For far too long, customer feedback has been intrinsically linked to customer satisfaction surveys. It’s the go to method for collecting customer feedback. The thinking behind it makes sense; if you want to know what someone thinks about you as an organisation, ask them.
But there’s a real issue with customer satisfaction surveys. Instead of giving customers the chance to say what they think, companies are asking questions which their customers don’t necessarily want to answer. Essentially, shoehorning customer responses into boxes without giving customers the opportunity to say what they think. On top of this, surveys are usually long winded, time-consuming and completely irrelevant.
So, if we agree that there is a problem with customer satisfaction surveys, what is the alternative? What can you do if you really want to find out what people think about your organisation?
Think instead, about making leaving feedback as simple and quick as possible. Let your customers be in charge of how long it takes them to complete a survey – first ask them for a score and then ask why they gave you that score.
This way, if they want to spend an hour leaving a lengthy explanation about what they loved or didn’t love about you, they can. But also, if they just want to say, ‘the queues were far too long’, they can do that too.
The insight this gives you will also be much more valuable than knowing that out of 10, John thought your customer service rep was a 3. Why was she a 3? What specifically made him say 3 instead of 2? Or 4?
You’ll get all the insight you need. You’ll get the ‘why?’ behind the score, rather than just the cold, hard numbers that don’t give any indication about how your customers think and feel.
Plus it’s so much easier to deal with. If you allow your customers to say what they love and what they don’t, you’ll be able to make changes quickly which will show your customers that you’re listening, that you care and it will show future customers exactly the same thing, as they will have avoided potentially experiencing the same problem.
So if you’re looking for an alternative to customer satisfaction surveys, look no further than real-time fast feedback.
Find out more about our fast feedback solution here:
