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.

What's the next consolidation in EFM?

There's been a large recent influx of new capital going into EFM vendors, either through private equity, or merger and sometimes by both merger and additional equity. So, I thought I'd revisit my thinking on the consolidation occurring in EFM.

All technology markets undergo consolidation over time. Normally, it occurs as the technology itself (whatever it is) grows and vendors adapt to that growth. This has been steadily happening in the EFM space.

A few months ago I wrote about this in a post titled: "More Consolidation in the EFM space." It outlined the merger and acquisition activity going on with EFM. The discussion was about the business consolidations by Verint (Vovici), ConfirmIT (CustomerSat), SurveyMonkey (CustomerSat and ClickTools) and others, including QuestBack. The post is available here:

At the time, I had three thoughts about the merger activity.....

"Thought #1.  The EFM space is getting crowded at the top end of the market.  Gartner, Forrester, Aberdeen and others have been beating the drum for Enterprise Feedback Management for a long time, at least five years by my count.  Since most of the EFM vendors focus their efforts on selling to "Enterprise" class customers, as time has passed more of them have adopted solutions, leaving less growth available to the rest of the players.  Hence, acquisitions of high-end products."

Clearly, the EFM space remains quite competitive at the top end of the market. So much so in fact that EFM vendors are competing with market research consultants, who sit at the top echelon of the market and act as strategic vendors to large businesses. ConfirmIT / CustomerSat and even QuestBack / Global Park seem to be pushing into the project space of traditional market research consultants. Market research consulting firms are reacting by acquiring EFM technology vendors. The Empathica / Mindshare and Maritz / Allegiance mergers look like this kind of combination to me.

I'm not sure how this will play out. Consulting firms typically purport to be "tool agnostic". It may be that these particular companies have vested interests in the survival of Mindshare and Allegiance, having brought those products to customers as part of solutions. If that were the case, it argues against the standalone market effectiveness of those products going forward. Alternatively, it could be that the consultants find a strategic advantage to owning their own EFM products. Potentially they've even acquired significant projects or new customers as a result. From the outside there's really no way to tell.

To me though, when I see technology solutions that require large amounts of consulting support to enable success, the benefits of the solution need to be correspondingly large, usually this means enterprise scale. Ultimately, I think that means the enterprise software guys will be sniffing around at EFM companies too.

"Thought #2.  Serving the small and mid-tier customer segments normally requires that companies have either scale or distribution in order to effectively market.  SurveyMonkey has scale, QuestBack has distribution (I'm a QB reseller), Vovici has partnerships (Oracle in particular) and ConfirmIt now has scale at the high end of the market."  

Since publishing my earlier comments there've been changes at these companies. SurveyMonkey, QuestBack and ConfirmIt have all become more potent competitors via organic growth and acquistions. What's really new is that Qualtrics and Satmetrix have joined the ranks of larger players in the market. The common theme among all these firms is that they now all have scale, breadth of market access and technology competency. It's a good bet that all of them will continue to grow. Some may become targets themselves for the software giants out there looking to acquire saas businesses in the EFM / CXM space.

Thought #3.  Many of the smaller players in the EFM market have neither scale nor distribution. They have to rely on organic growth while competing with larger, better funded and more effectively structured companies.  It is among this group of companies that I expect to see further consolidations.  Some companies on the list:  Qualtrics, Medallia, Satmetrix, Allegiance, SNAP surveys and KeySurveys.  These firms serve Enterprise customers or mid-tier customers using a direct sales or assisted direct sales model. They could all use more scale, more distribution or both.

Not much new here except that the list is smaller. Some companies have moved up and others have been acquired. The rest, in my opinion, will be bought out or will just continue muddling along.

So what's next for EFM?

I see EFM being subsumed into the Customer Experience Management (CXM) space. Businesses today realize that feedback comes to them via multiple channels and in different forms. CXM has been about finding ways to collect and integrate that largely unstructured feedback with standard and more structured feedback processes. The goal being to produce a coherent view of customer perceptions, issues, advocacy and angst as it relates to products and processes. The point is that EFM / CXM's value proposition has moved largely to back-end analyses and visualizations which document insights and facilitate actions that improve customer experience.