In this article, we’ll explore the key elements of crafting user experience survey questions that yield meaningful feedback. We’ll also provide a comprehensive list of example user experience survey questions to help you get started.

User experience (UX) refers to the interaction and perception that users have when engaging with a product, website, application, or service.

It encompasses all aspects of a user’s experience, including their emotions, attitudes, behaviors, and satisfaction levels throughout their journey. User experience takes into account various factors such as:

• Usability
• Accessibility
• Visual design
• Content clarity
• Responsiveness
• Fulfillment of user goals and expectations

It focuses on creating intuitive, meaningful, and enjoyable experiences that meet the needs and desires of the users. By prioritizing UX, businesses can raise customer satisfaction, increase engagement, and build long-lasting relationships with their target audience.

Let’s delve into each step of the user experience survey process to guide you in unlocking valuable feedback.

1. Determine your goals:
   Clearly define the objectives of your user experience survey. What specific insights or information are you seeking to gather? Understanding your goals will help shape the survey design and question selection.
   
2. Select a survey method:
   Decide on the most suitable method for your survey, considering factors such as your target audience, resources, and timeline.
   
3. Design your survey questions:
   Write clear questions that align with your goals. Utilize a mix of question types such as Likert scales, multiple-choice, open-ended, ranking, and rating scales to capture a comprehensive view of the user experience.
   
4. Sequence the questions:
   Organize the survey questions in a logical flow. Start with your most important questions, this ensures you collect the data you need even if respondents drop out. Place the most important questions upfront to capture respondents’ attention and engagement.
   
5. Pilot test your survey:
   Before launching the survey, conduct a pilot test with a small group of participants. This step helps identify potential issues with question clarity, response options, or survey length. Make adjustments as necessary based on the pilot feedback.
   
6. Distribute the survey:
   Depending on your chosen method, distribute the survey to your target audience. This can involve sharing a link, in-person interviews, usability testing sessions, or even in-app surveys.
   
7. Collect and analyze the data:
   As responses come in, collect and compile the data. Ensure that the data is stored securely and protected. Once collected, analyze the data to gain insights and identify patterns, trends, and areas for improvement.
   
8. Draw conclusions and take action:
   Analyze the survey findings and draw conclusions based on the data. Use these insights to make informed decisions, prioritize improvements, and enhance the user experience of your product or service.

It’s important to use a mix of question types to reduce survey fatigue and increase response rates.

Here are some commonly used question types in UX surveys:

• Likert Scales: Measures respondents’ level of agreement with a statement or question on a scale, typically ranging from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree.”
• Multiple-Choice Questions: Provides predefined response options for participants to choose from.
• Open-Ended Questions: Allows respondents to provide detailed, open-ended feedback and insights.
• Ranking: Asks participants to prioritize a list of items based on their preferences or importance.
• Rating: Evaluates specific aspects on a numerical scale, such as satisfaction levels or usability ratings.
• Binary: Typically, these are Yes/No questions that allow you to filter survey results based on opposing opinions.

To help you kickstart your survey, here’s a list of example UX survey questions you can ask potential and existing customers.

With each question, we’ll recommend the best question type to use. You should be able to find these with any survey software, but you can rest assured that Shout offers them all.

Customizing these questions to fit your industry will provide you with valuable feedback to identify areas for improvement.

Use these questions to understand areas of strength and identify opportunities for improvement to enhance overall user satisfaction.

• On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with the overall user experience?
  [Opinion Scale]
  
  
• Did our website/product/service provide value to you?
  [Binary Yes/No]
  
  
• How likely are you to recommend our product/service to others?
  [Net Promoter Score]
  
  
• What aspects of our product/service do you appreciate the most?
  [Multiple-Choice (Multi-Select)]
  
  
• Is there anything about our product/service that you find frustrating?
  [Comment Box]
  
  
• What made you choose us over our competitors?
  [Multiple-Choice (Multi-Select)]
  
  
• Would you consider using our website/product/service again in the future?
  [Binary Yes/No]
  
  
• How well did our website/product/service fulfil your needs or requirements?
  [Matrix / Likert Scale]
  
  
• Is there anything we can do to improve the overall user experience based on your feedback?
  [Comment Box]
  

Assess users’ experience in terms of navigation, efficiency, clarity of instructions, and overall usability.

• How easy is our product/ application to use?
  [Matrix / Likert Scale]
  
  
• Which specific features or elements were confusing or difficult to use?
  [Multiple-Choice (Multi-Select]
  
  
• Were you able to accomplish your goals using our website/product?
  [Binary Yes/No]
  
  
• What improvements would you suggest to make our website/product more user-friendly?
  [Textbox (Multiple)]
  
  
• What’s the most difficult part of the application to navigate?
  [Dropdown List]
  
  
• How useful was our help documentation in helping you understand our product/service?
  [Matrix / Likert Scale]
  
  
• Did you feel that the overall layout and organization of our website/product is intuitive?
  [Binary Yes/No]
  
  
• How well did our website/product guide you through the different steps or processes?
  [Opinion Scale]
  

These questions assess the users’ perception of aesthetics, usability, and brand consistency.

• Out of 5 stars, how would you rate the visual design of our website?
  [Star Rating]
  
  
• Are there any aspects of the design that you would like to see improved?
  [Comment Box]
  
  
• Does the visual design of our website/product align with the overall brand image?
  [Binary Yes/No]
  
  
• Are there any design elements that distract or hinder your experience?
  [Text Boxes (Multiple)]
  
  
• How easily were you able to easily navigate and find your way around our website/product?
  [Matrix / Likert Scale]
  
  
• Did you find the placement of content or features intuitive and user-friendly?
  [Binary Yes/No]
  
  
• How well did the visual design contribute to your overall understanding of the information or functionality provided?
  [Opinion Scale]
  
  
• Is there anything we can do to improve the visual design and layout of our website/product based on your experience?
  [Comment Box]
  

By understanding the user’s opinion on content quality and relevance, you can enhance user experience.

• Did you find the information presented relevant to your needs?
  
  
• Was the content easy to understand and digest?
  
  
• Is there any additional content or information you want to see on our website/product?
  [Text Boxes (Multiple)]
  
  
• How well did the content provided address your questions or concerns?
  [Opinion Scale]
  
  
• Did you find the language and tone of the content appropriate and engaging?
  []Binary Yes/No]
  
  
• How satisfied are you with the information on our website?
  [Matrix / Likert Scale]
  
  
• How easy was it to find the information you were looking for on our website/product?
  [Matrix / Likert Scale]
  

These questions aim to gather feedback on the performance and speed aspects of the user experience. They cover areas such as responsiveness, loading times, navigation, and overall satisfaction.

• Did you experience any issues with the website/product performance or speed?
  [Binary Yes/No]
  
  
• Does our website/product respond quickly to your interactions?
  [Slider]
  
  
• Have you encountered any delays or lags while using our website/product?
  [Binary Yes/No]
  
  
• How satisfied are you with the overall performance and speed of our website/ application?
  [Matrix / Likert Scale]
  
  
• How quickly did our website/product load pages or screens for you?
  [Opinion Scale]
  
  
• Were you able to smoothly navigate different sections or features of our website/product?
  [Binary Yes/No]
  
  
• Is there anything we can do to improve the performance and speed of our website/product based on your experience?
  
  
• When did you experience an issue with our website or application?
  [Date]
  

These questions aim to gather feedback on various aspects of the customer support experience. This includes satisfaction levels, the effectiveness of communication, issue resolution, and overall quality of service.

• How satisfied are you with the level of customer support provided?
  [Matrix / Likert Scale]
  
  
• Were your inquiries or issues resolved in a timely manner?
  [Binary Yes/No]
  
  
• Did the customer support representative address your concerns adequately?
  [Binary Yes/No]
  
  
• Did the customer support representative provide clear explanations or instructions?
  [Opinion Scale]
  
  
• Is there anything we can do to improve our customer support experience?
  [Comment Box]
  
  
• How likely are you to recommend our customer support agents to others?
  [Net Promoter Score]
  
  
• Were you satisfied with the communication channels available for contacting our support team?
  [Matrix / Likert Scale]
  

The post User Experience Survey Questions, Methods & More appeared first on Shout.com.

Optimizing your customer surveys means data-driven decision-making. All you need is to know how to make the most of it. Here’s how you can maximize customer experience surveys to get the most value out of every feedback.

What’s the difference between customer experience and customer satisfaction?

Customer experience surveys relate to a specific event or touch point that your customers have recently experienced. For example, the product purchase process. Whereas customer satisfaction measure a customers average happiness with your brand in relation to a recent to a series of similar or identical touch points.

This is to say, customer experience surveys provide insight into how your customers feel at a specific point in time about a specific event. Customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT surveys) allow you to benchmark customer attitudes to those experiences over time.

That is to say that you can’t ask about more than the most recent experience in customer experience surveys. But, we’ll get into this a little more below.

7 Tips for your customer experience survey

We’ve put together some of our tops tips for creating a customer experience survey, increasing your response rates, and improving customer relationships.

1. Ask about the experience

Most businesses focus their survey questions on the product or service. Customers may be happy or even satisfied with the product, but that doesn’t mean they are having a good experience with the brand. Measuring your brand experience is essential in understanding the customers’ pulse.

Adding specific questions about how customers perceive your company through the responses will help you unlock valuable insights that will help you improve the overall quality of customer service. 

Surveys should ask about the customer journey, not just the most recent interactions. Customers will also remember the frustrating error messages, the delays, and the upsells. In addition to these, they will remember how the customer service agents handled their queries.

We’d also recommend ending these surveys with a Net Promoter Score (NPS) question, which will help you identify your most loyal customers. If you’re unsure what an NPS question is, these measure customer loyalty with a single question:

“How likely are you to recommend our product or service to a friend or colleague?”.

2. Have a goal in mind

When putting together a customer feedback or analysis program, it’s crucial to have a specific goal. Do you want to inform your hiring process? Are you trying to improve the product? Are you looking to solve an issue?

Understanding what problem you want to solve with your survey data allows you to target your analytics efforts towards it. You may not be able to set up a data infrastructure immediately, but you can set measurable goals that you can tackle little by little.

Once you have determined what you want to achieve with a customer outreach program, you are all set to set up an actionable plan. Whether you’re looking to develop a better service process or increase revenue, the customer response data you gather will help.

3. Target your survey’s audience

Your response rate will vary from industry to industry and geographic location to location. But knowing the audience, you want to reach out to before you set the survey up is incredibly important.

Setting up a survey isn’t difficult but choosing the right audience can be time-consuming. Targeting your desired recipients correctly can help you increase response rates and optimize your data analysis.

It’s essential to understand the demographics of your customers. For example, a disproportionate number of minorities get surveyed in customer experience surveys, which is especially important for some products.

You can compare the number of complaints and negative feedback to your customer base to identify any demographic discrepancies.

4. Maximize your response rate

Sending out irrelevant emails or making users wait long before seeing the results can discourage the user from completing the survey. While proper customer data management helps, there are many ways to maximize response rates.

Increasing your conversion rate requires balancing minimizing dropouts and providing in-depth information. Your response rate will also depend on the questions you ask.

This is all important, as when it comes to measuring customer satisfaction with experiences, you’ll want as much data as possible.

Using open-ended questions and forcing respondents to express themselves takes a lot of energy and time. Unless your business has an army of marketing experts at your disposal, it’s best to stick to close-ended questions that only ask for numerical answers.

Ask questions that are brief, easy to answer, and easy to understand. Focus on asking yes or no questions or ranking on a scale of 1 to 10. Doing so increases the probability of getting an accurate response, and you won’t have to devote resources to reviewing qualitative opinions.

5. Create personalized responses

Your customers are unique. If you treat them as such, they will likely respond to your customer satisfaction and interaction research. Now, you may not be able to personalize their interactions with your customer service team, but a personalized message can go a long way.

Using marketing automation systems to generate tailored responses to their inquiries is one of the most effective methods for collecting data. Don’t forget to personalize your communication based on the channel through which you receive their requests.

You can take advantage of workflows in your business processes to automate your notifications for follow-ups, promotional offers, or other messages.

6. Rely on multiple channels

Some businesses do everything via email; others don’t. Not everyone is on social media, so having a dedicated customer support portal or phone number will be more efficient for some.

Email remains the most commonly used tool for communication with customers and prospects, but don’t forget that not everyone uses their email inbox. You should consider reaching out through various channels depending on your company, product, and market.

Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook are great outlets for soliciting community input. The data collected by these mediums are complementary. Online forms allow you to collect structured data from your website. Emails are great for organizing quick feedback and allowing users to participate when they don’t have the time.

7. Respect your customer’s time

Be as responsive as possible. The faster you respond, the more value you add to the relationship with your prospect. The time it takes to respond to an inquiry depends on the complexity of the question and the number of team members required to review the answer.

A user who sends a simple request should be able to expect a quick reply. One who replies to the complicated one should expect a longer response time. You can also use artificial intelligence to gather and classify large volumes of your customer data.

Incentivizing the completion of your online survey is a great way to boost participant rates. Depending on the business, you can offer an incentive such as a discount, free item, or additional reward.

You can also improve user experience by making it easier for your customers to provide feedback. You can make it easier by automating your processes, reducing your number of clicks, or using short, simple questionnaires.

Wrapping up

Data obtained through a customer experience survey shouldn’t be put to waste. The information you gain through this process is precious.

Optimization is key. You need to understand how your customers want to interact with you, what causes them to delete your emails, and which issues they want to see improved.

Use these steps to set up your optimization plan and get the most out of the insights from your digital marketing campaigns.

The post Make the Most of Your Customer Experience Survey appeared first on Shout.com.

• 1. Simplify your website
• 2. Make It mobile-friendly
• 3. Improve your response time
• 4. Make important info clear
• 5. Grow with customers in mind
• Conclusion: keeping customers happy when they’re busy

You know first-hand just how busy life is, and the same goes for your customers. High customer satisfaction means repeat business and glowing reviews.

If you’re looking to improve experiences and reduce friction, take a look at these tips on how to keep your customers happy.

1. Simplify your website

Whether you sell products or services online or in-store, it’s important to create and maintain a high-quality website. ThinkWithGoogle found that over 60% of purchases began online, meaning your website will influence whether you make a sale.

So, it’s essential to maximize your brand’s visibility in search engines and ensure your website is both accessible and easy to navigate.

This rings true for existing customers as much as it does for prospects. If a customer has a question, it’s more than likely that they’ll go to your website for answers. If they can’t find what they’re looking for, they’ll need to contact customer support, meaning more time out of their day.

Your website also needs to look good and function the way customers expect. An unreliable site host, slow page speeds, poor website design, and cluttered pages can all have a negative impact on customer experience.

2. Make It mobile-friendly

Between 2018 and 2021 the number of purchases made using mobile devices doubled, now accounting for around 50% of all eCommerce sales.

Because of this fact, it’s essential that your website is mobile-friendly to keep your customers happy. But, how do you go about this? Tt should be responsive, meaning all pages should load and function correctly, regardless of the user’s device.

You should also ensure that buttons and text are large enough for smaller screens. Here’s a great article if you want more tips on how to make a website mobile-friendly.

Usability isn’t the only reason to focus on a mobile-friendly design. Google now takes a mobile-first approach to index pages, encouraging all website creators to uphold the same standard for mobile as desktop. If your website isn’t optimized for mobile, you could see a drop in rankings (and traffic).

Test-drive it first to ensure nothing looks wacky when you zoom in or scroll. Most content management systems (CMS) will allow you to preview your page in desktop, tablet, and mobile modes, so you can make changes ad hoc.

Then you can use Google’s mobile-friendly testing tool to identify any problems with your pages. This tool won’t necessarily help you orient your pages for mobile-first indexing, but it will allow you to improve the experience of mobile users.

3. Improve your response time

Nothing is more aggravating than having a question or issue, but not being able to get the help you need. This is an issue many customers face and can leave them with a bad taste regarding your business.

If you have a large enough team, you can increase response times with social media customer service. This also means your customer interactions are in the public view, allowing for others to find answers quickly whilst also promoting your organization as one that cares about its customers.

Consider creating a separate handle for customer support. This will improve efficiency and separate issues from general comments and inquiries.

You can also use live chat, which will show response times and alert you to new conversations.

Other companies like HelpScout also allow you to track Time To Resolution (TTR), a customer service metric that averages the time it takes for support staff to resolve tickets.

A quick response time (and a quick resolution time) will keep your customers happy, making them feel valued and improving their overall customer service experience.

4. Make important info clear

If you notice certain questions keep popping up, put together an FAQ page to enable customers to get the answers they need. This also means you reduce the amount of time spent on responding to customers.

This is also a good place to include your return policy if you are selling merchandise. When questions you have addressed on your website are asked, you can quickly refer them to the FAQ page to save everyone time.

If you’re a SaaS business, you may have created help docs for your users. You can refer to the most common searches that still result in a ticket being created to determine what information is missing.

Then as your last line of defence, you must make your contact information readily available.

5. Grow with customers in mind

One of the best ways to build customer loyalty is through communication. Keep them up to date with regular email campaigns and always consult them before making any significant changes.

We also recommend you use surveys to collect customer feedback, demonstrating that you value their opinion and giving you vital data to inform decisions.

You should also create customer satisfaction surveys at least twice a year, to highlight areas for improvement, along with Net Promoter Score surveys to identify your loyal customers.

Another way to demonstrate value is to set up loyalty programs or to acknowledge milestones in the customer journey.

For example, has a customer been with you for a whole year? Show them your gratitude with a personal touch by offering a discount on their next purchase or by gifting them some promotional swag boxes which will help you establish an emotional connection with your long-term customers.

Conclusion: keeping customers happy when they’re busy

We live in a world that is constantly on the move and craves the next best (and fastest) thing. Keep your busy customers happy by creating a website that is both simple and mobile-friendly for ease of use on the go.

Increase your response time via social media and customer service apps, and don’t underestimate the power of a well-put-together FAQ page.

By streamlining the customer experience, you are putting you and those who matter most to your business on top.

The post How to Keep Your Customers Happy appeared first on Shout.com.

• What is a customer satisfaction survey?
• Other types of Customer Satisfaction Surveys
• Why are Customer Satisfaction Surveys important?
• Customer satisfaction question types
• How often should you survey customer satisfaction?
• Best Practices for customer satisfaction surveys
• Wrapping up

Your customers are the lifeline of your business, and their experience with you is integral to your continued success. This is why customer satisfaction surveys are so important.

Think about why they came to you in the first place; to solve a problem they had. By measuring customer satisfaction, you can identify what is working for them and what isn’t.

What is a customer satisfaction survey?

Customer satisfaction surveys are designed to collect feedback from customers in order to measure the success of different elements of your business.

Opening a line of communication enables you to identify what makes your customers happy and what aspects need improvement.

How to measure customer satisfaction

Whilst your customer survey will have a whole range of questions relating to their experience with you, it is possible to measure customer satisfaction by determining your CSAT score. You can do this by asking a single question, but the question type you use will impact how you calculate your score:

• Measuring CSAT with a scale
• Measuring CSAT with a binary question
• Measuring CSAT with a star rating

Measuring CSAT with a scale

To measure your customer satisfaction score with a scaled question type, all you need to ask is:

‘How satisfied were you with the [product/ service] you received?

You can then provide a 1 to 5 (or even 1 to 10) scale:

1. Very unsatisfied
2. Unsatisfied
3. Neutral
4. Satisfied
5. Very satisfied

Then, to calculate your score you’ll need to add up all the individual scores given, divide this by the maximum score possible and multiply that number by 100. This will give you your CSAT score as a percentage.

Measuring CSAT with a binary question

Measuring customer satisfaction with a binary (or dichotomous) question only requires two answer choices.

‘Are you satisfied with the [product/ service] you received?’

• Yes
• No

To calculate your CSAT score with this method, you’ll need to divide the total number of positive (‘yes’) responses by the total number of responses received, then multiply this number by 100.

You can also apply this calculation to a scaled question, by dividing all respondents who chose the top two numbers in the scale by the maximum score possible and multiplying that by 100.

Measuring CSAT with a star rating

Star ratings are more general in nature, they’re not usually used to explore specific customer experiences. However, they are useful for giving a more zoomed out perspective of how your customers feel about you.

‘How would you rate your experience with us?’

The calculation for a star rating is as follows; the total number of stars given divided by the maximum number of stars achievable, multiplied by 5 (the total number of stars a respondent is able to award).

Other types of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Customer satisfaction is directly influenced by their experiences. But there are other types of customer (or client) satisfaction surveys that you can conduct that tell you more about the way they feel about your business.

Two examples of these are Net Promoter Score surveys and Customer Effort Score surveys.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS surveys are used to determine your customer loyalty. You can quantify this by asking them one simple question:

‘How likely are you to recommend [product/ service] to a friend or colleague?’

To answer this question, customers choose a rating on an 11-point scale (0 to 10), from ‘Not Very Likely At All’ to ‘Extremely Likely’.

Respondents are split into three categories based on what rating they select along this scale:

0 to 6 = Demoters
7 or 8 = Passives
9 and 10 = Promoters

Calculating your Net Promoter Score

NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. Your final score will be between -100 and 100, where anything over 0 is considered a good score.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

CES surveys are used to measure how easy a specific action or process was for a customer to complete. The purpose of these surveys is to identify areas of friction, so you can remove them and improve customer experience. The types of things you can measure customer effort for are:

• Navigating your website
• Making an online purchase
• Finding resources (e.g. help docs)
• Customer support

Again, you can calculate your customer effort score with a scale (1 to 10) or a binary question (easy or hard). When using a scale, divide the sum of all your CES by the total number of responses.

If you use a binary question, simply subtract the percentage of positive responses from the percentage of negative responses.

When using a neutral answer option, you can ignore this when calculating CES in this way.

Why are Customer Satisfaction Surveys important?

It’s essential that you reach out to your customers for this information because there’s no guarantee they’d get in touch with you if they have an issue. It’s even less likely that customers will get in touch to tell you you’re doing a good job. This same logic applies to your customers sharing their experiences with others.

A survey found that 95% of respondents who had a bad experience shared it with someone they knew. This kind of negative word-of-mouth can be detrimental to generating new leads and customers. These respondents who had a bad experience were also 50% more likely to share their experience on social media and review sites, which can be permanently damaging to your brand.

This is why it’s so important to ask your customers how satisfied they are before an issue snowballs.

Other than avoiding these kinds of nightmare scenarios, there are also major benefits to running customer satisfaction surveys.

1. Feedback can be used to improve products and customer experience
2. Identify gaps in your product or service
3. Discover loyal customers who can become advocates
4. Find out why ex-customer switched to a competitor
5. Collect testimonials and success stories

1. Feedback can be used to improve products and customer experience

There’s a whole range of things you want to ask customers about your product. Is it good value for money? Did the quality meet their expectations? Was it delivered on time? How does it compare to competitor products they have experience with?

Asking customers these questions shows them you care about their experience and will improve customer retention and loyalty in the long run.

2. Identify gaps in your product or service

Customer feedback isn’t just useful for improving experiences and reducing fiction. It also allows you to identify what’s missing from your product range, your service or even the availability of information.

Customers could be ecstatic with everything you’re doing, but may still go to competitors for features or products that you’re missing. This might not be something you can address immediately, but this kind of feedback gives you the edge when choosing how to expand your business.

3. Discover loyal customers who can become advocates for your brand

While it’s important to know what problems your customers have, it’s equally as important to know what you’re doing well and why. Identifying customers who’re completely satisfied with your products/ service enables you to create customer profiles (buyer personas) for your perfect target audiences.

Not only does this make your marketing efforts easier, but it also provides you with an audience who’s happy and willing to advocate for you.

4. Find out why ex-customers switched to a competitor

You aren’t limited to contacting your existing customer base, there’s real value in collecting feedback from former customers. For example, you can learn:

• The frictions they experienced
• What event or experience incited their exit
• What competitor they chose and why

All of this information is actionable and will help you grow to be a better business with stronger relationships with your existing customers.

On top of this, you have a chance to reclaim ex-customers if you’ve already addressed their issue, whether it was lowering prices, expanding your range, or improving time-to-resolution with customer support.

5. Collect testimonials and success stories

Customer satisfaction surveys are the perfect place to collect testimonials, in-house reviews, success stories and case studies. Even if you don’t collect this information in the survey itself, you can easily identify customers who’ll be happy to provide this social proof.

Content like this is essential to wooing prospects, who’re looking for advice and feedback from people like them. They certainly can’t just take your word for it, by showing proof that you’ve solved their problem for someone else, you’ve laid the foundation for a relationship.

Customer satisfaction question types

• Binary/ dichotomous questions
• Multiple-choice questions
• Opinion scales
• Star ratings
• Open-ended questions

Binary/ dichotomous questions

Binary survey questions provide respondents with two answer options, one positive and the other negative. This could be a simple ‘yes’ and ‘no’, or be more visual like a thumbs up and thumbs down or happy face and sad face.

These question types keep your survey simple and allow you to easily quantify responses into two opposing categories.

However, they don’t provide much information beyond that. On top of this, answering pages of binary questions can be tedious and so respondents may suffer from survey fatigue if your survey is too long. In these cases, respondents are likely to exhibit acquiescence response bias, where they lean towards positive answer options.

Here are a few examples of binary questions:

• Did customer support address all your concerns?
• Are you happy with the product?
• Would you recommend this product?
• Was this article easy to understand?

Multiple-choice questions

Multiple-choice questions usually consist of 3 or more options, where each answer is mutually exclusive from the others.

In customer satisfaction surveys, you can use these question types to categorize themselves based on the options you provide.

For example:

• Job role
• Level of education
• Employment status
• Industry
• Household income

Why is this information relevant to your customer satisfaction feedback? It will allow you to filter your results by demographic information and identify the wants and needs of individual audience segments.

If you’re planning to include more than seven answer options, we’d recommend you use a dropdown list question type instead. Too many options can be overwhelming for respondents, dropdowns package a list of questions in a more appetizing way.

Opinion scales

It’s almost certain that you’ll employ scaled questions in your customer satisfaction survey. Both CSAT and NPS questions require you to use a scale to measure satisfaction and loyalty respectively.

There are three types of scales you can use. The first is a standard numbered opinion scale where respondents select a number, e.g. between 1 and 10. The second is a slider, which also requires respondents to select a number. Both ends of these scales are labelled to provide context to respondents, e.g. ‘Not Very Good’ and ‘Extremely Good’.

The final type is a Likert scale (called a Matrix here on Shout), which are also numbered, but each point along the scale has a label.

Star ratings

Star ratings are simple in their aims, they ask respondents to rate an experience out of a number of stars. These are great for collecting reviews for different products, features or services you provide.

For example, you could use a series of star rating questions to measure satisfaction for:

• Customer support
• Product quality
• Delivery time

Open-ended questions

Open-ended questions are spaces where customers can write customized feedback and are essential to contextualizing your results

This qualitative data gives you insight into why customers responded a certain way and is the lynchpin for actioning change in your business.

It also ensures that there’s less bias when interpreting your results, allowing you to draw evidence-based conclusions rather than loose inferences.

How often should you survey customer satisfaction?

It can be tempting to ask for customer feedback as often as possible, but this can be counterproductive. Not only will you be drowning through a constant stream of data, you’ll also annoy your customers. This may mean they ignore all future requests for feedback.

We recommend you conduct full customer satisfaction surveys twice a year. This gives you enough time between surveys to act on feedback, so the results are not identical in each survey.

You may also want to avoid sending a full satisfaction survey to newer customers, they may not have enough experience with you to provide actionable feedback.

If you’re having trouble collecting a large enough data set to inform action within your business, take a look at how to increase survey response rates.

Best Practices for customer satisfaction surveys

1. Keep surveys short and sweet
2. Ask the right questions at the right time
3. Ensure questions are neutral
4. Test before you send
5. Act on results and follow up with customers

1. Keep surveys short and sweet

The longer your survey is, the more likely it is that respondents will suffer from survey fatigue, which can impact your survey completion rate. Before you start writing questions, think about the aim of this particular survey and what data you actually need (right now).

This is for your benefit as much as your respondents. Collecting too much data can be overwhelming, it’s better to collect a more manageable set and action changes one at a time.

2. Ask the right questions at the right time

Following on from our last tip, it’s important to split your surveys up by their context. Not only does this keep them short and targeted, it also ensures you’re collecting the right data at the right time.

For example, if you’re conducting an NPS survey, avoid asking questions about customer effort or satisfaction with individual experiences. You risk muddying your results or skewing respondents’ answer choices when mixing and matching these types of questions.

This is also important as each survey should be used at a different place in the customer journey.

3. Ensure questions are neutral

When writing survey questions, you’ll need to make sure the language you used doesn’t influence the way respondents answer. Loaded language that’s evocative or leading questions that nudge respondents to choose a specific answer will leave you with a useless set of results.

For the best quality data, write questions in a neutral way that encourages customers to express their own opinion.

4. Test before you send

It’s an unfortunate trend in survey research to distribute before testing it yourself. It’s totally understandable that you’ve spent all this time writing the perfect questions for your goal and want to start collecting feedback, but it’s important that you don’t skip this step.

You’ll want to check that your survey is void of any spelling or grammatical error and that all your questions make sense in the context of the survey. Secondly, you can use this opportunity to put yourself in your customers’ shoes to see if there are any biases or order effects induced by the survey.

If you want to go one step further (and we think you should), you can collect some dummy responses from your colleagues or a small pilot group to get an idea of what your feedback will look like.

This gives you the opportunity to chop and change your survey if the results aren’t as useful as you expected.

Finally, it also gives you the opportunity to check the technical elements of your survey. If you’re using an online survey maker, it’s likely you’ll be employing features like Question Logic and Text Piping to personalize survey content. It’s much harder to fix these things if your survey is live and has already collected responses.

5. Act on feedback and follow up with customers

There’s no point collecting all this feedback if you don’t intend to act on it. The only question you need to ask yourself is when and how you will act on it.

You’re going to receive a lot of different opinions and some of them will be contrasting, it’s up to you to decide how much of your audience needs to agree in order for their feedback to create change.

But this isn’t the final step, you should then get in touch with customers to let them know that you acted on their feedback.

This will show them you’ve gone above and beyond to improve their experience and will go a long way in improving customer loyalty and retention.

Wrapping up

So, that’s how to create a customer satisfaction survey. It’s important to keep in mind that it’s impossible to please everyone, we can’t think of a single company that has a 100% customer satisfaction score.

If you can please the vast majority of your audience whilst maintaining your values and mission, you’re doing everything right.

The post How to Create a Customer Satisfaction Survey appeared first on Shout.com.

• What does RACE stand for?
  • Plan
  • Reach
  • Act
  • Convert
  • Engage
• Why choose the RACE model

The RACE model is a framework for the strategic planning of digital marketing activities or omnichannel communication plans.

The model consists of four stages, each aimed at customers in a different stage of the customer lifecycle, with the aim of building relationships and increasing customer loyalty.

It was developed by Dave Cheffey, from Smart Insights, to help marketers integrate digital marketing with more traditional marketing activities.

What does RACE stand for?

RACE is an acronym formed of the four stages of a marketing framework. These stages are Reach, Act, Convert, Engage.

Each stage is its own ongoing process, but all aim to move leads down the pipeline to eventually become advocates of your business or brand.

However, there is a stage prior to any of the others: Plan.

Plan

It’s essential that you begin your digital marketing strategy by planning and setting goals. Your strategy is liable to change the longer it is in place, and that’s a good thing, but when you’re starting out you do want to make sure your goals are SMART.

If you’ve not heard that term before, SMART is a way of setting goals for campaigns and projects that are trackable and set a foundation for success.

Each letter is SMART stands for something that can help you set these kinds of goals:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

Reach

In the Reach stage, your aim will be to generate exposure for your brand, product or services using both online and offline media.

You can measure the success of your efforts by tracking the traffic generated by your campaigns to your website or social media pages.

This stage of the RACE model is hugely important when launching a new website or product, as early exposure will lead to a higher return on investment.

You might be stuck for ideas on how to increase your reach. Well, you can do this by utilizing your earned, paid and owned media.

What are earned, paid and owned media?

Earned media

• Reviews
• Testimonials
• Mentions
• Social shares
• Influencers/ plugs (free)
• Guest posts
• Media coverage

Paid media

• Pay per click (PPC)
• Display ads
• Paid social
• Native ads
• Remarketing
• Retargeting
• Influencers/ plugs (paid)

Owned media

• Website
• Blog
• Social media pages
• Emails
• Profiles (e.g. on review sites)

Take a look at this article from Mention for tips on how to increase your organic reach on social media.

Reach KPIs

• Unique visitors (to your website)
• Value per visit
• Followers (on social media)

Act

The A in RACE stands for Act, which is short for Interact. In this stage, you’ll want to start generating leads for your business. It’s all about offering something of value to prospects to encourage the start of a relationship.

The more leads you capture and the quality of the relationships you start with will determine how high your conversion rate is in the future. So, this step is a crucial one.

But don’t let quantity be a detriment to quality. If you only have the resources to create 5 strong lead magnets that collect qualified leads, focus on those and get going. Need some suggestions? Here are 13 lead magnets and how they can grow your email list.

However, there’s more to lead generation than collecting email addresses, there are also specific interactions you can track that signal potential leads. These are interactions like ‘viewed product’ and ‘added to basket’, which can easily be tracked as Goals with a tool like Google Analytics.

You also want to encourage prospects to share your content with other people. Try thinking of content that you’d share with friends or colleagues and recreate that for your audience.

A great example of a lead magnet with high shareability is a quiz. People naturally want to share their personalized results with their friends, which encourages those others to take your quiz to see what they’d get. If you like this idea, take a look at how to create an effective lead capture quiz.

Act KPIs

• Leads
• Lead conversion rate
• Time on page/ site
• Shares, comments and likes

Convert

The Convert stage requires you to take your leads and turn them into paying customers. These could be from online transactions or offline channel purchases.

You’re likely to be chopping and changing your strategy and content in this stage, after all you can’t get it all right the first time around. So, don’t be disheartened if you don’t see the conversion rate you were hoping for immeditetly. Step back and and assess what’s working and what isn’t, then change what you can. It’s as easy as that.

An effective method for finding what works for you is to A/B test (split test) content. Make minor changes to each variation of your content/ campaign and collect as much data as possible to identify which performs best with your target audience.

For example, you could split test the same product page with varying CTAs. Take a look at our article on writing a call-to-action that converts for some tips on this.

Another way to approach this would be to simply ask your audience about themselves. Create a survey, send it to your target audience and start to build customer profiles based on what you learn. Adopting data-driven marketing strategies will go a long way in personalizing content and increasing conversion.

Convert KPIs

• Online and offline sales
• Revenue/ profit
• Average order value

Engage

Everything in the Engage stage is aimed at developing a long term relationship with your customers. Essential, you want to turn first-time buyers into loyal customers (or subscribers) who’re advocates of your brand, products or services.

Most brands engage their customers across social media platforms and through email campaigns as a minimum. You need to think of content and incentives that build customer loyalty, which will boost customer lifetimes and increase the success of your top-level goals.

However, it’s more than engagement that can influence loyalty. You need to consider your customers’ entire experience to create long-lasting relationships with them. Take a look at our article on measuring and improving customer experience to learn more.

To track your success in this stage, you’ll want to take a look at your repeat purchases, customer retention and positive mentions of your brand on external sites (e.g. review sites).

You should also consider conducting customer satisfaction surveys at least twice a year. These will give you essential feedback on what your customers like and where they feel there is room for improvement. If you’re struggling to collect enough feedback to inform action, take a look at how to get more survey respondents.

Engage KPIs

• Repeat purchases
• Satisfaction and loyalty
• Advocacy

Why choose the RACE model

The RACE model allows you to plan your digital marketing strategy out as bitesize tasks and encourages you to set easy to track goals.

This streamlining makes identifying the strengths and weaknesses or your strategy effortless, enabling you to make changes and improve your overall strategy quickly.

It’s important to keep a record of the different changes you make to benchmark your progress and rollback your strategy if you change the wrong element.

The key thing to remember is that this isn’t a one-stop-shop, it’s going to take time and monitoring to see any real success from this model (as it would with any other). But the RACE framework is a simple and effective method of improving your ROI.

The post RACE Model: Improve your Digital Marketing Strategy appeared first on Shout.com.

• What is customer experience?
• 4 Pillars of customer experience
• How to improve your CX strategy
• How to measure customer experience
• Tips for conducting customer surveys to improve CX

What is customer experience?

The customer experience (CX) describes the relationship between a business and its customers across all customer touchpoints.

That relationship is determined by every interaction between the two; from website navigation to product/service delivery.

Great customer experience leads to repeat purchases, referrals and positive reviews. I.e. happy customers are the quickest and easiest way to building a successful brand.

What are customer touchpoints?

Customer touchpoints are points of customer interaction with your brand. These touchpoints can be results of both outbound and inbound campaigns. 

Outbound touchpoints would include things like marketing emails and advertising, where inbound touchpoints include customer support and web pages.

Mapping out your customer touchpoints is crucial to forming successful CX strategies.

4 Pillars of customer experience

1. Marketing
2. Sales
3. Product
4. Customer support

1. Marketing

More often than not, your marketing outputs will form a lead’s first impression of you. Therefore, you should be continuously adapting your marketing strategy to meet customer needs.

It’s important to build an easily accessible web presence to increase your reach. At the same time, create content that establishes you as an authority in your industry. Share this content across multiple platforms to engage as many leads as possible and slowly build a trusted brand image.

This also applies to traditional (offline) outbound campaigns and advertising. In turn, this will increase word of mouth and the reputation of your organization.

2. Sales

Your sales team should be in harmony with your marketing department, where all information and metrics are shared. This is vital to providing a seamless experience for leads, without contradiction or misinformation.

A key aim of sales is to determine exactly what each lead needs to be converted, and you may need to take a personal approach.

The more you learn about customers, the more your sales team (and other departments) can optimize their customer experience strategy and the more value your products/ service provides.

3. Product

Product and service delivery is equally important as the impression and sales experience you provide. How you deliver these will be based on your customer expectations and your brand image.

For example, customers attending a cinema viewing will have drastically different expectations for quality and experience than those attending a Broadway show.

However, there are other factors that can affect customer experience.

Such as:

• Price
• Quality
• Delivery time
• Usage support
• Product life-cycle
• User experience (UX)

A poorly received product or service can undo all the good work you’ve done with sales and marketing. These experiences often translate into negative word of mouth and bad reviews, which can do long term damage to your brand.

4. Customer support

Your customer service team will interact with leads and customers more frequently than any other. Therefore, any queries or concerns must be addressed efficiently and effectively.

Live chat services are a great way of achieving this as responses to queries can be instantaneous. However, you should also provide support over social media platforms to increase your reach.

Support staff must be able to empathize with customers and translate products and services into benefits that meet their needs.

How to improve your CX strategy

1. Take a customer-centric approach
2. Collect feedback
3. Reduce friction

1. Customer-centric culture

Putting customers at the center of everything you do is the first (and biggest) step you’ll take. This approach has to be top-down, where C-level employees understand that customer experience correlates with customer retention and an increased ROI.

It’s also important that customer feedback is shared with staff at all levels to encourage empathy. This will ensure that all outputs and tailored to customer wants and needs.

2. Collecting feedback

At the heart of good customer experience is feedback. The voice of the customer has never been more influential in developing businesses practices, and so you must reach out to them.

Collect feedback with surveys across all touchpoints, including customer service, product development and website design. This will highlight what you’re doing well and where improvements need to be made to reduce friction.

This strategy needs to be ongoing, where you collect feedback, analyze results and action findings.

3. Reducing friction

Frictions are anything that hinders customers progression through the sales funnel. Here are a few examples of customer frictions:

• Slow response to customer enquiries
• Poor customer service
• Misinformed customer service agents
• Confusing website architecture
• Slow page load times
• Readability of articles/ pages
• Hidden contact details
• Lack of reviews/ referrals
• Difficulty returning a product
• Lack of documentation for online services
• Poor layout/ lack of signage (physical stores)

It’s important to ask about these frictions in customer satisfaction surveys, or they could go unnoticed indefinitely. 

How to measure customer experience

There are a few methods through which you can measure and gauge customer experience.

• Time to Resolution (TTR)
• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
• Customer Effort Score (CES)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Most of the above methods incorporate direct feedback. But TRR can be measured without contacting your customers.

Time to resolution (TTR)

TTR is the average time it takes customer service representatives to resolve a ticket opened by a customer. The standard for these times can vary between industries, depending on the complexity of the average ticket.

You’d calculate TTR by adding up all times to resolution and dividing that by the number of resolved tickets. But most customer support platforms, such as HelpScout (which we use), will provide you with the relevant metrics.

Long wait times (for both an initial response and case resolution) is a major friction in the customer journey. Optimizing the time it takes to resolve tickets is paramount to creating a good customer experience.

Take a look at these tips on how to reduce time-to-resolution from Helpscout.

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

CSAT is a tool for measuring customer satisfaction at certain touchpoints. Typically, these surveys are conducted after a product or service has been purchased by a customer.

Then you would use a Likert scale question type to ask how satisfied they were with their purchase. Respondents would choose a rating between 1 and 5, where the two highest ratings (4 and 5) represent your satisfied customers.

The calculation is as follows:

(Number of satisfied customers/ total respondents) x 100 = % of satisfied customers.

Customer effort score (CES)

CES measures the ease of a customer’s experience. This method assumes that the less effort a customer has to make, the more satisfied they will be with the experience overall.

These types of surveys focus on removing any unnecessary friction in customer processes. For example, customers may feel it was too difficult to find your pricing page or that an order form had too many required fields.

It’s all about finding those little ways to improve customer experiences. In doing so, you’ll see an influx of positive reviews and a rise in customer loyalty.

Net promoter score (NPS)

NPS is a tool for measuring customer loyalty based on their likelihood to recommend your product, service or company to friends and colleagues.

The standard scale for NPS is from 0-10, where 0 is ‘Not at all Likely’ and 10 is ‘Extremely Likely’.

An overall score is produced by subtracting your percentage of Detractors (those who choose 0-6) from the percentage of Promoters (those who select 9-10).

See our article on how to calculate NPS for more.

Tips for conducting customer surveys to improve CX

1. Keep them short

Whittle your questions down to those that provide the richest feedback. Asking too many questions will lead to a low response rate or disengaged respondents.

2. Brand your surveys

Customize the colors, images and logos in your survey to align with your brand guidelines. This will ensure customer feedback remains focused on you.

3. Personalize content

Structure your survey so that customers only see questions relevant to their experience and personalize questions to keep them engaged.

4. Benchmark results

Monitor levels of customer satisfaction over time to identify what changes are successful and which aren’t. Then use this information to inform development.

5. Ensure it’s accessible to everyone

The most effective research takes a multi-mode approach to data collection. Your survey has to be responsive on all devices (mobiles, tablets and desktops) and accessible by other means, e.g. print/ QR code.

6. Don’t collect personal information

There’s no bigger deterrent to respondents than blatant attempts to collect their data. Only ask for what’s essential to your research goals and improving their experience.

7. Don’t survey too frequently

Asking for feedback too frequently will lead to survey fatigue. You have to consider how often other departments, and competitors are asking for feedback.

8. Map your customer journey

As we said above, it’s important to know when to send customer surveys. A good way to do this is to map out your customer journey and all the key touchpoints throughout it. 

When and where you ask for feedback will then become clear. Of course, this can change over time, as the responses you collect may determine feedback at certain touchpoints is unnecessary.

9. Always act on feedback

Ensure that feedback is shared with all relevant departments and acted on. If this isn’t done, you’ll only receive the same data in the next survey. You’ll also need to keep track of the changes to make based on feedback.

By doing this, you maintain a retrospective on what changes improved customer experience and others which may not have been as effective.

Customer experience management should be at the center of your business strategy. Doing so will improve customers’ perception of your brand and increase loyalty and satisfaction. Which, in turn, will lead to increased revenue.

A study concerning experience-led businesses (run by Forrester) found that experience-driven businesses had a 4% higher revenue growth rate than non-experience driven businesses.

The post CX: Measuring and Improving Customer Experience appeared first on Shout.com.

• Customer communication and experience
  • Digital communication channels
• Strategy 1: Provide omnichannel support
  • What is omnichannel customer experience?
  • Omnichannel technology
• Strategy 2: Personalize individual conversations
  • Identifying customer touchpoints
  • Artificial intelligence as a customer communication tool
• Strategy 3: Rely on customer feedback touchpoints
  • Acting on customer feedback
  • Using surveys as a customer communication tool

What makes your business stand out within your competitive landscape in the eyes of your consumers? More often than not, winning over shoppers in 2020 relies on more than delivering a great product or service. It’s about meeting customer expectations.

Wider access to the internet enables users to spend more time researching brands comparing price points. Meaning, brands are in constant competition with each other in the digital space. This access also implies that prospects and customers demand a quicker

By the end of this year, customer experience will completely eclipse price and product as the decisive factor between competitors. Marking a major swing in the pendulum of strategies organizations use to retain their customer base.

Customer communication and experience

So much of successful customer experience, or CX, hinges on your communication with buyers. From the types of communication channels you use to the overall delivery of your conversations.

And since 91% of consumers are prone to seeking business elsewhere after a single poor customer service conversation. Having a poor communication strategy, or no strategy at all, isn’t an option for businesses that want to survive.

Unfortunately, staying up-to-date with every inquiry proves to be more challenging than it may sound.

Today’s consumers have a wide variety of communication options at their disposal. Which can limit your bandwidth and the resources you’re able to devote to each channel.

On top of their brick-and-mortar interactions with customers, companies now must contend on a digital frontier. A majority of buyers on the market (57%, to be precise) prefer to contact businesses through digital mediums. Such as chat widgets on websites (in real-time with real people), social media and email.

Digital communication channels

As customers become more proficient with technology, digitized communication will become the new norm for CX design. Neglecting your virtual communication platforms in the future will only become increasingly detrimental.

So, what is the solution for organizations that do not have the workforce to manage multiple customer communication channels?

By leaning on customer-centric innovations and technologies. These new solutions let you revamp your workspaces to streamline your approach to customer communications and drive higher satisfaction rates

Strategy 1: Provide omnichannel support

Support teams have developed a new strategy to give customers an abundance of options to reach out with their inquiries.

Many businesses have integrated new technologies to develop omnichannel customer experiences. This has helped revitalize their:

• Sales
• Marketing
• Product development
• Customer support

What is omnichannel customer experience?

Omnichannel is defined as a customer support strategy that provides seamless interactions across all types of platforms (digital and physical).

The underlying concept behind omnichannel is that people should be able to intuitively engage with your brand, regardless of their preferences.

Perhaps this means your shoppers begin a conversation with your social accounts before purchasing in person.

Alternatively, your customers may jump from your help docs to email to phone calls as they try to resolve an issue. Regardless, successful omnichannel requires companies to host multiple communication paths to continue dialogues with audiences.

Omnichannel technology

The growing adoption of omnichannel corresponds with the new methods that shoppers use to communicate. Two-thirds of consumers opt for at least three communication channels to get in touch with your support teams.

And addressing multiple channels at once can become time-consuming.

That’s where omnichannel integrated technology comes into play. Contact centres with omnichannel support, for example, can build on the already established features of a call network.

They do this by enabling users to address all their communications through a single, unified platform. Including:

• Calls
• Social media messages
• SMS texts
• Live chat

This provides your customers and service agents alike with a seamless transition from one channel to the next.

Strategy 2: Personalize individual conversations

Your company can stand out in the crowd by leveraging technology to make each customer interaction unique.

Research conducted by Epsilon reports that four out of five consumers are more likely to purchase from brands that personalize CX. Not only can it help you convert prospects, but also aid in increasing customer retention.

91% of shoppers are more inclined to do business with brands that pitch them other relevant products. However, these should be based on their search history, previous purchases and buyer behaviors.

Identifying customer touchpoints

It can be difficult for those in charge of customer communications to discover the most efficient method to develop personalized touchpoints.

How do you foster a customer’s emotional attachment to your brand? (Without extending hold times or saddling your support teams with extra work.)

If you’re a smaller business, personalized CX might be more easily achievable, or at the least more feasible. For larger or growing companies, however, personalization at scale only becomes more challenging with each new sale.

Artificial intelligence as a customer communication tool

A proven method for personalization that reduces workload is by using your existing customer information. You may have always had access to your historical data, but its sheer volume makes it too demanding of a task.

Artificial intelligence software for personalization helps you develop insights around individual shopper experiences.

Many AI-driven software options offer personalization opportunities at multiple touchpoints. For example: highlighting more products that may interest a customer during and after a purchase.

Allowing artificial intelligence to optimize your data set helps ensure customers are engaging with your business within the most relevant way.

Strategy 3: Rely on customer feedback touchpoints

Perhaps no aspect of customer communication is as essential as listening. Contrary to popular public sentiments, people like to be asked for their opinions from brands that they care about. Customers want to feel valued, that their opinions and suggestions matter to your business.

Customer reviews also have the potential to boost sales among those who research your company before making a purchase.

As high as 91% of people read online reviews of brands, and 84% trust them equally to a personal recommendation.

Acting on customer feedback

At the same time, one of the greatest customer pain-points is feeling their input remains completely ignored or unused.

Half of all shoppers believe their feedback is never received by someone who can enact any sort of meaningful change.

When left to fester, these sentiments can spur a complete breakdown in communication between producer and consumer. After all, who would take the time to share their thoughts if they believed their thoughts would go unnoticed?

Using surveys as a customer communication tool

The key to acquiring candid feedback from your audience lies in your ability to express your appreciation for all customer feedback.

Customer satisfaction surveys are designed to place your customers at the center of your business. Allowing for their voices to be heard and for you to make informed decisions.

These platforms help you ask the right questions and reinforce your findings with concrete data. Helping you understand the best approach for enhancing your customer relationships.

By strategically placing feedback opportunities at customer touchpoints, you can visualize recommendations along the customer journey. Allowing you to build a comprehensive strategy for improving customer experience.

Using the technology available to your business, you can build a fully realized method to communicate effectively with customers.

Learning how to best to communicate is the first step to keeping customers happy. But to create truly great customer service, you must be willing to act on that feedback.

The post Customer Communication: 3 Strategies for Success appeared first on Shout.com.

• What is Net Promoter Score?
• How is NPS calculated?
• What is a good Net Promoter Score?
• Benefits of Net Promoter Score
• Disadvantages of Net Promoter Score
• Tips for improving NPS

What is Net Promoter Score?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is the standard for measuring customer loyalty. This is gauged by their likelihood to recommend your product, service or brand to a friend or colleague.

It is the correlation between a customer’s advocacy (i.e., positive word of mouth) and revenue growth that has made NPS a key metric in driving business development.

What question do you ask to determine NPS?

To measure customer loyalty, you need to ask one simple question:

On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this product to a friend or colleague?

0 would be labelled with ‘Not at All Likely’ and 10 with ‘Extremely Likely’.

Your NPS question does not have to ask for a recommendation of a product, it can concern any aspect of your business. E.g., services, brand, websites, events or customer service.

Calculate your NPS with Shout

Measure your customer loyalty with a single question, and we’ll calculate your Net Promoter Score for you.

NPS Surveys

NPS scale

The Net Promoter Score scale usually consists of 11 response options; from 0 – 10.

Fred Reichheld, who developed the NPS system, thought it necessary to have 11 points in the scale so respondents would not mistake 1 as the highest point.

However, some businesses also use 10 point and 5-point scales to determine their score. A study from MeasuringU on changing NPS scales found that:

• Scores from the same respondent varied across different scales (although only a little)
• 10 point scales reduced the number of detractors, increasing overall score
• 5 point scales reduced both detractors and promoters
• Not using an 11 point scale risks losing external benchmarks, as it’s the industry standard.

The biggest take away from the study was to remain consistent with the number of points in your scale. I.e., don’t use a scale of 0 – 11 for one survey and then a 5-point scale for another.

This will result in discrepancies between data sets, meaning they will be incomparable.

How is NPS calculated?

NPS ratings are split into three categories: Promoters, Passives and Detractors. The ratings associated with each category are based on the standard 11 point scale.

Before calculating your score, you must determine the percentage of customers for each category.

Detractors (those who select 0 – 6)

Detractors are unhappy customers who’ve had a bad experience with your organization at a touch-point. They’re the most likely to jump to a competitor or even impact your reputation through negative word of mouth.

Passives (those who select 7 – 8)

Passive customers are somewhat happy with your business but are not likely to recommend you to others. You shouldn’t be complacent with passives, they’re also likely to defer to a competitor if left unchecked.

Promoters (those who select 9 – 10)

These are the people most satisfied with your product or service. These are advocates for your organization, actively recommending you to friends and colleagues.

Net promoter score calculation

To calculate your net promoter score, subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. The number you’re left with is your NPS, it’s as simple as that.

The final score is not expressed as a percentage, but as a number between -100 and +100.

You can test this out for yourself with our Net Promoter Score calculator.

What is a good Net Promoter Score?

Any score above 0 is good, whilst any NPS score over +50 is excellent. Organizations that score over the +70 mark will be providing the best customer experience.

Customer loyalty is inherently linked to their experience with your business, products or services. So, it’s well worth strategizing ways to improve customer experiences.

Benefits of Net Promoter Score

1. It can be calculated with a single data point

Calculating this only requires a single question. Saving time for survey respondents (reducing the chance of survey fatigue) and for those performing the NPS data analysis.

2. Your score is a sign of business growth

If your customers are referring your product/service to friends and colleagues, they have entered the final stage of the customer journey; advocacy.

3. Conducting an NPS survey is effortless

With a host of online tools available to create, distribute and analyze NPS research, it’s never been easier to measure customer loyalty.

As long as the question is standardized for your organization, it can be used across all contact points. For example, at an event, as part of a website feedback form or following a recent purchase.

4. NPS is malleable

You can calculate an NPS rating for any of your organization’s output. Whether it’s your overall brand, a product or customer service. In this way, you can determine which aspects of your business need the most attention and where you’re already doing well.

5. Measure change over time

Conducting NPS research at regular intervals is paramount to improving customer relationships. It’s suggested you calculate your score around twice a year, to measure the impact of changes you make and identify seasonal discrepancies.

6. Benchmark against competitors

Average NPS scores vary from industry to industry. Performing some research into the average score for your industry can provide valuable context to your score. HubSpot has accumulated a list of NPS Benchmarks by industry.

Disadvantages of Net Promoter Score

1. A single data source can be limiting

Without open-ended feedback to provide context, NPS scores can often be ambiguous. Because of this, it’s difficult to identify which area of your organization needs improving and where you’re already succeeding.

2. You need a large survey sample

The opinions of a few customers aren’t representative of the whole. Which segment of your audience, or what aspect of your business, your NPS survey concerns, can also affect what your score will be.

For example, if you calculate NPS for a product that’s doing well, your score will likely be high. But you can’t generalize these results, as they aren’t representative of customers who’re unhappy with other elements of your business.

3. Results don’t always lead to instant action

As mentioned above, collecting data from such a large audience can take time. So, those who’re unhappy with their experiences aren’t likely to see positive action quickly.

However, opening a line of communication with these customers can go a long way in maintaining relationships.

Simply let them know you’ve listened and give them regular updates on what action you plan to take and when.

4. NPS ratings don’t account for the influence of individuals

If a well-known CEO or celebrity is a detractor, they’ll influence the decisions of other customers.

5. Solicited feedback may create response bias

The time and manner of feedback requests may influence the way people respond. The best feedback is unsolicited, as it’ll likely be devoid of any bias created by the researchers. Learn more about response bias.

6. NPS score can be manipulated

Whether it is intentional or not, employees may only send NPS surveys to happy customers. This would lead to an artificially high NPS score.

Tips for improving NPS

1. Personalize NPS surveys

Improving customer relationships is the end goal of NPS. Addressing them by name will strengthen your relationship and encourage unbiased feedback.

2. Collect reviews regularly

Your score is not a one-off calculation, it’s a benchmark for development. Make a habit of collecting NPS at customer touchpoints or through email campaigns.

3. Ask for open-ended customer feedback

By asking for additional comments, you’ll gain more insight into your strengths and weaknesses as an organization. However, don’t overload customers with open text boxes. That beauty of NPS is its usability and efficiency.

4. Open a dialogue

At the end of your survey, create a contact field for those customers who wish for you to contact them regarding their response. This creates another opportunity for relationship management and insight.

For a full perspective on your customer relationships, couple NPS with other forms of market and customer research. E.g. Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES).

This isn’t to say that conducting NPS isn’t a worthwhile pursuit. It is essential to identify those in the final stage of the customer buying journey (advocacy). But in compiling data from multiple feedback sources, you give more context to your NPS score.

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