Surveys have long been the backbone of getting to know customers. They’ve been seen as a relatively easy and inexpensive way of collecting feedback—and for the most part, they are. But the ugly truth is, sometimes traditional surveys can be long—and let's be honest—boring. Surveys aren’t always the most engaging to the customer, meaning you’re not likely to hold their attention long enough to get the information you need to make impactful business decisions. Sounds pretty bad, right? The great thing is that there really is no ugly truth. Truth helps us learn how to change, when to pivot, and what we can do to improve the road ahead.
As brands continue battling to win over the increasingly short attention spans of consumers, the need for engaging experiences increases. We’re used to an endless scroll of new content, most of it being visual, flashy, and fun. Traditional surveys are typically the opposite of that. With most surveys asking customers to rank an experience or provide long-form answers, consumers may not feel compelled to engage.
Realistically, surveys aren’t going anywhere and will continue to be used to gather insights. However, you don’t want to rely solely on surveys in today’s day and age, especially when there are so many other engaging tools and tactics you could be adding to your toolkit to level up your customer feedback game. If you want to collect context-rich feedback that leads to more strategic business decisions and better customer experiences, consider shorter, in-the-moment surveys, also known as microsurveys.
Collect actionable feedback with microsurveys
Every company hopes their customers are so loyal they’ll open every email, reply to every survey request, and ultimately do whatever they can to help the company succeed. But while companies might have a few of these ultra-loyal customers, the truth is that most customers are busy. They don’t always have time to answer pages of survey questions, no matter how much they love your brand. If you want to get in touch, you need to meet them where they are—when they are browsing your site, social media, or mobile apps.
Alida Touchpoint makes that easy with digital intercepts. Using the activity builder, you can create short, relevant interactions for every step of the digital customer journey. Deploy those activities across social platforms, website pop-ups, and in-app interactions—putting the questions you want answered right in front of the customer when they’re already engaging with your content.
Engaging with customers on their turf also provides more personalization opportunities. Because you can deploy multiple activities through various channels and include flexible calls-to-action, you can more accurately target customers to ask relevant questions, including using question branching to personalize questions based on responses.
While traditional surveys are great for collecting a lot of information at once, microsurveys give your team the in-the-moment feedback they need to act on quickly. They are also a great way to quickly validate a hypothesis from a broader audience. With real-time insights gathered, your marketing, product development, or customer experience teams can adjust strategies and implement changes as customer needs or expectations change.
Alida Touchpoint makes collecting feedback smarter. By creating personalized experiences that don’t require customers to drop what they’re doing to respond or come back later to share feedback, you’re able to more efficiently collect feedback across the entire digital customer journey.
Close the customer feedback loop with CXM
In addition to trying new, more engaging survey types like microsurveys, take a step back and consider what you’re doing with the customer insights you’re gathering. Are you implementing the customer feedback to improve the customer experience? If not, you're missing out on a huge opportunity.
Layering on customer experience management (CXM) will enable you to listen to direct and indirect sources of customer feedback, perform automated actions based on that feedback, and have complete visibility into key customer experience metrics so you can create exemplary customer experiences.
Consider a holistic customer experience platform that brings in and integrates both operational and experiential data so you can collect, understand, and action customer feedback. Analyze data and monitor trends in one integrated solution.
Surveys are just one tool in your toolkit
You put a lot of hard work into designing and distributing customer surveys, but keep in mind traditional surveys are just one customer insight collection method available to you. Experiment with in-the-moment microsurveys to engage your audience and collect actionable feedback. Close the feedback loop by implementing those valuable customer insights to deepen customer loyalty and advocacy, reduce churn, amplify your Voice of Customer (VoC), and ultimately improve the customer experience. Manage, monitor, and optimize millions of customer experiences and unlock meaningful insights; the beautiful truth your customers want to share when you really engage with them.
