How to improve your customer feedback response rate?

Written by: Kushal Dev | Co-founder, Customer Guru

Have you been asked to fill in a feedback survey at a fine dining restaurant on the food/experience/service etc and you either did not bother to reply or indiscriminately marked everything as “good” or whatever took your fancy? You may have done it for the following reasons

• You wish to finish you dinner and get out asap. Definitely not interested in answering a long, boring survey of zero value to you
• You are not bothered as you are not sure if any action is taken on this feedback
• You don’t want to be rude! Maybe speaking out your mind will only lead to mindless follow-ups (i.e. “if” they read your response ;))

So if your customers are not giving you enough response. Frankly they are pretty much thinking the same. A low response rate only means low stickiness with them. Its quite likely that your non responsive customers are like those fence sitters who will jump to your competition without much consideration.

How do you rectify it?

• Keep it simple – Each question you add to your survey is going to increase the drop off rate from start to finish. Hence in order to reach out to a wide customer base restrict your customer feedback surveys to as few questions as possible. The Net Promoter Score® questions along with a follow up question is what we recommend.
• Allow your customers to get back to you easily. Make your surveys easy to answer. With more and more traffic driven (almost 50% response of our customers is from mobile) from the Mobile its important to make your survey mobile friendly. Click here to see how
• Make your customers believe that their feedback matters to you and you will definitely look into what they have to say and resolve their issues. This belief can only be instilled when customers see your commitment and know that you mean every word of what you say. One of our technology partner’s client liveouthere.com used a very creative video to communicate this to its customers and got amazing results!
• Take action ….. Consistently!! – Its important to deliver what you have promised. Don’t just deliver consistent customer service but also look into every customers feedback and resolve their issues……consistently. It is better to be consistent with what you promise to your customer than promising a lot and not delivering it. Unpredictable service is liked by none. On gathering customer feedback its important to analyse this data, identify what matters to your customers and take corrective action. On taking this action analyse its impact on customer loyalty, this goes on and on in a cycle. In order to do this consistently and successfully its important to have the right systems and processes in place. Click here to read details on how to implement NPS successfully.
• One step at a time – Imagine taking massive actions on customer feedback reports generated after lot of “research”. The research approach is time consuming and makes it difficult to analyse the impact quickly and in case you observe a negative impact of your actions, the changes are so massive, backtracking on them is near impossible. The idea is to make small incremental changes based on the insights from your customer feedback and measure their impact before making bigger decisions. This helps to revert your changes easily if required. These small changes accumulate over time and create a positive impact on your customer loyalty. A right technology solution like CustomerGauge helps you automate your system to gain insights real time and deliver good customer experience consistently. Click here to schedule a demo.

Some best practices

• Set the expectation in the beginning – Tell customers its a shart survey which will take under 3 minutes to answer
• Don’t be a pain in the ass – Survey your customers too much and they are bound to ignore you.
• Be crisp and creative – refer the liveoutthere.com video
• Mobile optimised – 50% traffic driven through mobile. Consider a technology solution like CustomerGauge
• A well timed reminder works at times
• Keep your data clean. Ensure your customer information is correct/ updated.
• Say Thank you. Tell them what action you have taken

Reach Kushal at kushal@customerguru.in

How to increase profitability per customer

Written by: Kushal Dev | Co-founder, Customer Guru

The enormous scale of markets in India and China provides an immense scope to grow for organisations. A key criteria for growth is customer acquisition, which organisations spend a lot on through marketing, discounts, loyalty programs, 24 hours sale….its endless! But is this sufficient? Imagine a customer getting such poor experience with this organisation that she defects even faster than she was lured through these “smart” customer acquisition strategies. Hence its important that customers are given such stellar experience that they become loyal to you and stick around. Losing customers at a rate faster than acquiring new ones will only lead to a shrunk customer base and decline in profit.

Both Loyal (read “promoters” according to Net Promoter Score® philosophy) and not so loyal customers (read detractors) have their own lifecycle and impact the bottomline accordingly

Promoters	Detractors
They are happy doing business with you and hence buy more Come back for repeat purchases Recommend to their friends and family leading to more business Willing to understand your genuine problems Complain less which means service cost is low Fewer complains means happier employees Happier employees are more efficient and serve your customers better!!	Detractors buy less Unless you dominate your market they will not come back. Will defect at the first opportunity though! Spread negative word of mouth creating a –ve chain reaction Enraged at minuscule issues Escalate at every opportunity consuming more of your team’s bandwidth Dent your employee’s morale. Unsatisfied employees means low efficiency, job dissatisfaction, higher attrition!!

Since loyal customers lead to lower costs, happier employees and repeat business leading to higher profits we should explore how to set this customer experience environment in your organization.

The first step should be to measure your customer loyalty. As the saying goes what gets measured gets improved. To measure it effectively its important to quantify it and make it understandable for everyone in the organisation. Net Promoter Score® (NPS) is this simple and easy to understand metric. The beauty of NPS is its simplicity. Since its easy to understand the focus can quickly shift from analyzing the score and how its arrived at, to focusing on why did you get this score and what actions are required to improve it. You then use it to establish a flow of information across the organisation creating a social environment around it. Individuals, teams, departments and different entities within an organisation can use it as a mirror to evaluate and improve themselves. When the teams understand how their actions directly impact customer loyalty they stop waiting for the higher management to show them the way and start thinking and taking action on how to improve customer loyalty  themselves. A detailed explanation on how to implement NPS successfully in an organisation can be found here.

Reach Kushal at kushal@customerguru.in

NPS as a KPI – the good and bad!

Written by: Kushal Dev | Co-founder, Customer Guru

One of the first few questions that organisations ask on adopting NPS is “should they set NPS as a KPI?”  While the intention could be right to ensure that the team is serious about NPS, it is equally important to ensure that the program has reached the maturity level of adopting NPS as a KPI. Do it too early and it will face a lot of resistance from the team. Do it too late and the program loses its value.

A few pointers to keep in mind while you are on the NPS journey

“We are in it with you”. The company should give out a clear message to its employees. Imagine the detractors reaching out to your front line employees. When they voice their concern, then other than acknowledging it if your team is clueless on the next steps it will only lead to repeat complains and further customer dissatisfaction. With no defined system in place the frontline feels helpless and this effects their morale. Any organisation would definitely not want to get in this vicious cycle of unhappy employees and customers. The solution here is to define a process for handling customer issues and equipping the team with the right tools to collect customer feedback, analyse this data and take necessary action to address these issues. The employees should get the message that the company is in it as much as the team and willing to equip them with the right processes and tools.

“Data is key”.  To create the finest quality product you need to use the best raw material. Similarly if you want to get the best result from your NPS program it is important that the data you are collecting and using to make key decisions is relevant, reliable and a good representation of your entire customer base. Initiatives based on non reliable data will face resistance from all the departments effected. This resistance will also be rightly justified as decisions on unreliable data will not be credible and yield minimum result. Some points to consider for data reliability

• The team must be trained and system should be put in place to avoid “gaming” (surveying only satisfied customers, colour coding score chart to suggest scores to customers, pleading customers for high scores indicting bonus for the team etc).
• Some geographies are culturally tuned to lower scores. Its should be accounted for while making key decisions
• Try to get a good response rate. With more and more internet users on the mobile it could be your key to higher response rate
• Organisations with high NPS may want to focus on issues creating passives rather than the ones creating detractors.
• Focusing too much on the score may dilute the essence of the program to resolve customer issues.

Though it is advisable to set NPS as a KPI it is important to commit along with you team, support in their initiatives and in the process always be focused on the ultimate goal to WOW you customers.

Reach Kushal at kushal@customerguru.in

An Indian context to NPS

Written by: Vivek Jaiswal | Co-founder, Customer Guru

Since my return from Amsterdam, I have been repeatedly told that it’s great to have the experience of helping European organisations implement NPS, but I’ll have to keep the ‘Indian context’ in mind while implementing the same in India. Some even cast doubt on whether NPS is applicable in India because Indians rarely respond to surveys. It got me thinking if it’s actually true, if there really is an ‘Indian context’ to NPS. With respect to the same, I would discuss three major questions.

1. Is the NPS question relevant to the Indian community?

2. Do Indians have a relatively low response rate to surveys vis-à-vis people of other nationalities?

3. Can NPS be skewed because Indians are culturally inclined to give low scores?

I started by conducting small experiments locally. Whenever I went out to purchase anything of value – a new mobile connection, an Internet dongle, or new earphones for my iPhone, I would always ask the NPS question to the salesman:

Would you recommend this product to your friends and family?

And

Why?

It was a fun experiment because almost always it made the salesmen think for a while. It was different from asking ‘Is this product good?’ to which they instantly responded ‘Yes! It is one of the best set of earphones we have.’ But when asked the NPS question, I was given an honest answer – ‘you should buy this one instead because it has so and so advantages over the other one’ OR ‘absolutely, in fact a friend of mine has the same product and is very happy with it.’ Having run this simple experiment across several small and big purchases, I received the same level of engagement from the sales people. It reinforced my faith in the NPS question and it is safe to extrapolate the observation across all Indian organisations.

Now comes the question of whether we Indians have an inherently low response rate? That is to say that we rarely respond to surveys. I believe that culturally we are very enthusiastic about sharing our product knowledge with others. Like the rest of the world, we regularly seek and offer opinion about products/services we would like to or have used, often volunteering to help with purchasing decisions. Though offline, these are manifestations of customer feedback. Then why is it that companies fail to capture them? In a recent call with a prospective client, I was told – “Customers don’t have the time to respond to surveys.” it prompted me to think “Yes, as long as they are sent 10 page long questionnaires, the response rate will remain abysmal.” Traditionally customer surveys have been extremely lengthy. And, along with corporates, customers have come to believe that if it’s a customer survey; it will be lengthy. However, does the length of a survey really affect response rate? Well, our dear old Surveymonkey guys have the answer to that. As one of the most widely used survey platform, Surveymonkey studied around 100,000 customer surveys for a correlation between respondent dropout rate and length of the survey. The results are depicted in the following chart:

C, Brent. “Does Adding One More Question Impact Survey Completion Rate?” SurveyMonkey Blog. https://www.surveymonkey.com/blog/en/blog/2010/12/08/survey_questions_and_completion_rates/ (accessed July 20, 2014)

So, if you are a company that really wants to improve customer response rate, you have to cut down the number of questions. It’s that simple! Again, since NPS relies on asking just the two questions I mentioned earlier, its response rates are phenomenally higher than traditional customer satisfaction surveys. To give you some perspective, CustomerGauge, our technology partner, gets NPS response rate of  >60% in B2B and >25% in B2C. This is across more than 130 countries that CustomerGauge receives responses from, India included.

Finally, some would also point that NPS could be skewed because of cultural bias: that Indians do not have a tendency to rate an organization very highly. However, in contrast to the notion, I believe Indians are more generous in that regards compared to their European counterparts. On a global scale if India scores lower than other markets, it should not be assumed to be because of a cultural bias, rather the service quality in India should be closely observed. As long as service levels are delightful, companies can be assured of receiving a 10 from Indian customers. Adam Dorrel’s (CEO CustomerGauge) blog – “Net Promoter: is there a ‘Dutch effect’?” corroborates this view.

It is important to understand that NPS is a way to measure customer delight and is a must have for every organisation. What Indian organisations really need to implement are the processes that make it easier for customers to share feedback and NPS facilitates that process most effectively.