What's CEXy: The Perfect Survey Doesn't Exis...

Hi Team,

This week, we were TRIGGERED by a poorly designed survey.

And just like any great #CEXPERT should do, we leapt into ACTION by spending the week documenting the 10 best practices everybody should follow when building a #CX or #EX survey.

10 Survey Best Practices To Follow 🫵

Preparing your survey data 🧑🏻‍💻

BP1: Never ask a customer something that you already know

• Asking your customer for their age, or when they interacted with your company appears unprofessional and demonstrates that you don’t know much about your customers. Try to avoid this at all costs!

• Use data to personalise the survey - use the customer’s name & try to reference as much information about the interaction as possible (agent name, interaction type). This will make the customer more receptive to responding & will likely obtain more relevant feedback.

BP2: Paint a full picture by combining X & O data

• Data preparation is the 🔑 to deriving actionable insights from a survey. Before distributing a survey, you should always ask yourself - “how can I contextualise this survey by leveraging operational (O) data available in our business?”

• Common data points that should be tied to a survey include demographics (age, gender, location), contact performance (reason for contact, contact length) & financial information (lifetime value of customer, transaction value etc).

Designing your survey 👨🏻‍🎨

BP3: Make the survey shorter than the interaction it was associated with

• 7 questions is the maximum survey length we would recommend. Where possible, include display logic to minimise the amount of questions customers need to answer i.e. promoters may not be required to provide as much open text feedback.

• Include no more than 3 open-text questions. Make these open-text questions targeted & ensure you explain what you do with this feedback. If you use text analytics, mention this to the customer. This will give the customer confidence that they’re not wasting time when providing a long response!

BP4: Survey questions should move from OVERALL > SPECIFIC

• To assess customer satisfaction or advocacy without biasing the customer, use a funnel approach: begin the survey with general questions and progress to specific ones.

• For example, start with overall measures of customer experience (e.g., NPS or overall satisfaction), and then progress to open-ended questions and specific customer experience attributes.

Our recommended survey framework look like this:

• Q1 - Overall Metric: Overall NPS / CSAT

• Q2 - Open Text: Why did you provide this score?

• Q3 - Driver: Outcome Variable - Overall satisfaction with XX

• Q4 - Driver: Predictor Variable - Driver questions

• Q5 - Open Text: What is one thing we could improve?

BP5: Set up your survey correctly for driver / regression analysis

• Always have the end goal in mind whenever you design a survey. Ask yourself - “what insights am I looking to obtain from this survey, and how can I obtain these?”

• We won’t go into the detail of driver analysis within this blog however a pro-tip is to always have an outcome variable (main KPI) and predictor variables (drivers of that KPI) included as questions within the same survey.

• We will generally involve a statistician or data scientist in our preliminary survey design discussions as they often provide invaluable survey design considerations if you want to conduct regression / driver analysis on the outputs.

BP6: Use a consistent scale throughout the survey

• We understand that it’s tempting to include every metric imaginable but it truly does confuse customers. Where possible, keep your survey scale consistent throughout the survey. The one exception would be NPS, which always needs to remain as 0-10.

• All scales should read from LEFT to RIGHT

  • Dissatisfied —> Satisfied

  • Disagree —> Agree

  • Hard —> Easy

  • Detractor —> Promoter

• Our recommended survey scales are below:

  • NPS: 11-point scale, from 0-10

  • CES: 5-point or 7-point scale, where 1 = Dissatisfied

  • CSAT: 5-point or 7-point scale, where 1 = Dissatisfied

  • Drivers: 5-point or 7-point likert scale

Distributing your survey 💌

BP7: Right channel, right context, right time

Let’s face it, customers are getting bored with surveys. That’s why it is so integral to consider the 3Rs:

• Right Channel: explore more than the typical email survey! Explore how you can interact with customers using channels they interact with on a daily basis such as SMS, WhatsApp & FB messenger. Surveys masked as a bi-directional conversation are yielding response rates higher than 20% at the moment!

• Right Context: make sure you get your data right. Try to be as specific as you can about the reason for survey. What interaction did it relate to?

• Right Time: for transaction-based surveys, attempt to trigger the survey as close to the interaction as possible. For relationship surveys, be consistent with your timing and ensure this is communicated to the customer.

Oh and last thing, make it mobile friendly for God’s sake! If it’s not easy to complete on a mobile, don’t bother sending it at all.

BP8: Make the interaction valuable for both parties

• Where possible, try to reciprocate value back to the customer providing feedback! Try to make the interaction informative or entertaining. Try to avoid incentivising the survey if you can, but feel free to thank the customer by providing an exclusive offer.

• Ask yourself: In what ways will customers be better off for completing this survey? How does each survey enhance the customer’s relationship with our company?

Taking action on the feedback🚦

BP9: If you ask for permission to contact, make sure you freakin' call them

• If you are not set up to take action on your survey feedback, don't ask the customer for permission to contact them. If you do ask for permission to contact, make sure you follow through! Asking this question will set a certain expectation with the customer which you need to uphold in order to maintain trust.

BP10: Tell your customers how their feedback has led to business improvements

• When was the last time you received an email from a company explaining what they did with the feedback that you provided? Imagine if you did!

• Any good CX team will have a team focused on driving improvements. We will often provide updates on CX initiatives to internal stakeholders but forget about the most important stakeholder - the customer! Change this trend and you will be able to truly differentiate yourself from your competitors.

Graph(s) of the week 📈

Comment booster, anyone? 💡

Medallia has recently launched a really cool function which prompts customers to provide more feedback when filling out an open-text box. Simple yet very effective

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