Build a Better Customer Satisfaction Survey
We have never deployed a customer satisfaction survey for our own customers. Why? Because most CX surveys are not designed to help customers.
But we’ve just taken inspiration from a unique survey from Skype for Business, in order to Build a Better Customer Satisfaction Survey. It’s our feature article in this quarter’s newsletter. It highlights the serious problems with most CX surveys, and offers a strategy to fix them. (Hint: Dump the NPS question!)
What’s wrong with customer satisfaction surveys today? To answer that, I reflected on my own reasons why I, as a customer, almost never fill them out:
They do not matter in a way that affects me in an immediate, tangible way. Instead, they are used to generate aggregate scores and create models. Sorry, I have never seen these aggregate scores and key-driver models solve an immediate problem that I, as a customer, have wanted solved.
They are self-centered. No matter what they say, most sponsors of customer satisfaction surveys are not interested in me; they are interested in themselves. They want data to calculate their “metrics” and their KPIs and their NPS scores. They want their bonuses, and they can’t have bonuses without measurable outcomes, so let’s ask our customers … “How did we do?!”
They are too long. I am willing to give more than ten seconds. I am even willing to give more than a few minutes if it will benefit me. But most of these surveys ask for too much. Multiple dimensions of service and product, drill-downs on every sales touchpoint, every service encounter, every member of the team … on and on.
What’s the solution? Take a look at the Versta Research Newsletter for some ideas. We lay out a way of thinking and show examples from the development of a new survey we launch next month, designed to be laser-focused on our customers and what they need from us.
