No doubt this captivating title has elicited one of two responses from you:

1. Duh! Tell me something I don’t know! or,,,,,,,,,,,,
2. This resonates with you as the victim of one too many “generic” survey requests.

As practitioners in the “Voice of the Customer” space, uncovering the root causes or drivers of customer dissatisfaction or delight is at the heart of what we do. With that said, no matter the CX outcome, how we solicit further feedback should also leave the customer with a positive “they really care” feeling about our organization, thus earning their loyalty or further consideration of future engagement for our products or services.

So how does an organization best achieve these dual objectives?  The first part of the answer starts with a strategy an increasingly larger number of companies are doing or planning to do in leveraging 360 degree or multi-point customer feedback systems. These single or multi-vendor customer engagement platforms combine solicited and unsolicited input and typically include conversational (speech) analytics from either your or outsourced customer contact centers, text, chat or verbatim based analytics and of course initial survey results. 

Once an organization has these single or multi-touch CX insights, the opportunity to both further uncover the reasons behind those customer perspectives and better position your business for future engagements with these patrons can be yours. So how does one both ask and position at the same time? 

From a real-life standpoint we can look to several professions such as medical practitioners, mental health workers, learning specialists, etc. whose success is dependent on gaining both insight and trust from an individual. They will tell you the most effective method in achieving these dual goals is in posing their initial inquiries around the recognition of the obvious experiences or symptoms those individuals have incurred. This tactic has proven to be a succinct way to identify core issues and create an empathic relationship with an individual. 

So, let’s apply this methodology to your organization’s solicited feedback outreach. First, forget about sending a generalized post experience survey with your typical email subject line of “Tell us how we did?”. Instead leverage the insights gleaned from your unsolicited and solicited feedback systems to “headline” your email with a subject line that aligns with their actual experience. Secondly, sequence the survey questions to prioritize headline questions. For instance, you could make the email subject line “How could we have made your Check-in Experience better” and then ask the check-in survey questions first.

Employing this strategy will no doubt improve your survey response rates and all the benefits you accrue through higher input levels while providing a powerful impression to your customer of your awareness and genuine concern for their customer experience. After all, while customers will always prefer the frictionless experience, they give equal value to an organization or individual who may have faltered but acknowledged their shortcoming with the quest to improve upon that issue. 

I encourage you to contact your Customer Count or Patient Count customer representative to learn how to implement this game-changing strategy. 

Brian LaRoche

Customer Engagement Consultant

[email protected]

#781-296-0042