Response rates are dropping and are estimated to drop even further as the customer experience industry grows. Quite a paradox, the more organisations will invest in efforts to know the customer, the less customers will be willing to cooperate. Experience learns that in many cases customer feedback programmes with NPS℠ or other metrics are designed in a very organisation-focused way with no regard to the actual customer. The irony!
When people ask me what I do, and I explain to them that we work with customer feedback to put a company on the path to customer centricity, the number one response is:"Do people still fill out surveys? I hate surveys, I never fill them out". And my answer would always be: "Oh sweet lord, I hate surveys too."
Surveys are unfair. They are unfair to your customer, because you are saying that their opinions matter, but in fact that is not true. Throughout the check boxes and dropdowns, there is no room for opinions and stories. They are unfair to your employees, because it focuses on controlling, and they miss out on all the warm and constructive feedback from their customers. Instead they get reports and charts. Mostly with a lot of red. 'Things to improve'. Unfair. No wonder people get demotivated...
That is why you need to review your entire customer satisfaction / customer experience programme whereby you are surveying customers to get their input.
I can keep this going but you catch my point. What it basically means, is that you think you are making efforts to being customer-centric, but you in fact are NOT.
The irony of it all is that even in the endeavour of listening to customers, you take a very organisational approach, very much focused on what is in it for you.
If you take a customer-focused approach to customer feedback, if you make your customers an integral part of the programme, they are and always will be happy to participate. At Hello Customer we've been asked many times for more real survey features like dropdowns and checkboxes, and we probably would have landed a lot more deals when doing so. But we would not have helped your organisation, and we certainly would not have helped your customers.
We walk the line between putting YOUR customers first, and getting you the tools and insights you need in order to create a positive impact from what they say. In all that we do: it's customer first. So we do everything we possibly can to get customers to give as rich feedback as possible in a conversational way (yes, we do use metrics like NPS, CES and CSAT as triggers), and on the other hand we research the crap out of AI to get you the actionable insights, and the meaningful connections you so need to make a difference.
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