NB The article is originally produced in Danish
You know how crucial, happy customers are to your business. You just do not understand why the response rate to the annual survey is not higher. Do customers not want to be listened to?
Do you, in addition to the missing answers, have challenges in translating the many questions and scale into real action?
The solution is simple. Go single. Asking one question and using one scale makes it easier to make customer surveys for both you and your customers. We want to tell you why, but first let’s look at why customer surveys present challenges for many businesses.
Demanding, tiresome and turn-off
You’ve tried it yourself. After purchasing a product online or talking to a company over the phone, you will receive an email or text message: “Do you want to help us improve our service by answering a few questions?” You are busy, but happy with the service you as a customer have received. You click on the link. Your browser opens with a questionnaire where you have to relate to the company’s brand, product, customer service, your shopping experience and… It’s far too confusing. Your otherwise very positive view of the company fades a bit. You close the browser. So you do not have time for that. And neither do your customers.
Many companies still measure on customers with an annual questionnaire. A comprehensive survey that covers all areas to get it all. So far so good. There is no major challenge in sending out the questionnaire. However, it can be difficult to get customers to respond and to apply the answers operationally. A large questionnaire is enormously time consuming and can be confusing to deal with. If the customer receives the form several months after the last contact with the company, it seems irrelevant to spend time on it. Whether the experience was good or bad, the customer may not remember. It is no longer important. At least not for the customer. At the same time, it can be a cumbersome process to process the answers to the many questions, especially if they are to be translated into concrete initiatives in the company. Therefore, the study often ends up having minimal value when it has finally been analyzed finished, and should be found at the bottom of page 7 on Sharepoint.
One scale across departments
Some companies send out surveys from different departments, each of which has chosen their preferred unit of measurement and asks questions that are relevant to them. The questionnaires are not as comprehensive, but if the customer receives several surveys from the same company, where they have to deal with different scales, it can seem confusing and give a disjointed picture of the company. In addition, more surveys may be in the nature of spam, and the customer will be less likely to respond and, in the worst case, have a negative view of the company.
With a silo-divided approach to customer surveys, customer feedback is also locked in the respective departments, and the company does not get the full benefit of valuable insights that can be useful to the entire organization. And if the results of the measurements were actually shared within the company, the challenge would then be to compare them. In most cases, this will be impossible. A 3 on a scale of 1-5 is something different than on a scale of 0-10. And is a 7er better than a yellow smiley?
Single is superstar
In fact, most customers would like to give feedback. Especially after good or bad experiences, the need arises to be heard. But customers are typically preoccupied with giving feedback on a specific experience in a specific point of contact. If you have been out to eat and received enormously good service, it is not half a year after you contact the restaurant to say thank you for a good experience. Like you do not have months to express your dissatisfaction if you are frustrated by a delayed package delivery.
By measuring with one and the same scale and breaking down large surveys into one question, which you send out right after a point of contact, you make it easy for your customers to give feedback. They are far more likely to respond to a customer survey if it is easy, fast and meets the need to express themselves when the experience is sitting in the body and memory.
With one scale, it becomes much easier to work effectively with customer surveys and to implement a Customer Experience program. Your company only needs to integrate and relate to a unit of measurement, and the results can be compared across departments. A score of 5 means the same whether you are in sales or customer service. If you measure in selected contact points instead of once a year and ask a single question, you get more concrete feedback that lets you get closer to your customers. It gives you a better opportunity to follow up by being able to respond quickly to a low score. With ongoing measurements, you can follow developments over time and get a more nuanced and realistic picture of how your customers are doing – and how well your company is doing. You get a much greater benefit from your measurements because you can operationally take concrete action on the feedback you receive.
NPS and the ultimate question
One unit of measurement that is precisely based on asking a single question is the Net Promoter Score®. The method is designed to predict customer satisfaction and loyalty based on the ultimate question: “How likely are you to recommend our company to someone in your network?” The NPS method is an ingenious tool for measuring customer experiences. It is measured on a scale from 0-10, and the question can be adjusted, depending on whether you want to measure loyalty, customer satisfaction or Customer Effort Score. You follow the principle of one scale and one question that will make customer surveys easier for both your customers and your business. If you want to work efficiently with customer measurements, you can choose the NPS method. But you have to go single.