Feedback Action Management makes QuestBack Essentials - Essential

Two years ago I wrote post here about the importance of Action Management to customer feedback processes.  It was titled: "Turning customer feedback into action is the number one challenge for customer strategists."  The article referenced some work done by Walker Information Systems and pointed at an article written by them (click here to read my earlier post and the link to Walker's article). 

The point: Customer Feedback is a lot more useful if it is immediately actionable.

One of QuestBack Essentials' main advantages is that it makes customer feedback immediately actionable.
Kudos to QB for thinking that way as far back as 15 years ago. Their Essentials product uses a couple of different process mechanisms to make feedback actionable immediately. One of them is the equivalent to Walker's "Hot Alert" process. QuestBack calls it a "Notification", simply an e-mail that is automatically triggered to a given person based on criteria (a response profile) coming through the customer feedback instrument, which could be an e-mailed survey, a feedback form, a pop up survey or any other QuestBack created feedback instrument. Other process mechanisms include, all responses and manual inspection / selection of response to be acted on. As a result, QB Essentials is very flexible in how it helps organizations create action on received feedback.

In any case, the main issue most organizations have when trying to implement action processes on feedback is determining the combination of "feedback to be actioned" and "how to action it".  In other words, hot-alerting feedback for action only works if the "action takers" for that feedback are empowered to act on it in ways that help with the issue. This simply is not the case in most scenarios. So businesses continue to struggle with applying action management on their feedback, even when they have great tools to use like QuestBack.  

So what's different now?  Well, QuestBack is different.  Action Management has been improved in QuestBack Essentials and combined with a Case Management capability to allow customer feedback "issues" to be Highlighted, Status-ed and Actioned - all within the QuestBack Essentials platform. This capability allows new issues to be highlighted, internally discussed and disseminated, decisions to be made and actions determined.  All within short periods of time (minutes or hours potentially vs weeks or months today) To my mind, this is really cool stuff and very valuable potentially to call centers, sales forces, hr teams, etc. Really, any group of people in a business who have to react to the concerns of another group of people. And, it has "hot-alert" automated actioning too.  This combination allows an organization to standardize action taking on certain kinds of issues, while manually intervening on other issues and inspecting / organizing for yet additional kinds of issues - all at the same time.

Combined with QuestBack's Dashboarding capabilities, this lets companies inexpensively seek feedback, organize and implement follow-up actions and processes, report on feedback and actions, and Manage that feedback effectively based on surveys they do using QuestBack Essentials.

I think anyone looking to implement a closed-loop customer feedback process today would do very well to consider QB Essentials and its action management tools.

Stewart Nash
www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash/

Continuous vs. Episodic Feedback - Continuous is better

I've recently received a number of survey requests. 

The requests are coming from companies that, apparently, are having business "issues" of one kind or another and are looking for feedback to help them address it. The issues range from "low open rates" on electronic content to subscription cancellations to non visitation to websites. 

It's a good thing that these businesses are seeking feedback. And, late is after all, better than never. The feedback these businesses get will help them address the problems they've noted. Though, their remedial actions will come a lot later and as a result be less effective for their businesses than if their feedback programs were continuous in nature. Furthermore, I can't help but think that if these businesses had on-going customer feedback programs, they probably wouldn't be experiencing the issues that created the need for the surveys they're sending out now. 

Continuous customer feedback is known to be better than episodic customer feedback for understanding customer experience. This doesn't mean that periodic relationship surveying isn't necessary. For most businesses, both continuous feedback surveys and relationship surveys are extremely important for understanding the overall health of the customer relationship.

Businesses that continuously collect, analyze and act on customer feedback are able to detect issues before they become widespread. This means that actions can be taken to mitigate or eliminate issues before they impact too many customer relationships. This often reduces direct costs and even more often avoids indirect costs (typically discounts given to "make things right" for customers impacted by issues).

Continuous analysis of feedback to detect trend changes is the key to a feedback program. After all, data is just that without analysis. Analyzing for change in NPS or CSAT scores, topic popularity, topic sentiment changes, etc., gives the Analyst the insights to visualize what issues might be cropping up in the business. The tools for generating these analytical insights are now both available and reasonably priced for most businesses.

I work with QuestBack AS for surveys and Etuma Ltd. for text analytics. Businesses implementing both are able to get continuous feedback process monitoring and analytics.  

Stewart Nash
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash

Etuma - Best in Breed Sentiment Analysis

Here's an awesome quote from the Insight Now Blog about Etuma's text analysis solution.

"Arguably the best in breed automated sentiment analysis is provided by Etuma" - Insight Now
Click Here to read the entire blog post from Insight Now

I'm sure its going to generate a lot of discussion on the internet amongst companies using automated text analysis services as well as from vendors in the space.

Sentiment analysis has always been considered the most difficult thing to do when interpreting streams of text based feedback. But, doing it using Etuma, combined with key background variables (like NPS categories or scores) and some "eye ball" time on key sub-sets of comments (Which Etuma also makes easy to do) can give you a very accurate, actionable, picture of what customers or constituencies think about your products, services, systems or actions at different points in time.  That an important research house thinks Etuma is the best automated solution means a lot.

Stewart Nash
www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash

Text Analysis - Understanding Operational Change

I had a very interesting conversation with a customer recently.  The conversation resulted in the customer signing a contract for Etuma's text analysis service (Feedback Categorizer / Insight Portal).  I had been in discussions with this particular customer for a number of months with the dialogue going something like this:

- Customer: We really like Etuma's ability to categorize and sentiment rate our transactional NPS Survey feedback. But, we know what we need to do to improve our NPS scores and we're investing heavily to make lots of those changes. So, we can't justify the time and effort to buy and use Etuma right now.  

- Me: I understand, resources are tight all around and taking them from things you know you need to do, to do things you may need to do can be a difficult sell.  Let's revisit this in a few months when your investment and resource commitments have stabilized a bit. I'll touch bases then.

I've known this particular customer for several years. So, instead of pushing what I knew is good argument for Etuma, I thought it better to just wait until things calmed down for him.  So, what changed?  Why did this customer reach back out to me and decide to acquire Etuma Text Analysis?

The answer of course is simple.  The boss (CFO in this instance) wanted some way of understanding if all the financial and other resources they were investing into "doing the things they need to do to improve" actually were helping them to improve. What happened was this company's NPS scores started rising, which they hoped / expected would happen. But, the question they couldn't answer easily was which of the operational changes they made were driving the change in NPS scores. With Etuma, the changes in feedback, both from a topic perspective and a sentiment perspective, are easily mapped to implementations of operational changes, giving managements a very rapid and correlated understanding of the effects their decisions are having on customers.

Fortunately, implementing Etuma is almost as easy as deciding to buy it. So, getting data on NPS and its changes is a fairly simple matter.  Its great to have another Etuma customer. Its even better to see that corporate management is willing to invest in methods for understanding if their actions are producing the results they seek. Better still for this company, the investment needed to aquire Etuma Text Analysis was very modest.

Stewart Nash
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash

Try Etuma for free.  Click Here

The Survey is Dead, Long Live the Survey - Part 2

Four years ago I wrote a post here titled: "The Survey is Dead - Long Live the Survey".  At the time over-surveying was a problem being talked about a great deal in the trade magazines and blogs. Response rates were declining across the market research industry. The argument then was that social media data streams would replace a lot of Surveys.

Fast forward to 2015. I think the exact opposite has occurred. Today, more people are being offered more surveys than ever before. And response rates appear to have stabilized or maybe even gone up.  In 2011, I said that: "social media may actually increase both the frequency as well as the value received from customer surveys". I believe this statement has been proved even more true than I had imagined it would be. But, its been for different reasons. Or, maybe for reasons related to those I had mentioned. I had thought that social media would force businesses to respond to feedback in more real-time ways. And, today many do so, mainly through on-line chat applications. But, almost all electronic methods of communication with businesses today offer some kind of feedback capability. Virtually all of them employ some kind of survey technology to collect and distribute the feedback.

So, In point of fact surveys today are more ubiquitous than ever before.  And the reason is simple, businesses need to know something about the people giving them feedback in order to act on it.  Also true is that transactional and even relationship surveys are even more widely used now than then. Again, for the reasons I had described. They simply provide businesses with too much valuable, actionable feedback (at a very low cost) to stop being a core feedback management tool. What has changed is that surveys are being better designed and are a lot more respectful of people's time than in the past. So more people are willing to take them.

Of course survey technology is improving. Today, many web surveys are Mobile Device Enabled (MDE). MDE surveys appear to generate higher response rates. In my opinion, because people can use their smartphones on the subway, train or bus (or anywhere else that's connected to the internet) to take surveys. Also SMS text messaging can be used to deliver a survey to mobile users, meaning people don't even need e-mail accounts to be reachable anymore. Survey links are embedded in social media now all the time, further extending their potential reach. As a result, survey-able populations are larger. And, with larger populations and higher response rates, its no surprise that more surveying than ever is going on.

A plug for QuestBack.  All QuestBack Essentials surveys are fully MDE. They can be delivered via URL, Email, QR Code, Pop Up Script, embedded in social media or even sent via SMS text.

Surveys aren't dead at all.  They are more alive than ever before, used in more places and for more purposes than ever before and providing more value to businesses than ever before.  Long Live the Survey!

Stewart Nash
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash

Surveying in support of unsolicited verbatim feedback

I've written a number of posts her focusing on ways to employ outbound processes for soliciting customer feedback. But, by definition, outbound feedback collection requires enough customer knowledge to determine which customers to engage, when to engage them and what topics to try and engage them on. Some of that data can be drawn from CRM databases. But, what about when no solid information exists about a customer?  

In my most recent post I discussed how text analytics can be employed to categorize verbatim feedback from transactional surveys and how this categorized data might then be used to trigger follow on topic driven surveys. This post is going to elaborate on that topic and extend into other arenas where verbatim customer feedback can be analyzed, categorized and potentially used for input to survey processes. 

One important type of unsolicited feedback companies receive is from social media and company websites, where customers visit without being asked to, or are responding to some level of marketing. The feedback businesses get from these sources can be difficult to take action on, unless it is reviewed at the actual comment level. This, of course, takes lots of resource. Text analysis tools are a logical mechanism to employ so as to reduce the manpower needed for follow up. Since topical categorization of social media based feedback is a simple matter today for text analysis systems, using them to create feedback categories is a logical step. However, most verbatim feedback - taken without context of customer data is also hard to act on.  So, surveying subsets of customers based on their topic and sentiment profiles also makes logical sense.  The same way drill down surveys can help with simple transactional feedback (last months post), they can help with understanding unsolicited feedback. 

It seems to me that getting survey questions out to people interacting with social media or survey like data into social data streams would clearly add value to the data. An example of how this might work:
- "Business A" had 10,000 comments come in last month through their web site, where they offered a feedback form with a single NPS question and a verbatim comment box. The 10K comments were run through text analysis. 1000 comments were categorized as referencing "product quality". And, of those, 200 were from "detractors" and 200 from "neutrals". 
- In situations like this, the product management (PM) team would want to try and ascertain if product quality was in fact a driver of NPS score. By sending a follow up survey to this specific group of detractors and neutrals regarding products, company A's PM team can generate further and more detailed data about any product quality issues customers are experiencing. 

The benefit of a process like the one I'm describing above is that it eliminates the need for a person to go through all the "product quality" related feedback to generate the needed information about product quality issues. People taking the follow up survey would provide quantitative data about specifics of product quality. And, the qualitative data in the text would then make a lot more sense. Reacting to feedback using a process like this would help businesses react to the right issues, as well as not over react to non issues.

With more and more customer feedback being unsolicited in nature, its important for businesses to begin thinking about ways to attach specific quantitative data to the streams of text entering their processes.  Adding surveys to text analyses based on results, can help.

Stewart Nash
www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash

Should verbatim analysis drive customer survey processes?

Traditionally, verbatim analysis techniques and tools are applied in post survey analyses of customer feedback.  But, with the increasing prevalence of very brief transactional surveys and social media channels generally, I'm wondering if the process should be reversed.  i.e. Analyze verbatim comments to understand where deeper dive kinds of surveys should be deployed.

I'm seeing an increasing number of companies these days that use a very simple transactional Net Promoter or CSAT survey process. Typically, these firms are asking a single question: "How likely are you to recommend [company] to your family and friends?", accompanied by a comment box. Or, "Rate your satisfaction with [company]", accompanied by a comment box. It seems to me that there are advantages to this kind of process including:

• Higher response rates
• Really simple and fast implementation of the survey process itself
• Low cost 

It would also seem that there are some disadvantages to this type of process, including, among others:

• Figuring out who should do follow up on received feedback.  
• Figuring out how to appropriately follow up on received feedback.
• The challenge of analyzing feedback from surveys where no questions exist about key aspects of the company's offerings (examples being product / service quality or value vs. competition).

For companies early in their existence, simple easy and low cost are important characteristics for a customer feedback program. But, as they grow, understanding the drivers of loyalty or satisfaction become more important in successfully operating the business. This leads to growing companies using more and more manual resources for feedback analysis, which of course costs money. The way it works: At first, one person is assigned to read, categorize and action issues identified in comments in surveys. When comment volume gets more significant they expand to a team of people. And, so on.  

Once multiple people begin analyzing verbatims individually, interpretation issues begin to creep into the analyses.  The more people categorizing text the more interpretation issues there will be. Automated text analysis tools are a good next step for customer feedback evaluation when teams of people begin getting involved. They reduce labor costs while improving the quality of the analyses. 

Even automated and consistent text analytics isn't sufficient to fully understand the voice of the customer (VOC). Additional quantitative data is also necessary. So, some level of follow-up survey process needs to be implemented. In fact, potentially several separate follow surveys might be used depending on what the verbatim feedback is indicating. For instance, if product or service issues are highlighted by people responding to the survey, a follow up survey asking a few more questions (less than 10 ideally) should be sent in order to better understand what those issues might be.

A number of companies I talk with these days have this scenario where they're receiving lots of multi-channel verbatim feedback, beyond that contained in their transactional surveys. Twitter feeds, customer service chats, feedback forms on the websites, etc., all offer text analysis opportunities and will provide indicators for follow up, deeper dive surveys. Companies should look to Text Analysis tools to standardize their verbatim feedback analyses. But, they also should look for ways to use the verbatim analysis results to drive follow up surveys that lead to a higher level of VOC insight.

Transactional feedback is a key element to any company's customer experience strategy.  But, understanding the customer experience is more involved and requires more information about customers than simple transactional surveys can provide. Combining them with text analytics and targeted follow up surveys can provide that richer set of insights.

- Stewart Nash
QuestBack USA
Etuma USA
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash

"Ask and Engage" with Customer Surveys

Feedback Action Loop

Early on in its history (2001?), QuestBack coined the term "Ask and Act" to describe how its web survey solutions provide companies with an easy mechanism to follow up on customer feedback. But, with only a rudimentary e-mail capability, QuestBack's utility was largely limited to specific feedback projects, typically, research or customer service oriented.  That has all recently changed.......

Feedback Based Engagement Loop

Fast forward to today.  QuestBack should be renamed to "Ask and Engage". Its html based e-mail tools and media libraries allow marketers to build powerful messaging programs that present brands or introduce products / services, all while collecting data, qualifying or generating leads and prospects, or engaging with customers about various aspects of the company's relationship with them. "Rules" embedded in QuestBack surveys that accompany marketing messages let companies design engagement to maximize the business value from each contact they touch with QuestBack.

So why would a QuestBack based customer engagement program be better than say lead nurturing using e-mail tools? A couple of reasons, rules based follow up means that a "rule" determines what kind of engagement should occur. Should a contact's response profile indicate a certain type of engagement, that can be embedded as a QuestBack follow up "rule" which generates a follow action automatically.  Rules can also be constructed, using company data, so that the person who "owns" a particular kind of engagement with a particular class of lead, prospect or customer can be automated into an engagement process.

Since QuestBack operates in social media platforms like Facebook or on company websites, engagement doesn't have to be just outbound e-mail driven. Done well, and using closed-loop follow up, surveys themselves are engagement tools. In fact, they are typically very good engagement tools.  Even when going out in pure marketing blasts, 1-2% response rates are achievable. When going to customer bases, qualified leads or other folks with a connection, response rates can be north of 30%, a rate e-mail marketers would kill for.

"Ask and Engage" should be an approach marketers start to adopt more and more.  

Mobile Support Increases Survey Response Rate

There's been lots of discussion about how survey response rates are declining for market research and Voice of the customer surveys. I've always argued that survey design and delivery considerations make a difference in response rates. Though I am not a market research professional by trade, I do a lot of web surveys on my own and for clients.  So, I thought I'd share an anecdote about a situation where survey response rate actually increased, and my opinion about why.

If you've read this blog over the last 4-5 years, you'll have noted that I do work with a number of club soccer organizations.  In particular, I work with a large regional soccer club, helping them with their annual membership surveys. Notably, this year's membership survey is receiving substantially higher levels of response than identical surveys done in the recent past. The "delta" in response rate appears to be related to changes QuestBack has made in their "Essentials" product that make the club's membership surveys much friendlier for mobile device users like soccer moms, who for sure are heavy users of mobile devices.

By way of background, the soccer club uses a modified Net Promoter survey to determine member loyalty, assess opinion about player development and understand overall experience of members in their programs. They also implement a closed-loop follow up process driven by QuestBack notifications. The membership survey has generally been very effective, helping them to understand their loyalty drivers and areas where improvements are needed across the club.  

For survey process, the club does four e-mail "sends" of the survey.  An initial invitation followed by two reminders and a "last chance" note to the membership. Past surveys have received response rates of 40% or higher. This year, they have achieved 33% after one invitation and one reminder. If past trends hold true, this year's survey will achieve better than 50% response when complete. Needless to say, if 50%+ response is achieved it will be a milestone for the club and will give them a very useful data set to work with. The loop closing they do should help them greatly with club development next year.

I believe that QuestBack's support for mobile-adaptive surveys is the main reason for the increase in response rates the club is seeing. Earlier this year QuestBack invested heavily in re-developing their survey forms architecture to allow virtually any survey question to be delivered effectively on multiple mobile devices, from i phones to tablets. QuestBack surveys today automatically identify the device being used to take the survey, and then optimize questions for that device. For an organization like a soccer club, where parents may be taking the survey in their car while watching practice, mobile optimization may make the difference between taking the survey or not taking the survey.  

Verbatim Comparisons add value to Feedback Analyses

According to most of the research I've seen about Customer Experience, the single biggest challenge organizations face is taking timely action on their customer feedback.  For many businesses today customer feedback collection is an ongoing process where surveys are constantly being offered to customers. Yet, businesses still largely struggle to act quickly on the feedback they get. Often, this is because their analysis and reporting processes are manual, taking days or weeks to produce the analyses needed to understand problems.

Etuma Ltd. has created a new tool for evaluating verbatim feedback with comparisons based on key attributes that allow businesses to visualize differences in topics and sentiments expressed.  The new comparison tool enables quick and easy benchmarking of operational dimensions (like geographic areas, stores, products, etc.) against each other or against company-wide averages.

Pinpoint operational issues with Verbatim Comparison in Etuma360

Retailers, as in the above example, can use Etuma360 to compare feedback and sentiment at the store level versus the average of all stores and can thus quickly identify problems needing corrective actions at any of their stores. For instance, in the example above, the "Elm Street" store shows lower customer sentiment scores for Topics "Check Out" and "Queues", than the average for the company. This may indicate store staff is slow staffing registers, registers are malfunctioning or check out staff are not operating registers properly. Or, possibly some other problem. Since short lines and efficient check out processes are key attributes of good retail customer experience, negative scores on these topics indicate action needs to be taken.

Verbatim comparisons are equally valuable in other scenarios.  In my own experience I have found that in Net Promoter surveys customers often comment on same topics regardless of their NPS category.  So, understanding sentiment differences amongst detractors, passives and promoters is  particularly useful for me.  With Etuma's new verbatim comparison tool, this is now easy to do.  It's my experience that topics with negative sentiment ratings amongst detractors are likely candidates for loyalty drivers that the business needs to improve upon for customer retention.

The thing about Etuma that has always impressed me is how easy it is to get started and benefit from verbatim customer feedback analysis.  It also is surprising how affordable their solutions are. 

Going "Next Gen" at QuestBack

Those of you who read this blog will know that I resell QuestBack solutions. 

Normally, I don't talk a lot about QuestBack products here, as I want the blog to be focused on customer feedback management topics. Occasionally though a note on QuestBack isn't out of order. And, may even add to the dialogue about customer feedback management and dealing with the challenges thereof. I think today is one of those occasions.

QuestBack has embarked on a new strategy and development push that, in my opinion, will see it become a real player in the North American markets. The company has put a tremendous amount of effort into a modernized UI, device independence, multi-mode delivery, and data access via reporting. QuestBack's analytics were always great and their actioning capabilities top notch as well. So a really good feedback management solution has become exceptional.

QuestBack's new releases, v14 and v15, represent the beginning of QuestBack's "Next Generation" product strategy. v15 is currently available to existing and new customers. And, has been re-branded as QuestBack "Essentials".  

QuestBack Essentials is really just a beginning for the company. QuestBack has also brought to market its first Survey & Dashboard Application solution, SalesPulse. QuestBack SalesPulse is a survey based application, built on QuestBack Essentials and our DataVoyager reporting platform. SalesPulse uses pre-built QuestBack survey templates that plug into CRM platforms (Salesforce, Dynamics CRM, etc.) and automatically starts generating operationally useful data about sales processes and people. SalesPulse is mainly targeted at organizations that do sales meetings or have scenarios where meetings occur (physical or on-line) in their sales process.  An example of a SalesPulse Dashboard follows:

Over time, QuestBack Essentials is going to integrate with many additional applications, will have more action management capabilities, more analytics / visualization capabilities, more panel support and more social media integration.
 All in all a great start for QuestBack's Next Gen initiative.

Learn More About QuestBack Essentials Here

Good Customer Surveys are Money-in-the-Bank

Being in the customer experience management (CXM) space over the last seven plus years. And, in customer facing roles for a lot longer than that, I've seen first hand how customer feedback can impact businesses in hugely positive ways. At the same time, I see how customer feedback is often mis-used, or worse, goes unused at all. So, I thought I'd post something about the many ways that customer feedback can mean money for businesses.  Here's five examples...

1. The customer relationship survey. I constantly read about how companies are de-emphasizing their customer surveys because of low response rates, non-actionable data or other problems.  What I know, from long experience, to be true is that customer relationship surveys are hugely valuable. Consider the math. If you have ten thousand customers, a 10% churn rate, a 25% recovery rate and an average revenue of $1,000 per customer you lose a million dollars of business yearly, and get a quarter of it back after working for it again.  If you can cut that by a third, its an over three hundred thousand dollar "gain" to the company, and its less effort / investment put into account recovery afterward. Needless to say, you need less new customers to get back to even and if you get the same number you are up. Customer surveys provide the indicators and insight you need to reduce customer churn before it happens.
2. The customer relationship survey redux. Companies invest lots of money in developing testimonials. Smart companies just ask for feedback then take the words their customers write, feed them back to the customers along with a request to re-use the feedback in their marketing. Each instance becomes a virtually free testimonial.  With today's social media tools, its simple to automate feeds of positive, customer approved, feedback straight to your Facebook page, Website, Twitter feeds, etc...
3. Sales lead qualification surveys. Companies today invest boatloads of money in in-bound lead generation. They then bombard the "leads" with marketing e-mails (LinkedIn lives off of this). The leads after a while will self select away from the company to avoid bombardment. But, the real problem is that they don't really know who truly is a lead and is worthy of nurturing. A simple survey "leads" what they think of their solutions and likelihood of buying at some future point would produce a much clearer picture of who really is a lead and who isn't. Cost of this? Very low. Business impact, very high as "leads" who self qualify are much better quality (as any semi-seasoned sales guy would tell you) than those who do not. The survey process has the additional benefit identifying leads as qualified before those leads would otherwise do so via a normal bombardment process.
4. Prospect validation surveys.  As a sales manager I have found that sales reps can be opaque at times about their sales funnels. Often they truly do not know why a prospect isn't advancing through the funnel or that a lead hasn't yet defined themselves as an opportunity or that a prospect deep in the funnel in danger somehow. Surveys can provide give them (and you the manager) the insights they need to properly determine positioning in the funnel.  
5. Product / Service value surveys. Product managers are constantly trying to determine what features, capabilities, add-ons, integrations or other "things" they can add to their company's products or services.  And, determine which things they do will help the product maximize value to the company. Surveys asking customers for product thoughts (i.e. problems, enhancement ideas, documentation improvements, etc....) are an easy way for this kind of data to be accumulated.  Getting product enhancement ideas early and constantly helps product managers keep products current or ahead of with market requirements. Products that stay consistently good relative to competition often have more loyal user bases and higher overall profitability - Money in the bank.

So how to do all this surveying without over surveying customers and reducing responses rates?  First off, don't create one big survey and send it to everyone. Segment your customer population, then survey the segments periodically as business needs dictate. For example, survey product users for product management - maybe yearly or twice yearly. Survey decision makers and recommenders for relationship quality 1x or 2x per year. Survey leads for qualification quarterly.  Survey prospects for prospect validation - once if in short sales cycle and twice or more if in a longer cycle.  

What else to do. Have a process for acting on all the feedback you get. Its important to ask for feedback. Its more important that when feedback comes in someone, somewhere in your company sees it and take an action on it. 

Surveying customers in the right ways, at the right times with the right actioning processes in place is Money-in-the-bank.  

Learn more about QuestBack and how we can help with your customer surveys.