Customer Success Survey, the top three things to consider.
With the customer success survey what are the top three things to consider?
Effort: Getting clients to answer a survey can be an effort, make sure the survey adds value to your business as well as the client’s business
Value: Each survey question has to drive action.
Difficulty: Building a survey that takes into consideration the nuances of the written language is difficult and requires specialist skills.
Many organizations send a customer survey on a quarterly, half-yearly, or yearly basis. The frequency is defined by the type of customers you have and what sort of information you would like the customer to give you.
If your software product has poor product telemetry then the value of the survey increases in importance. Telemetry tells you how your product is being used and provides a huge amount of insight into the clients’ usage patterns. High levels of usage over a period of time can indicate that the product is adding value.
Effort:
If I sent 100 surveys to a customer set I would expect to get at most 20 responses. If I reached out to each client directly I might double the number of responses. However, you might have to spend a lot of time reaching out to your clients.
Value:
The survey itself can be constructed in many ways. Asking the customer to use a scale between 1 & 10 to capture the client’s perception can be useful as a coarse-grained measure. During the survey you have the ability to capture information about the client, these can be multiple-choice questions or questions that give the client the ability to write comments in their own words.
In the example below, when we are asking the client a “scaler” question, consider identifying be it at a high level what the best next step should be.
From 1 to 10, what to do?
If you ask your client to rate you product or service on a scale of 1 to 10 where 10 is the best result what are you going to do for each answer?
Answer 1 out of 10: Understand why they gave that score. Ask them what help you can give them to migrate to your competition, and at least finish the relationship on a positive note.
Answer 2 out of 10: Send a gift. Schedule a Service review meeting with the CSM and CSD and VP. Offer a discount
etc
etc
etc
Answer 10 out of 10: Understand why they gave that score. Send a gift. Request a senior manager puts in a call to the customer to thank them. Ask them to be a customer reference. Ask them to be a “spotlight” customer in your webpage, email marketing campaign, webinar or conference.
Often it’s not really clear what to do next until you speak to the customer and you get an understanding of the challenges and issues.
Communication is the root of all bad survey results
I would make a bet with you. For every customer that scores you under 6 out of 10 your client has a communication problem with your organization. Either you promised something that you have not delivered or you are difficult to deal with. Lower than a five and there may well have been an “event” that was emotionally negative for the customer.
Difficulty:
There is a fair amount of research about building surveys. Constructing a survey is a very specialist area and you should consider employing an expert that can guide you on how to ask the questions that you need answering. The use of language in a survey is incredibly important.
With the right questions and quality answers from clients, it can really help you to lift the service you deliver.
Perception is everything! The better the client's perception of your service the better the chance you have of getting the renewal.
If you need help building your questionnaire please get in touch.
