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...
- 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.
- 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...
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
