KEYS TO A SUCCESSFUL CUSTOMER FEEDBACK SURVEY / SATISFACTION CAMPAIGN

Over the past 17 years, Opinionmeter International has distributed thousands of satisfaction surveys through its wide-range of interactive survey devices. Here are some hot tips we have learned over the years.

Placement

When using one of the unattended Opinionmeter touch-screen systems, it is important to carefully consider the optimum placement of the device. You’ll need to consider the transaction or service flow of your environment and when in the flow you wish to capture feedback. Do you want to capture spontaneous feedback at the Point-of-Sale, or after the transaction or service? Perhaps a table-mounted Opinionmeter adjacent the cashier can take advantage of the customer’s wait time while their transaction is being completed to capture a short point-of-sale survey. Perhaps placing a larger, stand-based TouchPoint Kiosk by the exit or discharge area is your best opportunity for an exit survey. If, on the other hand, you wish to gather pre-visit opinions from repeat visitors, place a device in the waiting area or queue line and take advantage of your customer’s waiting time prior to today’s service experience.

Signage

Prominent signage is a useful adjunct to good placement to optimise engagement. It can significantly help draw attention to unattended Opinionmeter devices. Signage can also be used effectively to communicate the purpose and importance of the data being collected, to promote customer understanding and engagement. It can also draw attention to any participation incentives being offered. An important but little-appreciated use of signage is also to communicate to customers the changes that have been implemented based on previous survey feedback. This has been observed to increase ongoing participation rates. It also helps justify the few moments of time your customers invest in the feedback process, increasing their sense of ownership and participation.

Staff Involvement

The single most powerful driver of response rate is staff involvement. At the conclusion of the customer transaction, if staff ask the customer to provide a minute of their time to give us their feedback, experience shows a high percentage of customers will do so. It’s also important to let your staff know your survey plan and purpose, and ensure that they are not intimidated by the data being collected. If employees are not engaged in the process, they are likely to view it with suspicion or cynicism. This in turn can lead to a lack of motivation to encourage customer uptake and, in some cases, even attempts to manipulate the customer survey.

Survey Length

The shorter the survey the more likely you will have a higher response rate. This is always a challenge, balancing the need to ask the required questions to achieve your survey objective with a survey length appropriate to various factors of physical environment, customer motivation and their probable time to engage. In high-traffic areas, a short survey will be best. In exit situations, or waiting rooms, a longer survey can work well. Keep in mind that your survey design can have many questions but use branching logic to allow the customer to choose what level of detail to go into. It is also possible to have more than one survey loaded on any Opinionmeter device, allowing a shorter and longer version, and giving the customer a choice of which to engage. It is always useful to analyse what proportion of customers abandon a survey before completing it, as that’s a good indicator it’s too long. Opinionmeter reports provide that information. We have also found it is critical to give users an accurate sense of how long a survey will take, and/or to show their progress through the questions. With Opinionmeter screens you have a choice of showing progress by number (“This is question N of M”) or by percentage complete.

Using Incentives

Offering incentives can encourage survey participation and increase response rates. Opinionmeter provides two incentive options: a “Winning number” (where every nth customer is a winner) and a “Quiz” feature, (where a correct answer to a question makes this customer a winner). Signage should promote the “winning” opportunity and what the prize is, to encourage engagement. In our experience, testing of surveys with and without incentives is always useful to validate that the incentive makes a material difference to participation rate.

Actions which result from Feedback

Letting your customers know what changes have been made based on previous feedback is a powerful, multi-edged tactic. It tells repeat customers they’ve made a difference. It tells new customers you’re listening. It validates and justifies the time and effort you are asking your customers invest in their engagement of your feedback process. This can be done through signage placed at the survey location on or near the device, on the introductory screen of the survey itself, or through your website or written customer communications. When customers believe their feedback is being heard and actioned, their satisfaction and loyalty go up.