The Added Business Benefits of SMS Surveys

Transcription

1 The Added Business Benefits of SMS Surveys Copyright NICE Systems Ltd. All rights reserved.

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction... 2 Customer Feedback Engagement Best Practices... 2 Benchmarking Different Channel Results... 4 Business Benefits of SMS Surveying... 4 Conclusion... 6 ABOUT NICE SYSTEMS... 7 ABOUT DYNMARK... 7 Copyright NICE Systems Ltd. All rights reserved.

3 INTRODUCTION With the ever increasing growth in mobile devices which offer an array of applications offering customers everything from buying flights online to recording their favourite TV programme, it is perhaps easy to forget that these devices still have the basic function of SMS messaging. Yet this function is still widely available to all and great value can be gained if it is effectively leveraged when it comes to direct Voice of Customer. This white paper will look to cover an overview of surveying best practices, offering a range of recommendations. This will be followed by a channel comparison by response rate and speed of response, and conclude with a look into the value to gained from utilizing SMS as a feedback channel. CUSTOMER FEEDBACK ENGAGEMENT BEST PRACTICES Census Approach One of the key challenges facing organisations is ensuring that the decisions that are made on a day to day basis will positively impact the business. If your business is structured to be driven by the Voice of the Customer (as many analysts recommend today) then an important facet of your strategy must include capturing that voice. Many survey solutions will be able to survey customers at a tactical level. These include marketing and Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) solutions which provide typically long and extremely focused surveys based on certain metrics within the business. This could include asking customers anything from the cleanliness of a room in a hotel or whether an agent offered to sell them handset insurance. While these surveys can help businesses understand granular information on a customer s experience, they typically offer a low response rate and are only ever sent to a small sample of customers (somewhere around 2-3% of the customer base). By adopting a census approach to surveys you can ensure that you are gaining statistically relevant volumes of feedback to help make the correct decisions with far more confidence. Additionally there is an added benefit of the effect of Cognitive Dissonance (or the Benjamin Franklin effect) on the customer. By effectively asking the customer for a favour (to offer their feedback) they in turn feel more loyal to your business. This is largely down to a sense of empowerment placed on the customer from business and in effect means the sheer effect of surveying customers can increase loyalty. It would then follow that it is advantageous to the business to survey every customer and adopt a census approach to customer feedback. Proximity to the interaction When surveying customers it is critical to survey them as close as possible to the point of interaction. There are a number of benefits that can be attributed to this: For the quality of the feedback to be high then it is strongly recommended to survey as close as possible to the experience that the customer has had. The memory is still the top of mind and so is much easier to recall. If you were asked now if you could remember much about the last time you contacted a call centre you would probably struggle to remember important details from that call. In our experience the customer is far more likely to respond to the survey if they are being surveyed while the experience is still relevant to them. One example of a poor time to survey would be an airline which surveys two weeks after a return flight by Copyright NICE Systems Ltd. All rights reserved.

4 which time the trip is most likely a distant memory. One NICE Fizzback customer who surveys through SMS and 15 minutes after an interaction receives response rates of around 50%. Surveying soon after an interaction means that the business receives the responses much quicker than they otherwise would. This enables them to either deal with individual customer issues, or wider organizational issues much quicker. Ensuring that surveys are sent soon after an interaction demonstrates to the customer that your feedback is important to them. Conversation not a Survey At times surveys can seem very impersonal to the customer. Typical responses to customer answers which were not understood could be Do not understand, please respond with a number between When surveying customers it is important to ensure that it is a dialogue about the service, instead of an interrogation. There are a number of ways in which this can be achieved without excessive cost and while maintaining high volumes of feedback. It is advised to personalise messages with the customer s name, so they know it is meant for them, and to include as much detail about the interaction as is feasible and possible. Some examples would be to include the name of the agent they spoke to, the name of the store they visited, or the department they interacted with. An additional method is to employ adaptive responses during the survey. In this way the survey can adapt to the responses that the customer has given. For example if the customer responds extremely negative to the first question the next question can immediately follow up with message apologizing for the service they received and skip straight to a question asking what went wrong. Likewise if a positive response is received then the next message can state that they are glad the experience was positive. Finally it is beneficial to let every customer give their feedback in their own words. By asking the customer an open ended question about the experience it is possible to learn what is important to them. One example of a hotel chain can demonstrate the dangers of not doing this. Previously this chain had asked a large number of questions about many parts of the experience, the cleanliness of rooms, the level of service etc. One question asked about the quality of the carpets, in which customers responded that they did like them. The company therefore invested millions into putting in new carpets across every hotel. The impact on the customer experience though was negligible, ultimately the carpets had no effect on the experience, but when asked, customers had said that they weren t great. By enabling customers to feedback on what is important to them, businesses can more accurately ascertain what is important to their customers, not what the business thinks is important. It is small best practices such as these that can improve the quality of the feedback the business receives, boost response rates and volume and improve relationships with customers. Short Messages It may be a simple point but it is important to ensure that surveys are kept short (no more than 4 or 5 questions). Customers give up their valuable time to complete surveys on their experience and their time must be respected. By having them complete long and arduous surveys it is likely to vastly increase drop off rates during the survey. There is also a risk that customers become unengaged during the survey and do not give an accurate response in an effort to get to the end as quickly as possible. There are methods in which organisations can still get valuable information from the survey despite a relatively short length:

5 As mentioned previously customers asked to respond in their own words about what was important gives rich insight into what is driving customer satisfaction and loyalty. It is possible to have rotating questions within a survey so that every 3 or 4 customers get 3 or 4 different questions. With SMS surveying yielding high response rates it s possible to still gain statistically relevant volumes of answers to drive business change. BENCHMARKING DIFFERENT CHANNEL RESULTS Using SMS messaging as a survey channel has a number of benefits over other communication channels, and compliments well the best practices stated in the previous section of this white paper. In figure 1.0 we can see that SMS gains significantly higher volumes than both IVR and . With this being stated it is of course important to mention that the tables in figure X.X do not show either the cost per survey (which for is the cheapest method) or other details about the amount of detail that can be captured (i.e. comments in to web surveys tend to be much more detailed). It is also not always relevant to survey via SMS, and in these cases other channels should be considered or SMS utilised as a funnel into these channels. Figure 1.0 Overall Results Avg. Response Rate Avg. Response Time SMS overall 31% 0:05:13 overall 13% 1:04:35 IVR overall 5%-10% n/a In our experience the business value of utilising SMS as a channel where possible is always recommended. The next section of this white paper will elaborate on the business value of this method. BUSINESS BENEFITS OF SMS SURVEYS Customer Recovery As previously referenced in this white paper it is recommended to adopt a census approach to customer surveys. One of the key benefits to this approach (and the resulting high response rates and subsequent volumes of feedback gathered) is that the business is able to highlight a larger number of customers who are dissatisfied and in danger of leaving the business. By doing this and ensuring that relevant forces are in place to reach out to customers and recover them, the business is able to save and retain a large amount of revenue. One good example of this in action is with BT Business in the UK. Over a period of time BT measured their customer advocacy scores and churn numbers and were able to calculate that through customer recovery they retained $1.8 million alone. Additionally it is then important to factor in the speed in which the business can utilise the results of the surveys. There are two factors to take into consideration 1) the speed in which customers respond and 2) the speed in which the response can be analysed and passed onto the relevant party. Figure 2.0 By sector Overall RR Avg. Time to Respond SMS RR SMS Avg. Time to Respond RR Avg. Time to Respond Telco 32% 0:08:18 35% 0:04:58 12% 0:23:14 Financial services 20% 0:12:58 24% 0:03:23 14% 1:08:08 Transport 13% 0:17:22 13% 0:08:12 12% 1:11:42

6 In the first case it is important to use channels which gain quick response time (this is where runs into issues) as SMS and IVR generate vastly increased response times to surveys. Ultimately everyone carries a mobile phone around with them and post call IVR surveys can drive instant feedback responses. Our studies have shown that 90% of SMS messages are read within 3 seconds of them being received, and 98% in total are read. This demonstrates the value of sending SMS messages is not just in the response rates, but also the visibility it gives to the message. This is particularly beneficial when considered with the Benjamin Franklin Effect. In the second case it is important to utilise a robust solution to enable quick analysis of the survey responses and which has the ability to quickly share relevant information (such as customer alerts) to the part of the business which needs it most; usually in the case of the customer retention a team tasked with recovering dissatisfied customers. credit card company in the UK, were able to improve 204 processes within their operation. These ranged from contact centre related issues to processes around agent processes and coaching. An additional benefit to high volumes of feedback is the ability to drive performance management at an individual employee level. In most cases (and where possible) the ability to gain 20 to 30 pieces of feedback per employee on the service they provided is invaluable in coaching and improving the performance of individual employees. Particularly within the contact centre this feedback can then be matched up to other quality metrics or the call recording itself. In certain cases it is also possible to match these scores in the retail environment as well. It is also possible to look into incorporating these feedback scores into incentive schemes to bonus on the level of customer service instead of solely sales. If the business can highlight dissatisfied customers as soon as possible (in some cases within minutes of an interaction) it makes recovery both much easier to complete, and also much more likely to succeed and have a positive impact on the customer. Operational Value: There is also great operational value in utilising SMS as a feedback channel. As previously mentioned and shown SMS can gain significantly higher volumes of feedback from a larger percentage of the customer base. When coupled with the ability to let customers comment freely on what was most important to them about the experience the benefits are clear. Organisations can accurately make operational decisions off the back of the feedback, and safe in the knowledge that these decisions will positively impact the customer experience. In one nine month period in 2012, Capital One a

7 CONCLUSION While this white paper has clearly demonstrated the value of SMS as a feedback channel it is important to note the importance of other channels as well. In some cases SMS is not the most relevant channel, typically because it doesn t provide the level of detail required. In these cases then other channels of course must be brought to the fore with the support of SMS to drive customers to engage via these other channels. read rates for example can increase by up to 30% when an SMS is sent directing people to actively seek out s that may otherwise go unread. With this said if possible it would be recommended to use SMS for the benefits stated in this white paper. The benefits to be had by gaining significantly increased volumes of feedback enable the business to truly drive by the Voice of Customer (with a response rates under 10% this is not possible). Organisations who successfully operationalise feedback within their business (or drive by Voice of the Customer) can reap the benefits and effectively differentiate themselves in the market, on the level of service they provide to their customers.

8 This white paper was written in collaboration with Dynmark: About Dynmark Dynmark is a cloud based mobile intelligence platform enabling enterprises globally to harness the power of aggregated knowledge to increase customer engagement and ROI through targeted messaging. NICE Systems chose Dynmark to deliver their global mobile messaging as well as leveraging the Dynmark platform for intelligent tracking and behavioural insights into each mobile interaction. NICE CONTACTS Global International HQ, Israel, EMEA, Europe & Middle East, T , F T , F Americas, North America, Asia Pacific, Singapore Office T , F T , F The full list of NICE marks are the trademarks or registered trademarks of Nice Systems Ltd. For the full list of NICE trademarks, visit All other marks used are the property of their respective proprietors. ABOUT NICE SYSTEMS INC. NICE Systems Ltd. (NASDAQ: NICE) is the worldwide leader of software solutions that deliver strategic insights by capturing and analyzing mass quantities of structured and unstructured data in real time from multiple sources, including, phone calls, mobile apps, s, chat, social media, and video. NICE solutions enable organizations to take the Next-Best-Action to improve customer experience and business results, ensure compliance, fight financial crime, and safeguard people and assets. NICE solutions are used by over 25,000 organizations in more than 150 countries, including over 80 of the Fortune 100 companies. WP-#### 12/12 Contents of this document are Copyright