4 Tips to Integrate your VoC Survey into the Customer Journey

Opening the channels of communication between an organization and the customers it serves can result in more brand authenticity and a better overall Customer Experience. However, often times brands will create an entire Customer Experience platform without hearing from the voice of the customer. This can become wasteful and costly, especially compared to the value of consistent and honest customer feedback. Voice of Customer (VoC) survey programs are an effective way of capturing this information, but the challenge lies in finding ways to integrate survey participation into the customer journey. Follow these tips to increase the participation rate for your VoC survey program.

1. Make the Survey Easily Accessible from Your Website
   • Your organization should be striving to reduce the necessary customer effort throughout the customer journey, and the same should be true for your VoC survey program. Most websites have a universal footer or sidebar, and making the survey prevalent and available across all website pages is as simple as linking to it in these areas. This approach does not have to replace the traditional bottom-of-the-receipt method, but it can increase the amount of survey participants you capture by widening the reach. To avoid fraudulent entries and ensure data integrity, it is important to have introductory questions that illuminate which part of the customer journey participants encompass.
2. Train Employees to Push the Survey at the Point of Sale
   • One of the most effective ways of encouraging participation is offering a prize or sweepstakes. Using this approach in tandem with training cashiers to advertise this prize as customers leave your store can be supremely effective in garnering more participants. Again, the goal of any Customer Experience initiative should be to reduce customer effort, so brands should not require a taxing process to find, fill out, and enter these survey sweepstakes.
3. Wait 3-5 Days Before Reaching Out After a Purchase
   • After a customer has purchased an item and left your store they should possess two nuggets of information. How to access your survey, usually via a link, and the details surrounding the VoC incentives. However, customers have their own individual lives, and by the time they are in their car leaving the parking lot this information is most likely long gone. That is why it is important that your brand is reaching out to encourage customers to complete these surveys, but there is a line that brands do not want to cross. Be sure to not become an annoying spam presence in their inbox, and wait several days before reaching out. If there is no response after another few days, reach out again, but do not send more than two of these types of emails to customers. Additionally, adding personalization to the emails to avoid them seeming robotic is an effective approach to encourage more participants.
4. Make the Survey Accessible Via Social Media
   • One of the most common ways that customers and brands interact on social media networks is resolving service requests. While your brand should be able to listen to and react to these customer requests, social media can also be a place where the tables turn and brands themselves can reach out to their customers. By blasting out feedback surveys on social media, organizations can reach the largest possible pool of potential participants. Whether the survey is analyzing a post-purchase experience, individual product review, or the overall brand perception, social media can be an effective way of reaching a mass audience all while reducing the amount of effort a customer must take to start the VoC process. Optimizing your organizational social media accounts to include VoC survey capabilities can improve customer participation rates and foster better customer relationships.

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