Feedback surveys are important resources that help businesses assess the quality and success of their Customer Experience (CX) program. But, you cannot use all the surveys for all purposes. There are so many types of feedback surveys ranging from C-SAT to NPS designed to measure different aspects of CX. At the end of the day, the purpose of all these surveys boils down to attracting new customers and retaining existing customers.
If you need to gather accurate and useful responses that will help you achieve both the purposes above, it’s important to send out each survey at the right occasion and time. It’s all about identifying the sweet spot that will trigger the right feedback to help you grow and thrive!
The simplest way is to segment your customer journey into pre-purchase and post-purchase phases and identify the kind of surveys that come under each phase.
In this guide, we are going to explain it for you!
1. Pre-Purchase Surveys
The pre-purchase phase includes touchpoints like social media, website, email, and referrals that connect the customer with your business. This can be either through marketing campaigns, word-of-mouth, or other similar means.
Building a strong relationship with your customers from the beginning is very important. The pre-purchase survey feedback can be very helpful in attracting new customers. It helps you identify effective marketing channels and tactics, strengths that made customers consider your business, and pain points that deterred or inconvenienced them.
Using Emotional Experience surveys can help you understand the kind of attachment customers feel towards your brand. For example, you can ask, “what emotion best describes your last interaction with our brand” or a similar question that’s more specific. Then, customers can specify the emotion from the given set of options.
You can also measure how satisfied customers are with your marketing campaigns, website experience, and social media engagements using the C-SAT surveys. These surveys request customers to rate satisfaction on a scale.
2. After-Purchase Surveys
A majority of feedback surveys can be used after purchase as it’s the best phase to assess if your CX program has truly made an impact.
Customer retention and loyalty are crucial for the growth of a business, and several surveys can help you identify them successfully.
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey will help you measure customers’ likeliness to promote your business to others, and it should be sent after the customer has purchased and used the product.
If you want to identify pain points related to the post-purchase stage, such as the ease of connecting with customer support, Customer Effort Score (CES) is the ideal survey to use. If customers find it difficult to engage with the brand or don’t find the product to be convenient, the score will be high.
The C-SAT score and other satisfaction-related surveys can be used in the post-purchase phase as well. If you want to measure customer loyalty from the perspective of emotions, we recommend you use an Emotional Experience survey.
3. Surveys for the Entire Customer Journey
In addition to the above, you can use some surveys to receive feedback on the entire customer journey. These surveys can help you identify if your CX program covers all aspects and touchpoints in the customer journey, offering a consistent experience. Moreover, these surveys can be used to evaluate the efficacy of CX management, identify pain points, and fine-tune the program for greater rewards.
Customer satisfaction-related surveys like C-SAT and Emotional Experience are two major surveys that can be used to gain feedback related to the customer journey. These can be in the form of micro and macro surveys geared to gather both short and comprehensive responses.
