer experience management - what it is and what it entails.

Fortunately, with a bit of research it’s possible to identify online survey providers with best in class solutions that can offer a wide range of distribution methods to enable you to capture in the moment feedback from a wide range of customers.

From a product, client or customer service satisfaction, to support evaluation or buying experience, whatever area of your business you need to improve, there is a distribution method to best meet your scenario and touchpoint.

Based on our own experiences of helping customers across a wide range of sectors reach out to different audience groups, we’ve outlined below some of the most popular distribution methods you can use to connect with your customers via surveys and examples of scenarios where they are best used.

Selecting the right survey distribution method

Face-to-face (F2F)

This more traditional method of surveying is still popular in certain situations. From remote locations to in-store and on the high street, F2F surveys can offer you more in-depth data collection and a more comprehensive understanding, as an interviewer is able to see body language, facial expressions and probe for deeper explanations or responses. However, it is also important to balance this against the fact that can be more time consuming and costly than other approaches.

Offline

Whether you’re conducting a countrywide research road show, a post-show survey of an agricultural event, or you’re a regional sales exec with numerous face-to-face appointments. There could be many occasions where you find yourself in locations with little or no internet access. In such a scenario, the ability to conduct an offline survey, where you collect and store responses on your mobile device, ready for them to be uploaded to your account, as soon as you are re-connected to the internet is extremely valuable.

Email

One of the most popular survey distribution channels for businesses, email surveys are simple to setup and quick to deploy. The flexibility it provides to personalise your overall message, embed a survey link, or add individual questions into the body of an email such as ‘How would our rate our service today?’ – all help to maximise response rates and gather that all important feedback.

SMS

Modern consumers are literally attached to their mobile phones, and as people tend to check messages more regularly than they do their emails, you will want to consider collecting customer feedback via SMS survey invitations. Its immediacy and ease of reach, makes the SMS ideal for a range of scenarios, from a feedback survey sent to air travel passengers immediately after their aircraft has landed, to a survey distributed to a customer after they have completed a phone call with a customer support team or following their receipt of a product delivery.

A good example of the latter can be seen in our case study with a flat pack furniture giant. The retailer utilised the SMS feature of our survey software to enable a more immediate way of gaining feedback from their customers about their delivery at the point of experience.

QR codes

can be very effective when you want to garner your customers’ views about your product or experiences following an in-store visit. With their ability to be easily printed onto range of material from product packaging, catalogues, menus, posters and even at the bottom of sales receipts, they are quick and convenient way of connecting your customer with a relevant feedback survey. For anyone not familiar with them, QR codes are very much like barcodes that contain coded information. A QR code is an image that stores a url, which can be scanned and opened by a QR scanner, or a directly via the camera app on most phones these days.

Website pop up

Whether it’s new messaging, a new product, a fresh page layout, or overall views about your site, a pop-up is a great way to gather the experiences of visitors at different trigger points across your site.

Social media

With more and more people using social media channels as a way of communicating with an organisation, this can be another effective way to collect feedback from your customers.

Why it’s vital to capture opinion across all CX touchpoints

With customer experience now more critical than product and price in nurturing a customer’s affinity with a company brand, it’s essential to ensure you’re capturing feedback across all your customer experience touchpoints. Without this you’ll be unable to get a complete picture of the customer experience you’re delivering and make any necessary improvements you need. And you’ll risk falling behind competitors who are already doing this, who also have one eye on the next generation of survey distribution advancements and how best to use these for collecting customer feedback.