No one will argue conducting customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys gives organizations an edge against its competitors. Right? However, I think you’ll agree that this edge is sharpened even more by conducting customer satisfaction surveys on a regular basis.
Don’t get me wrong, conducting customer satisfaction research in the first place is a critical step for all organizations that helps orient and drive the customer-centric mentality forward. However, in our competitive and ever evolving world, truly understanding what drives customer happiness and pain points allows organizations to consistently adapt and mold itself into a better company day-by-day.
This is a lot tougher to do when customer satisfaction surveys are conducted once every 12-months or 24-months. It's much easier to manage the customer experience (CX) by obtaining regular feedback.
Want to cover the basics of customer satisfaction studies? Learn more here.
Give yourself a leg up, every month!
Monthly Customer Satisfaction Surveys Better Monitor Performance
So maybe you’ve conducted your first customer satisfaction research study and received in-depth data about what your customers think and feel about your brand. What's next?
Let’s say for example, respondents were asked to rate their satisfaction with Example Company ABC on several different factors. 'Ease of working with the company' (Customer Effort Score or CES) scored marginally well among customers, meaning that most think that the ease of working with the company is neither easy nor hard.
Here you were thinking working with your organization was easy, right?
By conducting customer satisfaction research on a regular basis, internal teams are able to create strategies and initiatives that address ease of doing business on the fly. Customer satisfaction survey data eliminates the guesswork. With the data you know exactly why customers stated your organization was difficult to work with.
Knowing what needs to be improved is powerful and gives organizations an ongoing competitive edge. Having monthly satisfaction data rolling in allows your team to measure and benchmark performance on a regular basis to see what tactics improved the score and which did not.
Learn more about benchmark data here.
Evolving Customer Personas
One of the unique differentiators of a Drive Research customer satisfaction report is our ability to create customer personas which adds a face and personal touch to data.
What is a customer persona? You’ve come to the right place.
To put it simply, instead of looking at results in a traditional executive summary format or using (sometimes boring) charts and graphs, a customer persona brings your data to life.
Let's face it, not all of us are research nerds who enjoy looking at spreadsheets and mounds of data.
Here’s a quick example of a customer persona from our customer satisfaction surveys:
“When Alexis first sees the Example Company ABC logo, she immediately thinks of the good service and the customer service representative she works with, Garrett. Alexis has been working with Example Company ABC for nearly 5 years and likes to do business with the firm because it’s local and has quick turn-around. Her business relationship with Garrett is a critical factor of her satisfaction. In the past 5 years, Alexis has reached out to competitors for services she didn’t know were offered by Example Company ABC. Alexis prefers to communicate via email, but is also an avid user of LinkedIn.”
Once a customer persona is crafted based on key results, organizations can focus on making the customer experience better for "Alexis". While Alexis is not an actual customer, teams are able to tie strategies to something more tangible rather than a simple chart or an executive summary.
Some places like Amazon and CEO Jeff Bezos go as far as saving a seat at all meetings for their "Alexis".
Now, take this a step further to think about how you can tie these customer satisfaction survey results to recent marketing and advertising efforts. The ability to have up-to-date and regular data helps organizations identify how well a campaign is working, if customers are aware of it, whether or not they are talking to colleagues, friends, or family about it, etc.
This data becomes much more real-time and actionable than one major study completed every few years right?
As your customer personas evolve and change, your customer satisfaction surveys need to keep up the pace. Surveying every year or 2 years is not frequent enough to keep up with changing behavior.
Change and Adapt, Change and Adapt, Repeat
The sooner you collect data, the better. Also, the faster you react to the data, the better.
Monthly customer satisfaction reports may include an executive summary, which could include several different pieces of information like a persona, infographic, and question by question results.
In a fast-paced world, access to this monthly customer satisfaction data arms your team with evidence-based and fact-based strategy on a regular basis.
For example, results could come back and say instead of focusing on XYZ, customers would really love if you could do ABC.
Creating strategies based on feedback from your customers makes complete sense. It's not rocket science. If you know what customers want, it's easier to keep customers happy which keeps customer retention high.
Stay Tuned In With Your Customers
Let’s face it, things change. When they do, you need to know about it.
If you conduct an annual customer satisfaction study, and results come back mainly positive with a few areas of improvement and your teams are geared up some enhancements, who’s to say the customer needs may change in 3 months or 6 months?
Or what if several customers begin to have new problems? Wouldn’t you prefer to know about these issues sooner than 12 months from now? My gut is telling me you’re nodding your head yes.
Monthly customer satisfaction surveys open up a whole new channel to stay tuned in to the customer journey. In a digital age, the customer experience happens 24-7-365. You need a customer satisfaction program that produces frequent feedback.
Hands in everyone! Let's talk about how to get this done right.
How do Monthly Customer Satisfaction Surveys Work?
This type of project is broken down into 4 key parts detailed below.
Part 1: Kickoff
The kickoff is where all the Drive Research magic begins. Here you will work with the market research team to identify what topics should be asked in the survey. This could include several different customer satisfaction metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs), like net promoter score (NPS) or customer effort score (CES). Benchmarking metrics like these are crucial to evaluate overtime to see how organizations improve month-to-month.
Part 2: Survey design
During this step, our expert team of market researchers craft your survey tool. It’s important to note the market research team not only looks for the best ways to pose questions to your customers, but also the ideal length and methodology. Each of these factors are critical to the monthly customer satisfaction survey process.
Mobile friendly survey design will play a big role in your monthly customer satisfaction surveys since many will participate in the market research via smartphone. Here are 4 tips to make your online survey more mobile friendly.
Part 3: Fieldwork
Now the fun part begins. During fieldwork, the survey is test driven followed by the the survey being sent to customers. During this time, you may want to see if the researchers you are working with can give you access to review data as it is received. We like to call this our “live data link”. It's about as real-time as real-time gets. Literally seconds after surveys are submitted they show up in your portal.
Part 4: Reporting
During this stage is where researchers compile the results and turn it into something actionable and specific for your organization. A customer satisfaction survey monthly report includes the background and methodology, topline executive summary, customer persona, infographic, and question by question results. The goal here is to arm your teams with powerful insights to create data-driven strategies to propel your success.
Want more? Contact Drive Research
Interested in monthly customer satisfaction surveys? Drive Research is a market research company in Upstate New York. If you can't tell from our frequent posts on our market research blog, we not only work in market research, we enjoy learning and writing about it too.
Have questions? All you have to do is ask!
Call us at 315-303-2040 or send us an email at [email protected].