Customer experience questionnaires: What's the secret sauce for super surveys?

Industry experts outline what to ask customers in your survey and how to encourage engagement.  

As more businesses are joining the trend to redefine themselves as customer-experience driven, understanding customers and what satisfies them has become crucial for success. Customer feedback surveys, thought to retain customers and drive revenue, continue to be used as the main tool to measure experience. Is there any better way of gaining insight into how your customers feel about your brand, products and services than by directly asking them?

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So you've decided to improve your customer experience - now what?!

Harley Manning outlines how brands can approach customer experience as a business discipline. Many a business has reached the crossroads of the customer experience – that moment when it has been decided that the organisation must improve the experience, but there is little idea where to go next. And as more brands realise the correlation between customer experience and financial results, so more of them will find themselves with the same quandary.

 Harley Manning, a vice president and research director at Forrester Research, and co-author of “Outside In: The Power of Putting Your Customers at the Center of Your Business”, believes that businesses needn’t be so confused. And he suggests the following steps. 

The trouble with magic metrics

Executives like the idea of using a single magic metric to evaluate customer service because it’s so simple. “Do well at this,” the thinking goes, “and you’re doing well.”

Unfortunately, the real magic happens when you start peeling back the layers of your data to find out what’s really going on. If you look carefully at so-called single score metrics like the Net Promoter System, you’ll realize the score is just a starting point for evaluation. It’s the underlying analysis and continuous drive to improve that’s really important.

The hidden key to reducing customer churn in Insurance? Reduce your customers' effort

How setting up a Customer Effort Index can radically increase Top-Line Revenue

We've all experienced one of the greatest paradoxes in the insurance industry – encouraging customers to be disloyal. Whether it’s offering an existing customer much higher renewal levels while dramatically reducing offers to others to encourage them to leave their existing supplier, or simply not having the appropriate channels by which to enable a customer to communicate with customer service.

Companies must radically re-think the rationale for customer service spend – it's not about reducing your customer service costs, it’s about stopping and not encouraging customer churn, and having a positive impact on your top-line revenue.

THREE WAYS TO REDUCE CUSTOMER EFFORT IN THE CONTACT CENTre

Customer effort reduction programs can have a dramatic impact on the customer experience your contact center delivers as well as on your company’s bottom line. 3-5% of your center’s call volume can be avoided with the help of a customer effort initiative, while handling time can be cut down by 4-6%. And in the contact center every second saved means a better customer experience, lower overhead costs and better ROI for your customer effort reduction program.

Here are three ways contact centers can work to reduce customer effort: