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St. James’s Place Wealth Management
Customer Satisfaction Surveys- Good Practices
Are such surveys effective? Firstly, let us explore the common types of surveys that are conducted. There is the telephone call from a customer service team, usually at an inconvenient time, asking you for a couple of minutes of your time to complete the survey on the service you received. In my experience, a lot of people politely decline; however, some will answer the questions if their experience has been good. Is this a fair representation of the service?
"In my experience, a lot of people politely decline; however, some will answer the questions if their experience has been good. Is this a fair representation of the service"
You then have the email with a link to complete a survey. The link will usually take you to answer several questions and may have a free text box allowing you to leave your comments on the delivered service or product or your experience of using a website.
Follow up of the poor customer reviews has been appreciated by the customers as it displays the team’s dedication toward serving the best to them
Any more than three questions and people lose their interest. So, in my experience completion rates on such surveys are very low, typically less than 10 percent.
There is also the survey which can gauge your experience by pressing on icons (smiley faces/emojis), like the buttons you can press outside the services at airports, shops, and malls. Some also add the ability to leave feedback through a free text box for additional feedback. These allow you to express your buying experience through a single click and/or leave feedback, if you feel like it. Such types of surveys have a slightly higher rate of completion due to a single click, so the response rate can be between 10-50 percent.
There is nothing wrong with any of the above modes of conducting surveys, it is dependent on each organisation’s choice of faith in the mode they choose. So, how many do follow up on the feedback received? The follow up requires firms to hire resources that analyse the feedback and then communicate to relevant managers on improvement areas for staff and services/systems. How many organisations have this luxury?
Large corporates may have a customer service team, but in IT teams this responsibility usually falls to the IT Service Management team. This team’s primary focus is on ensuring that the IT services offered to the internal or external customers are fit for purpose, thereby providing a good experience and ensuring that the survey results meet their KPI or CSAT targets.
Good practices would suggest a follow up on a bad score or negative feedback left by the customer. How many companies do this? A practice I have introduced is that for a Poor feedback, checking the incident or requesting the feedback relates to see if the issue was dealt properly by the team, reviewing the feedback, if any has been given, and then calling the end user/customer to check what could have been done if the issue was dealt correctly by the resolver team.
This sort of follow up has been appreciated by the customer as it displays the team’s dedication toward serving the best to the customers and that the survey responses are not going into a black hole. A simple yet effective way of appeasing a unhappy customer.
