Seven Steps for Creating Gold Standard Customer Experiences (Unicorn Dust Optional)

Boom! There it is. Landing in your customer’s in-box regular as clockwork after every transaction - it’s your good old customer satisfaction survey. It tells you everything you need to know about what you’re doing right and occasionally doing wrong, right? Wrong.

Most companies, from high street retailers and independent shops to B2B businesses and re-sellers use customer satisfaction surveys to gain customer insights to sharpen products and services, but do they always work? We’ll be frank, not all the time.

Exposing the pin-sharp pieces of information that make a genuine difference to customer service requires an agile, effective customer satisfaction survey solution to match. Here are seven steps to get the penetrating research results you need to bring about deep and lasting change to your customer experience:

1. Don’t Make it All About You

Many companies take the well-intended approach of creating surveys that capture what they think is important to the customer, rather than what the customer thinks is important.

Although it sounds obvious, developing a successful customer survey starts with your customers. A critical first step of our Customer Experience Quality Analysis programme is conducting qualitative interviews with current and lapsed customers to understand the purchase journey - from their motivations to buy, to problems they encountered. This information supports questionnaire development, ensuring question sets are relevant and touch on topics customers really want to talk about, so always get your customer’s side of the story first.

2. One Survey Doesn’t Fit All

Implementing a meaningful customer survey means developing surveys for the right stage of the customer journey. While a post-purchase ‘tell us how we did’ survey is ideal for collating feedback on ordering, transactions and delivery, what about the customers who bought from you six months ago that haven’t purchased since? These customers hold a treasure chest of information about their reasons for not coming back, including what went wrong, whether they were lured to a competitor and if so, why? Mine these information nuggets and you access a rich seam of information for crafting a better customer experience.

There’s also the customers who searched for your offering online and are familiar with your company but haven’t bought yet – what do they want to see that will turn them from a prospective into a paying customer? Tailor surveys to past, present and future customer groups to find out what customers want at each stage of the purchase process to optimise satisfaction and re-purchase metrics.

3. Benchmark Competitors

If you don’t know where you stand, how can you get better? Seeking customer perceptions and expectations of your services and products is only half the equation when generating productive customer research. Understanding who your competitors are and how you measure up is key for developing winning initiatives that set your company brand apart. Competitor benchmarking and analysis is a fundamental part of all our customer research programmes as it gives clients a solid grasp of:  

• Company ranking compared to their market competitors
• The service attributes most important to customers in their sector
• Where company performance is ahead and falls behind the competition
• Points of differentiation to exploit to get ahead, such as competitive pricing, providing additional back-up services or more automation to make customer’s lives easier.

Evaluating competitors is often a complex and time consuming, especially keeping tabs on service changes and new entrants, for best results call professional benchmarking research providers.

4. Unintelligible Data = Unintelligible Results

Survey-apps and other online survey tools have made DIY customer research enticingly accessible and cheap but to avoid ending up with a bundle of unintelligible data, careful planning is a must.

There are several factors to consider when designing a customer survey to ensure you get accurate, analysable output, including:

• Asking the right questions and providing the right answers – will the questions and answers deliver insight needed to inform decision-makers and help plan for change?
• Are the questions clear? Is there room for interpretation which may skew the response?
• Do the answers cover every answer type, including respondents who might not have or want to offer an opinion on a certain subject?
• Do they speak the customer’s language?
• How will the survey be delivered – email, text or phone interview, or a combination of methods?
• How do you plan to analyse the data? What key data points do you want to focus on and present?

The quality of data has a significant impact on the data value and the degree it can be used to plan change effectively. Survey presentation, content and delivery also reflect the company brand, so it pays to ensure it is professionally delivered and on-point.

5. Prioritised Customer Feedback

After collation comes all-important data analysis – sifting the raw data to identify trends and behaviours that will help fine-tune your customer experience. While many customer satisfaction surveys can help identify what service attributes customers want, these are rarely ranked in priority order. This has two counter-productive effects, stagnation – no or few improvements are implemented as a result - or a scatter-gun approach – prioritising and fixing processes that only have minor impact on satisfaction, wasting resources and failing to bring about a transformative result.      

Wherever possible, make sure there is sufficient diagnostic detail in the survey to determine the strength of customer’s expectations and how important these expectations are in the context of your organisation and other rival service providers. This will support better decision-making, resource prioritisation and action-taking. For example, our CEQA reporting not only identifies which area of the Customer Experience needs immediate action but what attributes will emerge as future priorities and areas where customers perceive ‘over delivery’ so a company can afford to relax resources.   

6. Multi-channel Customer Research

Customers no longer experience a brand in a linear way, but zig-zag across multiple channels. Use your survey to gather feedback about all your customer channels – traditional and digital – to find out what customers want to see more and less of. Read more about this here.

7. Don’t Rest on Your Research Laurels

By 2020 Customer Experience is expected to be the key company differentiator above price and product. Implementing a potent customer research survey that provides an ongoing foundation for tracking and indexing customer satisfaction has never been more critical. Take the opportunity now to revitalise your existing research or introduce a fresh solution that gets to the heart of what consumers want, allowing you to hone an effortless customer experience that your customers will love.   

Stale customer research? TTi Global Research has been helping companies world-wide develop and deliver an exceptional, unicorn-dusted customer experience for over 30 years. To find out how we can help you, contact me on 01753 214038 or here on Linkedin.

If you want to be the first to hear about new Customer Satisfaction data from UK sector research, join our Linkedin in group.