Happy customers are customers who are likely to return. In today’s world, when the competition is so fierce, having customers who are willing and pleased to continue using your services is essential. Leveraging customer satisfaction surveys is a proven strategy to boost happiness and foster customer loyalty within your company. In this article, we’ll examine why you should use surveys and how NICE CXone provides the necessary tools to make the most use of them. Not only will you discover the value of surveys, you’ll see why they need to become a key part of your change management system.
Customer Satisfaction Surveys Tell You What to Improve
These surveys are sent to the customers after they’ve had an interaction with one of your staff. In contact centers, this technology is used to get fast, direct feedback from customers and measure customer satisfaction, gaining valuable insights into the customer's perception of the interaction. This feedback allows the company to find ways to improve the overall customer experience. It will help not only that customer in the future but all customers who interact with the company.
Survey results should be a part of quality management, which will help to ensure that the feedback loop is complete. This simply means that the results of the survey will help to improve customer service representative performance and customer experience. As more and more surveys are provided to customers, and as their feedback is integrated into training and coaching, it helps to improve agents’ overall capabilities, fixing and weeding out any issues customers have had. Ultimately, it helps to improve the call center team and the entire business.
The Biggest Benefits of Using Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Just sending out surveys won’t help you make improvements that will delight your customers. You need to understand the reasoning behind creating and deploying surveys. Let’s take a closer look at some of the biggest benefits of choosing to use customer satisfaction surveys.
Gain Valuable Feedback
Naturally, the biggest reason to use surveys is that you can get important customer sentiment and feedback that comes right from the customers. Even better, it’s immediate. The customers still have their last interaction fresh in their minds, for good or bad. You can quickly and easily learn about any issues that your customers might have with your business or your customer support team. The feedback has the potential to expose issues you wouldn’t have seen or noticed in the entire customer journey. This lets you see and act on those issues before they grow and become a larger problem.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that all the feedback that you receive will be vital for your company’s success and survival. Sometimes, the feedback will be trivial, but it’s still something that you’ll want to keep in mind to improve your company's customer satisfaction score. Take trivial feedback with a grain of salt, but if you find multiple customers are complaining about the same thing, look into it.
Show Customers You Value Them
Customers want to feel as though you’re doing something about their problems. They don’t want their problems to be forgotten or swept under the rug. When you put in the effort to provide a survey, the customers will be pleased. You’re showing them you care about them and how they’re being treated. When people suggest changes that your company makes, it shows that you are striving to make true improvements.
Something that you’ll want to keep in mind with customer feedback surveys, though, is that not everyone will fill them out. You’ll find that those who are willing to fill out the surveys fall into one of two groups. There are those satisfied customers who are delighted with the service they receive, and they want their satisfaction to be reflected in the agent who helped them. On the other hand, there will be those who are dissatisfied with their service.
Those who are in the latter category tend to be more vocal about their issues, and far more willing to take the time to fill out a survey. Don’t get disheartened if you find that many surveys fall into this category. Think of it as a benefit. It’s an opportunity to learn about the issues that your company has, so you can then make a point of resolving the problems. The more problems you fix, the fewer of these negative surveys you’ll receive.
Understand the Customer’s Perspective
Your customers have insight into your company that you’ll never have simply because they have a different perspective. They are on the outside looking in, and you’re on the inside looking out. The customer surveys you can create with NICE CXone help you to better understand things from their perspective. You will get a better indication of the things you’re doing right and wrong. You can see where their concerns lie, and this can provide you with valuable knowledge. It makes it easier to fix elements of customer service and other areas of your company.
Determine Priorities
Another benefit of the feedback from your surveys is that you’ll have a good indication of where the biggest problems lie. If you receive several surveys that are all complaining about the same things in your business, you can then more easily determine which of these needs to be dealt with first. You can take care of the biggest problems as a priority, or at least put more of your team into handling those problems. You can then work your way down the list to take care of other issues discovered through the surveys.
Track Customer Satisfaction Survey Results
Another benefit of using surveys, especially those from NICE CXone, is that you can track how well you’re doing. Once you receive your initial surveys, you prioritize the areas you need to improve. After making those improvements, you should notice that the surveys no longer focus on those areas. They should be fixed. If you are still receiving complaints in the surveys about how agents handle questions and what solutions the agents offer, you’ll know that more changes need to be made.
The goal, over time, is to reduce the number of complaints and types of complaints that are discussed in the customer satisfaction feedback surveys. It may take time, but putting in work on this aspect of your business is essential if you want to keep your customers happy, which leads to the next benefit.
Retain Customers and Their Loyalty
When you have customers who can see you’re making positive changes, you’re more likely to boost customer retention rates. Customers see you’re taking customer satisfaction seriously since you’re collecting surveys. When they see you implement actual changes, it shows them you’re proactive. If you’re willing to make changes that improve their lives, they are more likely to return.
It means they’re more likely to say good things to their friends and family about your company. Of course, if you don’t improve your relationship with customers, they’ll tell their peers about this, as well. However, they will warn people against choosing your business.
Gain a Competitive Advantage
Getting ahead of the competition can be difficult, but one area where you can outshine them is through your customer satisfaction. The surveys allow you to get a better idea of what your customers want. If they don’t find it from you, they’ll find it from your competitors. The surveys are a way to know exactly what they want from your company.
If your competition is not providing these types of surveys, or if they aren’t making changes for their customers, it’s your chance to stand out. Show your customers that you’re taking their issues seriously. Change your business, and then brag about it. This can be a good way to bring in customers from your competitors.
Keep in mind that if you’re not doing this, there’s a good chance that your competition will be.
Formatting Your Surveys: A Key Action Step
Now that you have a perspective on why you should use customer satisfaction surveys and the value of the resulting feedback, it’s time to look at the format of the surveys themselves. We’ll examine how to create surveys and why NICE CXone is the best tool to produce them. Plus, we’ll see how CXone makes it easy to analyze the data and share it across your organization, so you’ll be on your way to achieving meaningful results.
What Types of Questions Should Be Asked on the Survey?
Because all businesses are different, you’ll want to make sure that you’re creating customer satisfaction survey questions geared specifically toward your customers. You should also include some general questions about overall customer satisfaction.
Essentially, you want to find out:
- What you’re doing right, so you know to continue
- What you’re doing wrong, so you know where you need to improve
- The overall satisfaction with their experience with your company/agent
- Whether they received the help they needed and had their questions answered
- Whether they would use your company again
- You can opt for yes/no questions, questions answered on a scale of 1 to 10, multiple-choice questions, and open-ended questions.
Keep in mind that when you’re creating your survey, you don’t want it to be overly long. Create surveys that are to the point and that can be filled out and finished in less than five minutes. Otherwise, one answer on the survey will probably tell you to shorten your surveys.
Note: Not only do we offer the best platform for creating customer satisfaction surveys and analyzing the resulting data, but we also provide insights into best practices for creating these surveys. We’ve covered some of these (survey length; question types). Three key points remain:
- Provide incentives for people to take the surveys. While incentives are not uncommon in other situations, with customer surveys they are relatively new. An effective incentive is a discount code on services. Make the discount universal, so the customer can select which service they’d like to apply the coupon code towards.
- Provide follow-up surveys. Getting fresh information right after an interaction is important. It’s also often necessary to check back with a customer, to see if the level of satisfaction is still high. An example might be checking in several times during a free trial period. Follow-up surveys can help you discover if the customer is experiencing any bumps in the road when using your product/service.
- Transparency throughout the process. Collecting survey data and using it internally for decision-making is but part of the equation. One of the best uses of your survey data is sharing it with your customers. You need to take action based on the data and then communicate the results to your customers. For example, surveys indicated that hold times at your call center were unacceptably long. You took this data and instituted a new ‘Fast Response Guarantee,’ where all calls are now answered in 2 minutes or less. You hired hundreds of new agents and equipped them with the best training and call center tools to ensure your guarantee was achieved.
The Top Choice for Creating Customer Satisfaction Surveys
How Does NICE CXone Stand Out?
NICE CXone Feedback Management is a high-quality contact center customer satisfaction survey product. The software’s goal is to collect feedback from customers that’s honest and unbiased and that can provide you with customer insight across all channel interactions. Regardless of how the customer contacted your company, it’s possible to collect the information you need to make improvements to their experience.
The software can even help with staff engagement thanks to customizable views and its intuitive interface. It allows users—both agents and supervisors—to view the results, which can help to identify areas where self-coaching and improvements can be made. Users will appreciate the interactive dashboards because they are so simple to use and understand. Survey results can be analyzed quickly.
You don’t have to worry about contacting your existing customers using just one method. When you use CXone, you’ll find that it’s possible to deliver the surveys through the web, email, or voice. Regardless of how you contact your customers, they can complete the survey on the same device.
This is beneficial because it provides them with the survey right away. The answers will be the most accurate because they are fresh in the customer’s mind. They don’t have to stop and think about how their interaction went, as they would if you emailed them a survey in a couple of days.
The software can help to eliminate misinterpretation. It funnels the feedback straight from the customer to the agent. Agents can be more proactive and identify any issues. When they can see issues and make improvements on their own, it can help to reduce training costs.
NICE CXone can do even more. Rather than just viewing the results, the software allows you to get a better look into the minds of your customers. It’s even possible to expand past the contact center and make improvements across departments for the best possible performance for your business.
With NICE CXone, you will:
- Empower your agents to self-coach and make their own improvements
- Unlock important customer data that can provide insights on how to improve your customer satisfaction score (csat)
- Share data across the organization
- Expand past the contact center across the entire customer lifecycle
- Recognize and reward those agents who are performing well and who are making improvements
For full control over your surveys, NICE CXone is the top choice. The software is intuitive, and as you’ll see below, there’s more than just surveys to help take your business to the next level.
CXone offers a range of capabilities that can help your company make improvements in every department. Additional features include:
- Multiple channels for customer interaction and connection
- Omnichannel routing, so customers reach the best agent for their needs
- Automatic call distribution
- Interactive voice response
- Predictive dialing software
NICE CXone is your key to tapping into a wealth of customer knowledge. Your customers are willing to tell you what they want: you must be proactive to seek out that information, so you can make their experience the best it can be. NICE CXone is the tool you need to outpace your competition; some of whom may be literally ignoring opportunities to engage with customers.
NICE CXone is Essential for Superior Customer Satisfaction
NICE CXone can help you unlock important customer data that are vital to improving your company. We’d like to show you how CXone’s range of solutions can not only empower agents, but also help them take initiative, and even share data across the organization. It’s time to be proactive with your customer satisfaction data. Contact us so we can help you get the most from your customer feedback.
