To offer truly personalised services, there’s one element that must never be left out of your considerations: customer voice. Their thoughts, preferences and concerns should be a framework upon which you build experiences — otherwise, those experiences will be impersonal at best and completely irrelevant at worst.
Every customer has a voice and, thus, a part to play in the personalisation process. But getting them to share those thoughts isn’t necessarily easy — which is why Voice of the Customer (VoC) software offers built-in solutions for understanding and improving participation rates.
Why are survey participation rates important?
Customer feedback gathered and utilised via a VoC program gives you the opportunity to better understand your brand. Survey participation rates are a vital metric for your organisation because they represent customer sentiment. The higher the participation rate, the more customer data you’ll have at your disposal for analysis, comparison and trend identification.
This empowers the process of personalising the customer experience, with the ultimate goal of improving customer retention. By noting which steps are creating measurable success and which are failing to meet customer needs, your contact centre will have the insights necessary to create value every time a user interacts with your brand.
In summary, survey participation rates are a way to make sure you’re offering relevant, convenient avenues for customer feedback. Understanding what motivates participation rates is key to improving them and, thus, gathering more useful VoC data.
What’s holding customers back from participating?
Low participation rates don’t necessarily indicate a failure to meet customer expectations. There are a variety of reasons why users may neglect to engage with your customer feedback avenues. A few key obstacles that could discourage direct feedback may include:
Survey timing
Timeliness is critical to achieving high participation rates. When surveys arrive hours or even days after the original interaction, users may have forgotten the details of their experience, leaving them less likely to engage at all.
It’s wise to offer surveys at points in the customer journey where users are already engaged with your brand — for example, after a purchase or a call with your contact centre.
Employee engagement
To set employees up for success, make them aware of the areas each survey addresses and encourage them to strive for direct feedback in pursuit of seamless customer satisfaction. Consider creating incentives to reward agents for getting a customer to complete a survey, receiving positive feedback or creating a measurable increase in customer satisfaction based on survey responses over time.
Perceived value
If there is little perceived value in completing a survey, there’s a higher probability that customers won’t complete it. Therefore, you must clearly communicate to users what they can expect in return for providing feedback, including a more personalised experience, a direct response to their questions or concerns, better or more timely customer service, a simplified customer journey or other value offerings.
Identifying gaps in your processes
Approach your brand from a user’s point of view and conduct in-depth sentiment analysis to identify any obstacles in your customer research process. To guide your VoC research, consider the nature of customer opinions:
- “What makes my experience convenient?”
- “What content is most relevant to me?”
- “Is this topic timely based on my current needs?”
- “Is my feedback being utilised to provide personalised customer support?”
- “Is this organisation listening and responding to my concerns in visible ways?”
How to improve participation rates
To ensure maximum customer participation and high-quality direct and indirect feedback, the collection process should address the following:
Content
VoC survey content should be short, sharp and clearly phrased. Don’t make customers feel as though completing your survey is a lot of work; instead, base each question on a specific, actionable insight to help users provide relevant VoC feedback. Also consider structuring your content as multiple-choice questions or offering a rating scale.
Timing
Utilise channels that prompt an immediate response but don’t require one. This allows you to take advantage of customer engagement or an existing customer relationship without forcing users to abandon a survey they may not have time for.
Convenience
Each VoC tool should benefit both you and your customers. However, since you can only benefit after a survey is completed, your first priority should be to create a convenient experience for users. Here are a few tips:
- Create a user-friendly interface: Survey navigation should be simple and inviting.
- Increase frequency: Create short, highly specific surveys at relevant touchpoints.
- Enable honesty: Surveys should assign equal weight to both positive and negative feedback or VoC data.
VoC data solutions from GSN
Your VoC solutions should prioritise high participation rates and create opportunities to engage with each actionable insight.
Start creating experiences that build customer loyalty and enable effective analytics by understanding the key drivers of customer satisfaction at each touchpoint. Contact us today to learn more about our VoC solutions.