In this week's column, I share insights from Sean Allen, CoreData's director of financial services, and CEO of our customer experience research business, Client eXperience (CX) Insights.
A surprisingly large number of businesses make avoidable mistakes when conducting service feedback and Net Promoter Score (NPS) research to understand what their customers are thinking.
Below, I've listed five common examples of poor customer experience research practices, and explained how they can have a negative effect on your business. If any of them sound familiar, it’s likely worth reworking your customer feedback strategy to produce better results from your customer surveys.
Score begging or Score chasing
Be very aware that once you decide to take the leap and start collecting customer feedback that applying it to staff reward or recognition schemes may adversely encourage the wrong staff behaviour. The service or experience the customer receives is the goal not the coerced score.
Debate exists about whether you should have these measures in staff scorecards. I have seen many Australian companies eager to roll out new customer measures whilst failing to understand the possible behavioural changes in staff when held to account on a number.
Doing your customer survey once and assuming it’s a static metric
By far the most common mistake is measuring customer & NPS feedback once and assuming it will stay that way forever.
If your practice earns positive customer feedback scores on its first survey, it’s easy to assume that because customers are satisfied now, they’ll remain satisfied forever.
Of course, this isn’t how business works. Customers might feel satisfied one month and disappointed with your service and value the next — a fact that you’d never know if you fail to at least annually measure your customers engagement levels.
Not communicating to your customers post survey
One of the most frequently observed poor survey practices is believing once you have collected your scores and feedback that this is all you need to do! You need a follow up plan.
Remember that completing an experience survey is also an important brand positioning activity for your business, so close the loop, communicate how you are going to utilise their feedback, always flag improvements along the way and you must thank you customers for taking the time!
Your customers are your most valuable asset and also your most valuable critics. Ignore them and there’s a serious risk that they’ll leave you quietly for one of your competitors.
Building and sending your own customer & NPS feedback survey
It can be very tempting to create and send your own customer & NPS feedback survey using a regular email or develop a basic solution using services like SurveyMonkey.
It is well established that arms length customer feedback produces better responses rates, deeper customer feedback while further adding to the professionalism of your brand. If you do decide to run an in-house option ensure you understand the total cost i.e. staff, management & CEO time, report building, insights collection, customer follow up, communication timetables and customer data cleansing to name a few.
It may be more valuable spending your time on running your business.
Failing to share your results with your staff
Your staff are most critical in the overall customer experience you want to deliver. Including them in understanding customer feedback may help you remove customer pain points, creation of new ideas, remove ineffective not valued processes, establishment and acceptance of new practice goals.
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This article was originally published by Sean Allen on LinkedIn.
