If you work in marketing, customer success, or customer experience, you face multiple high hurdles. One of them is running a successful customer experience program. A whole other is convincing your bosses that your programs can significantly boost your bottom line.
Christine Rimer, SurveyMonkey’s own Senior Director of Product Operations, has spent over 20 years as a senior operations and customer success leader in Silicon Valley—so she knows a thing or three (or more) about running a CX program that moves the needle.
Here are three best practices from Rimer:
1) Be thoughtful about how you collect information.
Thinking about which customers you’re targeting, as well as how you’re segmenting them, is extremely important. For example: if you’re running a program measuring the customer experience of enterprise customers, you want to be able to differentiate feedback from decision makers vs. power users. After all, the actions you’ll take based on each segment’s results will vary.
Knowing who you’re collecting information from is important, but so is how often. Annual or biannual customer satisfaction surveys are common, but in today’s high-speed landscape, that may not be enough to keep proactively improving your customer experience. At SurveyMonkey, we send customer satisfaction surveys to a subset of customers every month—a cadence made possible by powerful automation and analysis capabilities, like you’ll find in SurveyMonkey CX.
2) Design surveys with purpose.
Keeping your customers’ interests in mind is also critical when designing your surveys. One thing to consider: what’s the level of investment your customers have in the experience you’re measuring? If it’s a digital banking platform, decision makers and power users are more likely to provide rich, detailed feedback when asked why they gave a particular rating. On the other hand, a lower investment item (say, a stick of deodorant) is less likely to yield meaningful insights from open-ended questions.
Another big consideration is the impact mobile has on the survey taking experience. Typing lengthy answers on a mobile device is taxing for the user. Designing surveys that incorporate more device-friendly actions like tapping and swapping will boost completion rates, especially among younger, mobile-heavy audiences.
3) Analysis needs to be actionable.
You’ve targeted and segmented your survey respondents, designed and sent your survey—now you have to analyze your results and turn those insights into action.
Leveraging tools and automation is key to saving time and resources, so you can focus on taking those actions. The right solutions, like SurveyMonkey CX, can help you break down your promoters, detractors, and passives by geography, account rep, or other relevant filters. SurveyMonkey CX can also help you easily extract insights from open text or typed responses.
Once you’ve dug some insights from your data, you have to figure out:
- What those insights mean for your organization
- How you’ll act on them to improve the customer experience
- How to connect an improvement in customer satisfaction with a financial upside (this is often the most difficult, but most important, step)
More ways to move the needle
We’ve covered the importance of a thoughtful data collection strategy, purposeful survey design, and a streamlined analysis of your results to surface insights that drive action—but that’s only the beginning. Get even deeper learnings on bettering your customer experience and your bottom line from Christine Rimer herself: watch the video now!
