2.5. Describe Ways For Gathering Customer Satisfaction Feedback

A recent Bain research study reveals that there is clearly a breakdown in communication between most companies and their customers:

Simply stated, most companies are improperly measuring or defining customer satisfaction. These businesses continue to rest upon false laurels, consequently suffering the ramifications of lost revenue opportunities and negative branding.

Customer satisfaction is the determining factor for success or failure for many organisations today. Organisations have discovered that quality applies as much to the way people are treated as it does to their products. Today’s world-class organisations have learned to keep current customers and attract new ones by gathering quality feedback so they can consistently exceed expectations in every area.

It is important to gather customer satisfaction feedback from your customer base via the channel that makes the most sense for a certain type of interaction. Ideally, you would like to gather satisfaction feedback from your customers in the manner that they would prefer to interact with you (making it as simple as possible for your customers to provide feedback).

You can gather satisfaction feedback from your customers via multiple channels (IVR, Mobile phone, Online, Email, Onsite, Face-to-face, via Outbound telephone calls, Social media, etc.) and are powerful enough to report, analyse and interpret these satisfaction surveys via one central business analytics engine. Therefore, all voice of customer information and business intelligence is conveniently available through one reporting portal.

Online Surveys

Common types of online surveys include:

• Email—survey is emailed to customers, either as a link to a web-based survey or questions are included in the body of the email. Often used as a post-transaction survey, as well as for broader customer feedback collection
• Pop-up—“pops up” with a request for feedback after a visitor has landed on your website
• Website—a link on your website to a survey, often used to gather feedback on a website or web-based interaction

Post-Transaction Telephone Surveys

This type of survey is conducted at the end of a phone call with a customer—after you’ve helped them, but before they’ve hung up. This type of survey is primarily conducted in contact centres. Post-transaction surveys collect timely feedback about an interaction immediately after it took place, and can provide insight into the overall customer experience.

Customer Comment Cards 

Comment cards are paper cards containing one or more survey questions, designed to gather customer feedback after an in-person service interaction. These cards are typically filled out by customers immediately after an interaction, but can also be completed later and mailed back, or visitors can provide additional information via a web survey.

Focus Group

Focus groups are moderated, small-group discussions where a pre-selected group of people (usually current, past, or potential customers) discuss their preferences, attitudes, and opinions about products or services. While this fact sheet focuses on in-person focus groups, they can also be held over the phone. Feedback from focus groups is qualitative and is often combined with quantitative feedback to inform customer service decisions.

Website Usability Testing

These are the basics on how to collect customer feedback via usability testing, which is a technique for evaluating a website, application, system, form, or product by observing representative user interaction and ease of task completion. Feedback from these tests can improve design and performance.