Why Your Customer Surveys May Be Failing to Deliver

Surveys can be powerful tools for understanding customer sentiments, the effectiveness of your customer journey and what customer-focused problems may be lurking under the surface. Companies have used surveys to learn more about their consumers for centuries. Arguably, they are an even greater tool now, thanks to our Big Data and analytics solutions, because we can analyze and dig deeper into the responses of our audiences. Yet, there are many common pitfalls that plague brands disseminating surveys to their customers. In the worst case scenarios, these dangers can cause an organization to reach false conclusions and make decisions that have damaging effects, rather than positive ones.

Vague Survey Questions

If issuing a bad customer survey was a crime, vagueness would have to be a first-degree, felony charge. There’s an incorrect notion that by asking vague questions, you encourage the customer to open up and share more, but often the opposite happens. Perhaps the most common, vague and damaging question is the all too familiar: “How would you rate your experience?” The “experience” in question is made up of multiple steps and events; that’s why we call it the customer journey. If a customer were to mark an 8 out of 10, there is no way to tell what step in their journey caused them to downgrade from a 10, unless you ask follow-up questions.

Your survey questions should be crafted in ways that they ask about specific steps in the customer journey or focus on your current organizational objectives. In other words, you should ask the questions you want to know. Many surveys beat around the bush with vague questions in the hope that the customer will willingly discuss the topic that’s actually on the mind of the marketing department. For example, they’ll ask “How was Carrie as a waiter?” when they actually want to know “Did Carrie bring your food out in a timely manner?”

Not Looking Close Enough

When it comes to customer surveys, some of the greatest insights come from the smallest changes. Unfortunately, people don’t always take notice of the small. Many brands monitor their survey and customer satisfaction metrics on a routine basis. Maybe they’ll check once or twice a day to make sure nothing is going catastrophically terrible with their customer experience, but otherwise the day-to-day, small and incremental rise and falls don’t register much. However, by examining these seemingly insignificant fluctuations under the lens of an analytics solution, trends and valuable insights start to form. These discoveries can help expand your knowledge of the customer journey and find areas of concern before they evolve into a nightmarish crisis.

Focusing Too Much on Metrics

There’s not looking close enough, but there’s also looking too much. Some organization’s treat customer service metrics as a means to measure success. They make an incorrect connection between customer satisfaction scores and their brand’s self-esteem. While these numbers are important and can yield interesting and insightful discoveries about the target audience(s), companies need to remember that behind these numbers are people. And, those people have interactions and experiences with your brand that matter more than the numbers.

Metrics are useful because they quantify experiences into ways that are easy to measure and understand, especially during a meeting or presentation. But, if you don’ look beyond the numbers, you are going to keep your organization and team members from seeing what is actually going on. One tactic to remedy this is to conduct a sentiment analysis of survey responses. This allows you to still have presentable, quantifiable data, but the experiences behind the data are much more apparent.

Failing to Recognize the Human Element of Responses

This is the hardest pitfall of customer surveys to avoid because there is really no way to account for the often funny and backwards nature of humans. Consumers may say one thing, but mean another and only provide half-truths to either make themselves feel better or avoid hurting feelings and causing conflicts. This aversion to conflict is why a lot of customers defect to a competing brand without saying much or giving any reason. It can also keep them from opening up about criticisms of your brand or its employees, especially based on face-to-face interactions.

For example, let’s revisit Carrie the waiter and say that her service was a little too slow. Diners might not divulge this detail because they have shared a face-to-face relationship with Carrie during their meal; they may fear that their criticism will negatively impact her job security. Thus, she continues to believe her service is good and doesn’t ever think to pick the pace up.

Companies should not only recognize the fickle nature of human beings and their not-so-always-true responses, but also find ways to encourage wholly honest ones. Some organizations use a third-party to ask how their customer-brand relationship is really going. This can sometimes foster more honest responses because the consumer doesn’t feel as confrontational as addressing the company directly. If you don’t want to involve an outside party (or don’t have the means to), then your mission is to disarm any negative feelings surrounding honest feedback. If the customer had a face-to-face interaction, ensure them that any criticisms is constructive and won’t be used to penalize or reprimand any employees in question. What they have to say, once they shake their reserved feelings, may be difficult to hear, but you’ll be more grateful to hear the truth than to not be made aware of customer experience issues.

Conclusions

Customer feedback is invaluable to any consumer-focused company or brand. By avoiding these dangers, you’ll be able to swiftly identify gaps in your customer journey and deliver an all-around, better experience. Issuing surveys and receiving these responses is a nonstop effort. Even brands that have a flawless customer experience will still constantly survey and ask their customers about what can be improved. That’s what allows them to maintain this superior experience for its audiences.

Summary: For any customer-focused organization, receiving feedback from these parties is vital to success. Surveys are the fastest and best avenue to acquire these responses from customers. For a lot of companies, surveys are the essential tool, the hammer and the nails, to improving the customer journey. But, how effective a survey is at achieving this goal is greatly dependent on an organization’s ability to avoid the pitfalls of conducting a survey. These include being too vague with the questions, focusing too much on metrics, not looking close enough at the data and, lastly, failing to recognize that humans are fickle and do not always mean what they say, or say everything they want to.