How to improve customer service using online surveys

For those businesses that have a lot of direct customer interaction, there aren’t many better ways to learn how you’re being perceived than through online customer feedback forms and surveys.  The reason online surveys are so efficient is that they can be very cost effective, automated, and highly accurate.  To assist, CyberSense now offers a comprehensive, multi-featured service that allows for the collection of important customer data.  But what good is all that data if the results are not properly analyzed, facilitated, and addressed?  Not much; which is why we think the below solution is a “must have” for customer service businesses with a regional or national presence.

CYBERSENSE’S SURVEY

As the first step of our survey solution, CyberSense will consult with a client to come up with a thorough strategy including the overarching survey goals as well as the individual questions used to accomplish those goals.  From there, the CyberSense team will create a custom, web-based survey to collect the desired data.  This form will be displayed online such that customers will be able to answer questions via a combination of preset answers and open fields as determined through our consulting process.

With the form/questionnaire in place, the next step is to build a process that drives and encourage an appropriate level of customer responses, and there are several ways to accomplish this.  The best way to receive an acceptable volume of responses and an accurate sense of the results is by giving all customers some type of reward for participating in the survey as well as entering them in a bigger opportunity to win a reward like a quarterly grand prize drawing.  In addition to providing rewards for participating, an extremely effective way to deploy a survey is to distribute the survey through automatic notifications.  Meaning, we can develop a script that automatically sends a notification marketing the reward for participating and pointing the customer to the online form.  For this process to work though, the business obviously needs to have the customer’s email which can sometimes be tricky to obtain and keep accurate.  There are several ways to manage the process, but most successful processes requires a good CRM database which is synchronized with customer email addresses that are collected online.  If the nature of a given business is preventing the collection of email addresses on-line, then the process requires a good employee training program to collect, enter, and confirm email addresses at the point of sale.  While it requires good planning and some work, having accurate customer email addresses provides an excellent foundation for automating the process of collecting and analyzing customer feedback.

SCORING AND NOTIFICATION

In addition to the steps associated with collecting data, CyberSense has developed an integrated scoring system to help accurately evaluate individual situations and a notification system to illicit the appropriate response.  Each question can be set to have an associated positive or negative scoring value based on the responses from a customer.  As a simplified example: Let’s say a customer is filling out a survey after a visit to an auto repair shop and is presented with the question; “how likely would you be to return to our auto repair shop?”.  A “yes” response could result in a factor of 100 points and a “no” response could render 0 points.  This could also be customized to collect additional detail via questions using a sliding scale of 1-10 (1 being never to return and 10 being that they will recommend the shop to everyone they know) and assigning the score accordingly.  From that, individual questions and/or overall scores can be tallied and flagged to represent the experience as a whole (dissatisfactory, satisfactory, or excellent visit).

A notification system is also available to address both individual and overall situations.  For example, a customer could fill out an online survey indicating that he or she was highly disgruntled based on their score.  Immediately upon receiving that score, the system can send a notification to the manager in charge.  On a larger scale, areas and/or patterns of scoring can be set and identified and sent to higher level managers and leaders.  For example, an email notification can be sent to the Western Region manager when the cumulative score for the North West Region drops below a preset value.  To achieve top notch service, a customer needs to know that, by filling out the survey, they are being heard and changes are being made, and there’s no better way to convey that than to facilitate responses in a timely manner via the people in charge.

REPORTING AND GRAPHING CAPABILITIES

Our system is not just limited to numerical scores and notifications, but can also include sophisticated reporting and graphing capabilities.  Visual representation can allow for observance of any seasonality of particular services and products, the motivation behind particular visits, and other trends in an easy to follow format.

• SORT – Sort functions will allow you to focus on the important data at hand.
• SCHEDULE – Set recurring schedules for reports to be saved, generated and emailed.
• EXPORT – Custom reports and graphs can be exported in a PDF format which can then be used for distribution if needed.

DASHBOARD

The ‘dashboard’ acts as an overview of results and a portal to previous reports.  By showcasing the reporting and graphing capabilities, this serves as a tool for evaluating responses between reports as well as looking at overall cumulative results.

MERGE WITH INTERNAL DATA

It is also possible to couple survey responses with internal, proprietary data for more comprehensive results and accountability.  Using the auto repair shop example, the feedback would be far more valuable if the system could identify the employees on duty at the time a specific customer complaint occurred.  If the receipt and the survey don’t already have information on who was providing customer service that day, we can cross-reference employee work schedules with the details (time, day, etc.) of a particular visit.  This will give greater insight into areas of improvement or recognition.

In short, CyberSense’s end- to-end solution has taken the simple online survey and web-based form to a new level.  Our multi-featured service with reports, graphs, and a dashboard will uncover service patterns and employee behaviors that will improve customer service responses and decisions.   Please contact us for a discussion about how we can develop an online customer survey that best fits your needs.