Making Surveys Meaningful
We love our data. But let’s face it — surveys usually move your customers down the Loyalty Ladder.
It is tempting to want to survey everything as often as possible, but it takes a toll on your customer’s experience. Surveys can be a useful tool, but they are usually abused. In the worst cases, companies are interrupting their customers during or after every other experience in the name of the latest statistical trend, like the Net Promoter Score. The voice of the customer is an important and necessary part of innovation, but the truth is that surveys are almost always intrusive and annoying. They should be used sparingly and thoughtfully.
When researchers studied employees in a Western Electric plant known as “Hawthorne Works” in Cicero, IL — they demonstrated that people can’t be studied without influencing their behavior. The researchers coined the phrase the Hawthorne effect. This phenomenon is also well known in science as the Observer Effect. We can’t possibly measure people without impacting how they experience us — surveys are no exception.
Before you role your next survey out into the wild, take a step back and ask yourself if there is a better way to derive the insights that you are looking for.
For example, If you want to know if your users are recommending you to their friends and family, make it easy for them to recommend you and measure how often they actually do it. If you want to know if they are happy with your product, measure how often they are actually using your products or services. Repetitive usage at the appropriate intervals for your business is a great measure of satisfaction and loyalty.
Surveys, however, can provide some directed qualitative insights that will help you drive more efficient innovation cycles if they are engineered well. Asking your customers what features they want might lead to small ideas or incremental improvements in your product, but the game changing ideas are going to come from insights that will help your users solve problems. In the best cases, you will solve problems for them that they didn’t even know they had.
Customers who are already advocates are usually willing and often eager to share constructive criticism and feedback, but that should be done with an extreme appreciation for their time.
Even better, the people that talk to or have access to many of your customers are more likely to know where the sources of both frustration and joy might lie. Your customers have only one set of experiences with you — theirs. Customer service, marketing, sales and service people, however, observe hundreds or thousands of customers going through their journeys with your firm. They know where all of the skeleton’s are hidden. In addition, they are generally more than eager to help us to improve our business. You are almost always better off surveying those folks than you are surveying your customers.
Here are some best practices for surveys:
1. Be open ended: Open ended questions that spur deeper thought are always better than multiple choice, rating scales or any other directed questions. Let thoughts flow.
2. Look for sources of effort or frustration: Find out what customers spend the most time when they are doing business with you and try to figure out how to get out of their way.
3. Identify ways to improve your customer’s relatedness, competence or feeling of autonomy with your firm. If you intend to convert your customers into brand advocates, you have to search for what makes them tick. How can you better relate to them? How can you help them build competence in their decisions? How can you provide the right level of autonomy in their dealings with you and make them feel in control?
Here are some questions that can be customized to seed your next round of product innovation:
- What is causes you the most frustration when using our service?
- What would make life easier or better for everyone in the context of our services?
- What other challenges are occurring that we might be able to help with?
- Where do you spend the most time in your dealings with us?
- What service, product, app or other technology should be created in our industry?
These questions should be adjusted and tweaked so that they make more sense for your products and services, but they should not be too specific. Obviously, the results will be subjective and it will be difficult to measure impact, but that is not the point. In these questions we are looking to spur ideas that might turn into innovations that move the needle on our customer relationships in meaningful ways. They should lead you to brainstorm and improve the conversations that your teams are having about innovation.
Give it a shot and let me know what you find.
