Customer Survey Software

Getting survey respondents to complete your questionnaire is always the goal when sending out email invitations. Without enough responses, your survey data wont be representative of your entire target population and you may need to question whether it has enough validity to base business decisions. If you do have a high partial response rate, you may want to see what you can tweak about your questionnaire design to lower your abandonment rate and increase your completed responses.

My first suggestion is to run a survey report in your customer survey software tool, product registration software, hr survey software or whatever online survey tool you're using to collect feedback online to see where you're losing respondents. It may be very cut and dry. Perhaps you lose people during the product registration process when you ask for personal information such as the credit card used to make the purchase. Or it may be less clear why you're losing respondents because they're not all clumped together. If this is the case, I would question the length of your survey and the design itself. Using different types of survey question logic and varying question types can do a lot to keep it an interactive survey.

What are some of the tweaks you were able to make because you knew where you were losing survey respondents?

Although the Twitter talk has slowed down some, there's still a lot of buzz around how organizations should use Twitter as a resource for customer service, customer feedback, lead generation, etc.

How are you using Twitter?

I think Twitter is a great way to collect customer feedback. I'm still unsure about using Twitter for customer service, because if you do it wrong - it could really hurt your organization's reputation. Make sure you evaluate whether or not it even makes sense for your product. But the most important thing organizations need to understand when it comes to social media is that the conversation is going on - whether you're a part of it or not. It doesn't matter if you have customer survey software and conduct customer questionnaires online or off. The internet has made sharing information with peers so easy, of course it's going to happen and you need to monitor it. Ignoring potential feedback because it's not within your chosen method (ex. surveys online or feedback forms within your restaurant or store) would be silly. With that in mind, don't ever try to control the conversation, customers will not appreciate it and will likely kick you out of the conversation.

So how do you manage feedback and not let it spiral out of control? (See this post about Motrin Moms or #AmazonFail on Twitter for examples.) That's a great question, and I'm not sure anyone has a one size fits all solution. Social media doesn't have a one size fits all solution, each organization needs to figure out their own strategy. For how you deal with feedback, it's the same. You need to set your own rules for what requires action and what does not. My recommendation is if your share of the conversation is small it may be beneficial to take part in as much of the conversation as possible. This means when someone says something both good and bad about your organization. But do not over react to bad feedback. If you get bad feedback, maybe there's a process you need to look at and fix or it's just that someone doesn't like you. If you get bad feedback that you think is unfair, try to follow up in a non-defensive way to understand the problem so you can fix it. Chances are if you solve the problem, you'll receive praise for it, not more hate. Social Media users tend to share the good feedback as well as the bad, which flips the belief that significantly more bad news is shared than good. There's still an imbalance, but it's getting leveler.

My point: Twitter, and other social media platforms, are a great source for customer feedback for customer service feedback to product feedback to any other type of feedback. These resources should be included in your tool box.

Like customer service feedback, product research survey questions that target enhancement requests and ideas are critical for organizations - B2B, B2C and B2G alike. So my question is how do you gather product enhancement requests? I have a couple ideas, and I hope you'll share yours as well. Traditional ways may include enhancement request forms your customer care team completes if a customer makes a suggestion during a help session or front-line employees giving feedback to the developers during a meeting. But perhaps conducting a product evaluation survey among product users might be a good place to start. It's difficult to ask people who are not customers to provide feedback on your offering - let alone provide enhancement requests. It's also a pretty safe bet that some of your customers, if not a lot of them, have some great ideas for how you can improve your offering.

If you do go with some type of customer survey, the question maybe be how do you do it and how often. I would argue the survey could be ongoing if you have customer survey software for conducting online surveys. Customer services reps could add a link to the survey in their signature. Any time a customer has an idea or feedback, they know exactly where they can go to give it. If you're a software as a service (SAAS) organization, a link can be placed somewhere behind the log in screen.

There are various ways you can solicit feedback about your offering - the important part is you do it. Your customers are the ones using your product or service. They have the greatest chance of knowing what they need and how you could satisfy a need or pain they have. I tend to think an organization's job is to solve pain - each organization may target a different pain to alleviate, but they all solve some type of pain.

However your organization decides to gather product enhancement ideas is great, but the most important part is that you ask for customers feedback and you act it. How else do you plan to continually improve your offering to stay competitive in the market place?

I would love to hear how you gather product enhancement ideas.

How speedy is your online survey software? It may seem like a silly question with an obvious answer, and before yesterday I would have agreed. But once again, someone's web based survey has surprised me. I received an email questionnaire invitation from an ecommerce site asking me to complete a survey about my reading habits. In the invite, they told me it would only take 15 minutes of my time (good best practice, here are some other email marketing tips). I had 15 minutes to spare for a 25% discount off my next book purchase.

Unfortunately, the email should have read "15 minutes per page load." I could not believe how slow the online survey software they purchased was. I'm not exaggerating when I say one page took over thirty minutes to load. Are you kidding me? I thought perhaps it was just a momentary glitch or maybe my connection, but I tried it later that night on a different connection - it was just as bad. If it wasn't for the hopes that I was close to the end of the survey (I was promised it would only take 15 minutes), I would have abandoned the survey, but I find it so hard to give up when the finish could just be one page away!

No matter whether you're using customer survey software, HR survey software, product registration software, an email marketing tool or some other type of survey management software, speed should be a factor when selecting a solution. And while I'm at it, I'm going to suggest unscheduled downtime be a factor as well. If you have someone volunteering to take your survey, the last thing you want to happen is the software to go down in the middle of collecting their feedback. Here at Cvent, we're pretty proud of the fact that we've had no unscheduled downtime in the last ten years.

Cvent's online survey tool has a lot more to offer than no unscheduled downtime. Learn more about Cvent Web Survey software by registering for one of our best practice webinars - or if you'd prefer, we also offer weekly product demos.

MR Heretic recently posted about Phishy Survey URLs. The main point is how having a weird looking URL for your online survey could lower your response rate and destroy the customer trust your organization has worked so hard to gain. Why? If your organization is including IP addresses in your web survey link, consumers will think it looks like phishing and decide against clicking the link. By not clicking the link in your email marketing survey invitation, customers are opting out of your online market research or customer survey.

My recommendation: use a customer survey software or email survey tool that allows you to brand your own survey URL without any IT staff or programming knowledge. Cvent's Web Survey Software gives each survey it's own unique URL automatically, but you can take that a step forward and include your organization's name in the URL as well.

Getting clients to respond to your survey is critical for any survey project's success. There are enough obstacles standing between you and the desired completed online survey submission - don't ruin it by using a phishy looking URL.

Have you ever been asked to take a customer survey and a few questions in told you don't match the survey criteria? It's pretty frustrating. I've told the organization, "sure, I'll spend a few minutes giving you feedback for your customer research project." Then, I'm rejected and kicked out of the online survey. Usually, I'm kicked out after answering questions they should already have on file. Seems silly they even wasted any email marketing on me. These organizations need to step up their game and invest in quality customer survey software (I would recommend Cvent, obviously).

If your online survey tool is a good one, you have the ability to import critical information into the contact database. We've mentioned before how important having a robust contact database is for segmenting purposes, but the value definitely goes beyond that. I could argue this is a matter of poor email survey segmentation, but sometimes it's important to turn the problem a few degrees and see it from a new side.

Perhaps you don't have some information on a customer you'll need later, you can quickly survey customers to gauge product satisfaction and gather other customer information. You can create any number of custom contact fields in the Cvent contact database, beyond the basic address, phone, email information.

It may be important to your survey projects to be able to run cross-tabulation survey reports based on which tier customer someone is. If all tier 1's feel a certain way, and all tier 2's feel differently, maybe there's a problem that needs to be addressed. While my opening example was a matter of poor segmentation, this one isn't. It's a matter of needing quality data for strong customer analysis - without having to ask the extra questions. You should only ever ask a customer a basic question once. Remember: the likelihood of abandonment increases with each additional question asked. I would argue it skyrockets when additional questions are questions the organization should have (somewhere).

This is another basic case of respecting your customers' time. If you constantly tell them they aren't qualified to complete your customer feedback survey, they're going to stop volunteering to take it - then how will you conduct market research and analyze customer feedback?

This might seem like a silly question, but is your survey timely? If you're sending customer surveys, particularly if it's about a specific event such as the last time they called customer service, you could be severely damaging your results if you wait too long to send it.

If you want to follow up with a customer who called your customer service team and measure their satisfaction, don't wait more than a couple days. After that, most customers will have forgotten a lot of the details of their experience. Did they introduce themselves? I don't recall. What was the name of the representative? Couldn't tell you. How long was the wait before speaking with a representative? Too long.

Customer surveys can bring a lot of value to a department or organization if you have a program in place to send solicit survey responses in a timely manner. Online customer survey software solutions, such as Cvent, can help any organization put a program in place to email surveys to customers and receive feedback that you can quickly act on. 

Want to learn more?  Sign up for one of our online demonstrations.

A recent customer satisfaction, complaints and loyalty study in the UK discovered over half of respondents would rather take their business elsewhere than complain. A similar number of respondents expressed their desire to make a complaint but said it was too involved and time consuming.

Do you want the first sign of a problem to come from customers walking away? Of course not. With the growth of online channels (social networking sites, blogs, YouTube, etc.) to give feedback, it's even more important to take the time to listen. Customer frustration is no longer an individual struggle, but rather a shared conversation across members of online channels.

Surveys such as the UK customer loyalty online survey should tell you something: surveying customers and taking action based on the gathered data is essential. Online or Internet surveys are a great channel to gather feedback from customers and clients. If you're not asking if there is a problem, chances are they're not going to tell you first—they're just going to leave.

With high customer acquisition costs and the current state of the global economy, customer retention should be at the forefront of every organization's business objectives. It's not as difficult as you might think to get a customer survey program in place. With a web based customer survey software such as Cvent, getting an online survey launched can take mere minutes. Why wouldn't you put a customer survey program in place when it could increase revenue in the long term?