The Road to Alleviate Survey Fatigue 

As our approaches to customer experience advance, so does the challenge of survey fatigue. This is a hurdle that CX professionals confront head-on as they strive to maintain the momentum of their survey programs. In the following sections, I will delve into strategies that not only increase your response rate but also invigorate program engagement and yield more representative results. By implementing these techniques, you’ll not only provide outstanding customer experiences but also emphasize that their feedback is not just heard, but genuinely valued.

#1. Make Surveys Shorter. A LOT Shorter.

How many times have you called a customer service representative and thought, “I am your customer—you should already know all these details about me.” Well, people are potentially thinking this about your surveys, too. Ideally, experience surveys should take 2-4 minutes to complete, which can be easily achieved by cutting out the questions to which you already know the answers. You can start your journey to beating survey fatigue with shortening surveys further by removing surplus demographic or operational data that could be sourced from your CRM or data lake (e.g. age, products held, customer tenure), and ultimately improved response rates.

Another technique to fight survey fatigue that is successful for many brands is to leverage microsurveys for mobile and other digital environments. A survey can be set up at each key digital touchpoint (like on a mobile app or website) to send a one or two question microsurvey with an open text box to capture immediate, in-the-moment responses from customers.

Learn how Hootsuite tripled their Net Promoter Score by using Pearl-Plaza’s microsurveys!

#2. Ask Survey Questions That Drive Action.

Whilst “good” survey questions vary from industry to industry, there are some overarching considerations that you need to keep in mind when drafting customer survey questions:

• Make sure each survey question has an owner within your organisation;
• Consider the type of action that can be taken within your organisation from this question
• Minimise words used in your questions. If the idea is clear without excess words, trim down wherever possible
• Confirm each survey question is either aligned to customer experience goals and / or targets (e.g. expected front line behaviour or a KPI).

By keeping each of these principles in mind, you’ll ensure that each question can drive action within your organisation, which could in turn be used in comms to demonstrate you’ve listened to customer feedback and taken action to drive an improved customer experience!

Want to see what a survey that drives action looks like? Learn how Pizza Hut UK partnered with Pearl-Plaza to optimise survey design which resulted in double the average number of survey responses. Read the full Pizza Hut customer story today!

#3. Make Your Surveys Count: Pull Transactional and Journey Surveys Into Your Case Management Program

Surveys can be seen as the starting point of a customer conversation. Case management programs—also known as closed loop feedback (CLF) programs—enable trained staff to connect with customers one on one. Frontline staff call back customers to understand why an experience was either great or has room for improvement, and provide a chance to really connect with customers and hear their stories first hand. This can help drive continuous improvement initiatives, or provide customer-driven evidence to support larger initiatives that may require a business-case. Further, and if conducted with a treatment / control approach (e.g. 50% of CLF qualifying customers receive a call), you can track how customers’ behaviour has changed after you close the loop. 

Don’t underestimate the potential positive brand impact you’ll see when customers receive a call from a representative after clicking “submit” on their survey. By optimising case management, it will give your program the opportunity to evolve outside of analytics, and start directly contributing more to other operational areas of the business.

In this world where we can reach customers in so many different ways, asking customers “how would you rate XYZ”, “why did you rate XYZ”, and “thinking over these elements, how would you rate…” can be boring, let’s be honest, especially if it is a long survey. Instead, we encourage you to make your surveys shorter to fight survey fatigue and look beyond the questions to discover how the customer’s voice can influence your organisation’s operational performance through CLF and actionable insights. 

To learn more about what makes a great survey and how to combat survey fatigue, schedule a demo today!

On the surface, it seems like an obvious application for a ChatGPT customer experience approach. A survey is pretty straightforward, correct? Not so fast.

Keep reading to find out what happened when I tested this approach and why it may not be the best way to go when it comes to your customer listening approach.

Testing ChatGPT for Customer Experience Questions

I started off with a simple question for ChatGPT, hoping for a simple customer satisfaction survey, typing in, “Write me a survey.” You can see the screenshot of the output below.

After reviewing the generated answer, you may be asking, “what’s missing?” Well, to the untrained eye, there could be little to no difference between a traditionally written survey and a ChatGPT customer experience survey. After all, there are demographic questions, the typical “How satisfied were you with your experience,” and other basic survey asks.

But here is what stands out to me as a glaring absence. What is missing is pretty much the most important part of any survey: the link to the business questions you are trying to answer by launching a survey in the first place!

Quick PSA from Jim: Creating surveys is an important topic,  but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that while surveys are a tried-and-true method of collecting customer feedback, they are not the only way (or the best way, in many cases) to hear from customers. With so many channels available for you to monitor the voice of the customer, to restrict yourself to surveys alone is to limit your insights. This is another topic for another day (but if you’re interested, you can learn more about other listening channels here). End of PSA.

 For now, let’s talk about the risks of using AI like ChatGPT to write surveys!

ChatGPT Customer Experience Risks & Best Practices You Need to Know

ChatGPT Customer Experience Questions Miss the Point

Let me ask you a question: Is the point of your CX program to launch surveys? Now, many of you are likely rolling your eyes at me, but I promise, there’s a point to this. Hopefully, you answered no. Because the point of customer experience is not to ask questions, but to listen to customers and the market to help guide your path to achieving business goals. The questions are simply a vehicle to gain insight into what will help or hinder your business on the way to realizing those  goals.

When you look at the output of ChatGPT customer experience questions in the screenshot above, these questions really miss the point. Yes, they are generic questions that we have all likely seen in surveys before, but what are they getting at? The only results I can see this survey gleaning is a scoreboard metric and some customer demographics that we might already have access to via other data sources. 

When you craft surveys, the first questions you should ask should be for you and your team. Do you have a set of northstar goals (GOALS not scores!) for your customer experience program already? Great! If not, start that conversation with your executive stakeholders and team. Only then can you truly design your program, surveys, and other initiatives with the end goal in mind. 

Once you have agreed upon a desired end goal, then you need to ask:

• What are we hoping to learn?
• Who are we hoping to learn from?
• Do we already have access to this data?

If you want to gut-check your surveys, you can check out this CX survey assessment my colleagues developed to help you optimize your surveys!

ChatGPT Doesn’t Know Your Customers Like You Do

Context is everything. And when it comes to ChatGPT customer experience questions, they won’t have any of the contextual data that you do. If your CX program has been around for a while, you likely have a mountain of customer data around. And that existing data will shape what you already know, and what questions you still need to ask. 

(Additionally, you might be tempted to feed ChatGPT some of your customer data, but that can unearth a whole boatload of security complications. Do you really want every ChatGPT user having access to your customer data? Didn’t think so.) 

An effective customer listening strategy is personal and targeted. Speaking to the customer in their language is critical. Many brands have worked hard to develop a brand persona. Asking customers for feedback in a sterile, canned voice will not yield the best results or further endear your brand to your customers. I don’t believe your brand personalization  can be accomplished by a ChatGPT survey—at least not today.

ChatGPT Is a Starting Block, Not the Finish Line

Now you may be thinking, “Jim, you’ve made a good case for the risks of using ChatGPT for customer experience surveys. But there has to be some way I can use it.” I’m glad you asked and yes, there is! 

I know we have all heard the fear-mongering conversations about AI taking jobs. And if we’re being realistic, AI will eliminate some jobs, but it will also create new ones. Those who will be safe from that chopping block are those professionals who learn how to leverage AI to increase efficiency and  perfect skills that AI alone just can’t manage without human input.

In the customer experience space, this could be leveraging ChatGPT as a starting point, then leveraging the additional context you have about your customers and your brand’s identity to perfect its suggestions. 

For example, ChatGPT can give you phrasing ideas for your survey questions as long as you are very specific in your prompts. It can also help you to think of other ways to ask questions you’ve been posing to customers for a long time, giving your same old relationship and post-transaction surveys a refresh. 

It’s not about AI or humans. It’s about humans using AI to improve and become more imaginative and efficient.

I will end with this. I do not want to come off as a “debbie downer” or, even worse, as naive. AI is going to have an increased role in customer experience and in creating the listening posts that practitioners create to capture customer insight. But, I believe true value will be well beyond simply crafting a survey. 

The real power of ChatGPT and other AI tools will be to help understand the data that comes from a survey or the multiple direct and indirect data sources that make up the voice of the customer. And, just to validate this statement, I asked ChatGPT why the voice of the customer is important? In this case, ChatGPT was spot on:

I think we can all agree that ChatGPT is right on target with that answer.

How Do I Increase Survey Response Rates? Should I Shorten My Survey? 

My first instinct when asked this question is to ask, “are you really interested in only increasing your survey response rate, or are you interested in getting more responses?” Those are two different things. Survey response rates are the percentage of responses you receive from the survey invitations you send out. Responses are the absolute number of responses you receive, regardless of response rates. In many cases, you can actually increase the number of responses you receive while decreasing survey response rates by sending out more invitations.

In most cases survey response rates matter little in terms of your sample providing representation of a population. What’s most important is the absolute number of responses you have. For example, if I’m trying to represent the United States population of approximately 325 million people, I only need a little over 1000 respondents for a confidence level of +/- 3 percentage points. It doesn’t matter if those 1000 respondents are acquired from sending a survey invitation to 5000 people (20% response rate) or 100,000 people (1% response rate). 

The only caveat here is that a lower survey response rate may be an indicator that some sort of response bias is occurring: certain types of people may be responding more in comparison to other types. If that’s the case, it doesn’t matter how many responses you have. Your sample will still not represent the population. If you fear response bias, you should do a response bias study, but that’s a topic for another blog post.

Usually, when I point out to clients that they should be more interested in increasing the absolute number of responses they receive rather than just increasing survey response rates, they agree. 

Begin By Increasing the Number of Outgoing Survey Invitations 

You should begin your efforts to increase responses by deciding if it makes sense to send out more survey invitations. Below, I’ve identified three specific things you can do: 

1. Consider Doing a Census: Some CX programs still engage in sampling instead of sending survey invitations to all eligible customers. If your program is sampling, consider doing a census. This will both increase the number of responses you receive and give you the opportunity to identify and rescue more at-risk customers.

2. Scrutinize Your Contact Data: Are a significant portion of your records getting removed because contact information is either missing or wrong? If you obtain customer contact information from business units, such as stores, hotels, dealerships, etc., it’s important to look at sample quality at the unit level. It’s also helpful to examine the amount of sample records received from business units compared to their number of transactions. Units with low samples in proportion to their transactions probably need to focus on better ways to obtain customer contact information.

3. Invite All Customer Segments: Are you missing some segments of your customer population? Not obtaining contact information for specific customer segments often has to do with information system issues. For instance, in the earlier days of automotive CX research most companies only surveyed warranty-service customers. They didn’t survey customers that went to a dealership and paid for the repair/service themselves (customer-pay events). The reason was simply a system issue. Companies didn’t receive those transaction records from their dealerships. Now, most automotive companies have remedied that issue and they survey both warranty and customer-pay service customers.

Next, Revise Your Survey Invitation

The next step is to look at your survey invitation process and the survey invitation itself. You should look for two general things. First, is there anything that might prohibit customers from receiving the invitation?

• Are You Triggering Spam Filters? Sending out too many invitations in too short a time frame can trigger spam filters. Sending out too many invitations with invalid email addresses can also trigger spam filters or even get your project’s IP address black-listed by internet service providers. Therefore, make sure to check to see if email addresses are correctly formatted. If you’re really worried about the quality of your contact information, there are services available to pre-identify valid email addresses. 

• Are You Sending Survey Invitations to the Wrong Customers? Outdated databases can cause you to send surveys to people that are no longer customers. Obviously, these people probably won’t respond to your survey, thus reducing response rates.

• Are Your Customers Receiving the Invitations but Never Seeing Them: Most email domains use algorithms to sort emails into various folders such as Primary/Inbox, Promotions, and Spam. Keywords in your subject lines and invitation text can affect where your invitations go. Do some testing of your invitations to make sure they end up in the Primary/Inbox folder for the biggest email domains. Also, you need to repeat your tests periodically because sorting algorithms can change unexpectedly. An invitation that goes to the Primary/Inbox folder today will not necessarily go there next week or next year.

Second, is the invitation compelling enough that a customer or prospect will open it and take action?

• Is the Subject Line of the Email Engaging to the Customer? The subject line is the first thing the customer sees. If it’s not engaging, the customer won’t open the invitation email. It’s helpful to test various versions of the invitation with different subject lines to determine which yields the highest open rates.

• Does the Invitation Display Well on a Smartphone? Over half of Pearl-Plaza’s survey respondents are now completing their surveys on smartphones. Make sure your invitation (and the survey itself) displays well on smaller devices. You should also check to see how well your invitation and survey display in all major browsers.

• Do You Include a Realistic Time Estimate for How Long the Survey Will Take To Complete? This is especially important for shorter surveys, so that potential respondents know there will be only a small time commitment. It’s also a good idea for longer surveys because respondents will know what time commitment they’re getting into and they’ll be less likely to abandon the survey. If you are reluctant to tell the customer how long the survey will take to complete, your survey is probably too long.

• Is the Response Option Visible? When a customer opens the invitation, is the link or button to respond to the survey visible (front and center) without having to scroll down? Remember, this should be the case on a smartphone as well as on a tablet or computer.

• Is There a Call to Action? Your invitation should ask customers to respond and tell them why responding is important and what you’ll be doing with the information that will make their world and interaction with your product or service better. 

• Are You Using Incentives to Increase Your Response Rate? Using incentives is complex and can be a bit tricky. But it’s always worth seeing if it is something that might work for you and your company. If you’re interested in testing it out, learn more about using incentives here.

Last but Not Least, Look at Revising the Survey Itself

Revising the survey itself may help increase responses. However, remember that revising the survey will only increase responses by reducing the number of people who abandon the survey after starting it. Typically, that number is quite small (about 5% for most CX surveys), so reducing abandonment probably won’t lead to a meaningful increase in the absolute number of responses. That being said, some of the things you should look for, in addition to the possibility that your survey is too long, are:

• Is Your Survey Simple and Easy to Use? You should keep your survey focused on the topic it is intended to measure and avoid “nice to know questions.” In addition, avoid mixing response scales as much as possible, as this can lead to confusion for the respondent.

• Does Your Survey Look Engaging? Your CX survey represents your brand. It should have the same voice and look and feel you use throughout all customer touch points-physical location, mobile app, website etc.

• Is the Language in Your Survey Easy for Customers To Understand? Don’t use industry jargon. That turns off respondents and can lead to confusion. Be your brand, upfront with your requests, and transparent.

• Does Your Survey Follow a Logical Flow to Walk the Customer Through the Experience Being Measured? This not only helps in reducing abandonment, but also helps customers recall the event accurately so they can give more thorough feedback.

When you want to increase the number of responses you receive, you should look beyond increasing your survey response rate and shortening your survey. There are much more effective ways to increase the number of responses that are often overlooked. 

Remember that we’re here with the latest tips and tricks to help you figure out the best way to listen to your customers (via surveys or other feedback channels like social media, websites, apps, reviews etc.), understand customer behaviors and wants and needs, and act upon what customers are saying to create better experiences and ultimately drive business success.

Want to learn more about how you can boost your customer experience survey response rate? Check out these Pearl-Plaza Assets to learn more:

• Using Customer Incentives to Increase Survey Responses
• The Art and Science of Email Survey Invitations

Not all valuable feedback gathered is solicited in the form of surveys, focus groups, or interviews (also known as direct feedback in the CX world). There is a wealth of unsolicited—or indirect feedback—in call centre recordings, social media feedback, and web chat transcripts. A company can also use inferred feedback by tracking customers’ behaviours, contact frequency or purchasing habits.

This post is all about going beyond direct and indirect survey options and questionnaires, and expanding your program to include inferred feedback. When you meet customers where they are, however and whenever they’re interacting with your brand, you are opening the door to big picture understanding, big picture improvements, and, most importantly, big picture results.

So, What’s Inferred Customer Feedback All About?

According to Gartner analysts, inferred feedback is operational and behavioural data associated with a customers experience or customer journey, like a website’s clickstream data, mobile app location data, contact centre operational data, or ecommerce purchase history. 

Bringing Inferred Feedback to Life 

As an example of all three feedback sources working together, let’s imagine a shoe retailer’s CX team launching a new release sneaker in store—and they’re on the hunt for actionable intelligence. There are multiple touchpoints along the journey to analyse in order to launch this product successfully.

When customers buy shoes (or anything else) at the store, they are given scannable QR codes on each receipt for direct feedback. They might take the survey, rate their in-store experience, and say they buy shoes there every 12 months, on average. 

For indirect feedback, the CX team would also look at reviews on their mobile app, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube to see what customers are saying about the latest and greatest sneakers. We can use text analytics tools to find common data themes as well as positive, negative, and neutral sentiment in a customer’s verbatim feedback. The CX team can also look into web chat notes, which might show how many people have contacted you asking for more details, stock levels or sneaker quality in the past. 

The last step is to look at inferred feedback. When it comes to sneakers, it will be useful to look at purchase history through a CRM, a loyalty program, or a  customer’s store account, which will show an important operational and segmentation piece of the puzzle. From your analysis, you might learn a few things:

• the average repurchase cycle is 18 months
• those customers purchasing more frequently are your fanatics, more likely to be singing your praises and spreading the word
• your neutral customers are being nice and predictable
• the skeptical, non-loyalists come and go as they please

When you combine this behavioural insight with the direct and indirect feedback that corresponds to each segment, you are painting a better picture of what is driving customers to act in certain ways. 

Are the fanatics more forgiving of experiences, more excited, or even demanding more of you? What does this intelligence tell you to do? Increase stock levels, super-charge loyalty bonuses, or pivot?

When you put all of these pieces into your data lake, you now have all the information you need to form a rich, single view of the customer. From there, you can start making sense of the data and creating a world-class action plan. 

How Do I Take Action on Inferred Customer Data? 

A problem many businesses are facing is how to link all sources of collected feedback together, turn it into something they can act on, and truly transform their business. Luckily, we have a few tips for going beyond insights to take action:

Action Step #1: Get the Right Reports to the Right People

When it comes to bringing inferred data to life, optimised reports are a superpower. Spend the time up front to figure out which insights deliver relevant, actionable, and effective intelligence, then to get that intelligence to the right people. We recommend creating reports that are customised, metric-specific, and delivered in real-time, and then looking for those CX advocates in your business who have the power to do something with them.

Action Step #2: Put Your CRM Data to Work

Integrating CRM data with your traditional feedback data can be a game changer. It helps you understand more about the customer to create more informed, personalised interactions that can boost average basket size, increase purchase frequency and drive brand advocacy to new levels. 

Action Step #3: Resolve Issues Quickly

Your inferred data will show when customers are at risk of churning. This is a great opportunity to intervene quickly, and turn an unhappy customer into a lifelong advocate. One of the most important actions your CX program should take is responding to customer issues quickly and efficiently, be it negative feedback, a bad social review, or knowing a customer had a difficult time processing a refund.

If you’re looking forward to leveling up your retail customer experiences, check out this white paper: “How to Modernise Your Customer Feedback.”

While these metrics certainly have their uses, it’s much more difficult for brands to use them to find the deeper meaning behind problems. That is, unless they take part in a few brief exercises. Keep reading for the rundown on the exercises we suggest you apply to your own ease and effort scores.

Three Exercises to Help You Find the Meaning Behind Customer Ease & Effort Scores

1. Driver Modelling
2. Transaction Subgroups
3. Customer Subgroups

Exercise #1: Driver Modelling

One of the best ways for brands to glean the meaning behind their metrics is to set them as the outcome measure of driver modelling. This technique enables organizations to not only better understand key parts of the customer experience, but also customers’ perceptions of those components. Driver modelling also lets organizations know whether they’ve used enough such metrics to adequately explain how effort is being impacted.

Exercise #2: Transaction Subgroups

Every interaction with your organization brings with it its unique amount of customer effort. Because of this, it’s handy to divide your transactions into groups depending on how much effort customers perceive they entail. Thus, diving deeper and analyzing transactions in this manner can help brands pinpoint friction or pain points, then create solutions to deal with them.

Exercise #3: Customer Subgroups

Your brand has a variety of different interactions—your customer base is even more diverse. Rather than study this base as a whole, brands can and should profile subgroups who, say, tend to report dissatisfaction more often than usual. Some groups of customers will, unfortunately, have a harder time interacting with your brand than the rest, and though the possible reasons behind that vary wildly from industry to industry, profiling subgroups like this can help brands further identify CX pain points and, more importantly, fix them in a way that those customers find meaningful.

Meaning Over Metrics

Like we said before, metrics have their uses and are helpful for letting brands know that customer satisfaction, ease, effort, etc are shifting in one direction or the other.

Applying these techniques to your metrics can make them much more powerful, giving your organization the context and the details it needs to meaningfully transform your customer experience. Your customers will thank you for it and feel much more valued, creating a human connection that transcends market forces and that builds a better bottom line for your brand.

Want to learn more about effort and ease and their purpose in customer experience? Check out our free white paper on the subject here!