If you want to grow your bank by acting on individual customer feedback, your success depends upon a fundamental principle—you have to engage and encourage customers to provide feedback. In this regard, we advise our clients to follow the five tenets listed below. Take note of each, because they'll help you maximize the quality and quantity of the feedback you collect.
Keep your survey short.
The optimum length for a post-transaction survey is two or three minutes. You should be able to get all you need from your customers in that length of time. (Any longer, and we’d argue you're trying to do too much with one feedback channel.)
The core questions should include:
- An outcome question to assess how the customer is feeling about their most recent interaction. We discussed outcome questions in our previous section on setting customer-centric goals.
- Questions to gauge whether the customer has an issue in need of follow-up, or something positive to share about their experience or any employees they interacted with.
- An opportunity to provide suggestions for improvement, offer insight into their future banking needs, and provide a testimonial for marketing efforts.
Don’t ask questions you already know the answers to.
Customers should never have to provide information you already have about them. By the time they take a survey, they shouldn't have to note if they recently visited a branch, how long they've been a customer, or input demographic information. That should be information you already have.
Good Voice of the Customer programs stop you from wasting time on collecting redundant information by tying preexisting customer data to their responses behind the scenes. As an added bonus, this helps you avoid making customers feel like account numbers, who have to reintroduce themselves every time they interact with you.
Make the survey-taking experience frictionless and mobile-friendly.
Customers should be able to respond to your survey invitations wherever, whenever, and however they want. Your survey should feature a mobile-first design, meaning it displays correctly on any mobile device.
Give customers the room to tell you what’s on their mind.
Some misguided banks subject customers to a battery of rating questions about the experience they're trying to deliver. These banks ask customers about whether their people smiled, used first names, paid attention, if the lines were long, or if the restrooms were clean. Such concerns are not always the elements of the experience that matter to customers.
Instead, give customers the space to tell you want they want.
It's important to note that analyzing open-ended, free-flowing text responses requires intense effort. Make sure your Voice of the Customer solution can handle the analysis and sense-making of volumes of open-ended comments. This is where Text Analytics comes in: it can help you discover trends and sentiment in hard-to-understand data.
Always follow up.
Customers who complete a survey are opening the door to continued conversation and dialog. Even if they just wanted to point out how painless their experience was, make sure to follow up. Your Voice of the Customer system should offer automated thank you emails as a default.
But as your system becomes more sophisticated, you can build in logic to drive specific actions. You can make sure the most appropriate bank employees—such as Branch Managers, Personal Bankers, Loan Officers, or Executives—is prompted to take a specific and meaningful action.
Want a Free Sample Survey?
We've put together a free post-transactional survey for customers who have recently engaged with an employee at a bank branch. It can help you get a sense of how to design an effective survey, and it offers some good examples of questions to ask your own customers. Just click on the button below to download it.
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