Building Brand Purpose with Market Research
Building Brand Purpose with Market Research
As businesses seek to scale, grow and differentiate themselves from others in their field, they’ll need to have their brand purpose on full display.
Making light of your brand purpose is a critical way to show that your brand is mission-driven and exits beyond the shallow purpose of making a profit. Customers, especially the younger generation are fond of brands with a purpose.
In fact, 92% of Gen Z and 90% of Millennial respondents say they would support a purposeful brand, compared with 81% of Gen X consumers.
Consumers from across the globe also view brands that actively display their purpose in a positive light. 64% of global consumers say brands that communicate their purpose are more attractive. 62% want companies to take a stand on the issues they care about.
This article delves into brand purpose, its importance, examples of companies with visible purpose and how to find and build your own through market research.
Understanding Brand Purpose
This concept refers to a brand’s moral reason for being and what it stands for aside from making a profit and other commercial interests. Typically, a business assumes a brand purpose aligned with what its customers believe.
Also called the North Star and the noble purpose of a brand, it largely deals with finding a reason for the brand’s existence and using it to help its consumers.
Brand purpose is essentially the “why” behind a company. This “why” allows the business to show customers the values it holds and the noble cause it hopes to either achieve or contribute to.
A business’s brand purpose can serve as a reflection of the founders’ lives and experiences, what they consider to be gaps in their market or a major change in their market.
A brand’s purpose can be ethical, moral or political in nature, giving customers the chance to do business with a brand that supports a certain cause or way of life.
A brand purpose should not be confused with a brand promise, which is the general expectation a product or service offers to its customers.
Coming Up With a Brand Purpose
When coming up with a brand purpose, consider how your business intends to make the world improve, or at least a component of it. This can involve affecting social obligations for your target market, environment or society at large.
This will resonate with your consumers and their values and give them another reason to patronize you.
Ask yourself the following to begin finding your brand purpose:
- What does your brand stand for?
- Does your business have a mission?
- What does your business strive to do – or commit to never do?
- What values does your brand uphold or plan on upholding?
- How can you use your values as a company to strive towards a goal for the greater good?
Questions like these are at the core of brand purpose. Once you answer these, you can study your customers to probe further.
The Importance of Brand Purpose
A brand purpose goes far beyond appearing conscientious in your market.
First off, a powerful brand purpose will set you apart from the competition. Plenty of business rivals may offer similar products, services and experiences, but they are unlikely to share the same brand value of your brand — or any at all.
A brand purpose is a potent aspect of your business to use for building your reputation and strengthening your brand equity. You can do so by establishing your brand as one that is socially, environmentally, politically or otherwise conscious and caring about issues besides its own bottom line.
In turn, this humanizes your brand. Your business will no longer be seen as merely another provider or another cash cow. Instead, it will be recalled as one with a human conscious, one that cares bout a certain issue and it attempting to reach goals that ultimately benefit society in one way or another.
By improving your reputation and heightening your brand as one not solely concerned about profits, you can thus apply your brand purpose in your branding. You can do this across a wide span of campaigns, from branding to PR to advertising and beyond. Your best bet is to apply it to the main conduit of your communications: your content marketing strategy.
This involves directly mentioning your purpose and alluding to it across your blogs, resources pages, social media, landing pages, videos and any other channel that grants you the opportunity to make consumers aware of your brand purpose.
Finally and most importantly, having a brand purpose makes the brand more appealing to the customers, as they will feel that their spending is making a difference in the world. It will also make them feel like they are a part of something greater than just a customer buying journey or shopping session.
A brand purpose enables your business to connect with consumers on a personal level. This is important, as aforementioned, given that customers are becoming increasingly invested in brands that have a purpose.
In fact, 52% of customers say they are more attracted to buy from brands if they stand for something bigger than just the products and services they sell, especially if it aligns with their personal values.
Moreover, 71% of customers say they prefer to buy from a purpose-driven company over another one, should the cost and quality be the same. What’s more astonishing is that despite the statistics of consumers leaving brands after one bad experience, 72% of consumers say they would forgive a company with a brand purpose if it made a mistake.
The implications of these statistics are major, pointing to higher levels of brand trust in purposeful companies. Additionally, it means that when a customer contemplates a brand with purpose, they are also more inclined to remember it, purchase from it and want to work for it.
In addition, when a customer sees a logo of a purpose-driven brand, they’ll associate it with being compassionate, responsible and ethical.
All in all, when brands exhibit a brand purpose, they are effectively standing out among competitors, improving their reputation, gaining ideas for marketing and branding and resonating with customers and their values.
All brands should therefore strive to be purpose-driven.
Examples of Companies With Brand Purpose
Companies across various sectors have taken up a brand purpose. This has given their customers a much deeper meaner to their brand and offerings.
The following lays out a few examples of companies that actively demonstrate their brand purpose:
- Dove: The personal care company aims to help women discover the value of real beauty and improve self-esteem worldwide. Their #speakbeautiful movement encouraged women to be kinder to themselves and embrace their natural bodies. The brand creates relatable and realistic marketing instead of the highly edited images common in the beauty industry.
- Muji: The Japanese retailer of household items and apparel promotes self-restraint, humility and the natural state of the environment, along with supporting simplicity and moderation. It sustains the latter by offering functional products with a simple design and are practical to use. As for the former, Muji emphasizes reducing production, recycling and packaging waste.
- Crayola: The art supply company works to help parents and teaches foster creativity within children. It enables those in children’s lives to inspire them to be “creatively alive” instead of simply using their products. Crayola had various programs dedicated to this purpose, a mission they attempt to achieve globally.
- Everlane: The American clothing retailer has a threefold brand purpose. It is bent on creating environmentally friendly products, providing high-quality products and being transparent as possible. The company sources only from ethical factories — the kinds that have fair wages and hours. It uses fine materials and brands itself as being radically transparent. When it comes to the latter, Everlane gives information on how much their clothes cost to be made, which materials they used, the labor involved and even the transporting methods.
How to Find and Build Brand Purpose with Market Research
Market research can help you discover the possible themes and nuances of your brand purpose. This is because there are various market research techniques you can use to study your target market, the group of customers most likely to buy from you.
You can begin conducting market research via secondary sources, such as trade magazines, news websites, blogs and competitor websites to see the kinds of purposes your competitors are aligning themselves with.
You can also use these sources to understand which purposes resonate the most with customers and the kinds of campaigns brands in your field and beyond have created based on their brand purpose. This will help you form the onset of your brand purpose.
Next, shift into primary market research by conducting survey research on your target market. This will give you firsthand insights into all of your customers’ thoughts in relation to current issues and popular causes.
Use a trusted online survey platform to reach the correct target market sample. This platform should allow you to extract the exact amount of respondents that you input in the screener, including quotas on various audiences.
Your survey platform should have the option of being able to incorporate multiples audiences in one survey. That way, you can observe different target market segments and customer personas under one survey study, allowing you to analyze the data via the same dashboard.
You should also be able to reach the correct respondents via demographics, behaviors, and even by their specific answers to screening questions.
Ask your respondents about various social issues, from the environment to education and all else. In your survey, you should seek out which issue and which message resonates the most with your target market, along with which elicits the strongest reactions. In this way, you may need to insert elements of emotional marketing.
You should also add A/B testing into your surveys to see which messaging or issues affect your customers the most, along with which they care most about. Remember to conduct market research beforehand, as you’ll need to know your customers before you set out to find your brand purpose.
You can continue surveying customers after you’ve decided on a brand purpose, to find the right messaging and images. Do so with A/B testing, including sequential testing.
Differentiating Your Business
Creating a brand purpose and applying it to various marketing campaigns will differentiate your business and ultimately allow it to survive. But before you insert a brand purpose into your branding, you’ll need to find a strong one that your target market deems important and compelling.
To do so, you’ll need a strong market research platform to host your survey campaigns. Such a platform should run on random device engagement (RDE) sampling, so you can reach customers in their natural digital environments, instead of pre-recruiting them. This removes social pressures in the surveys and will cut back on survey bias.
You should also use a mobile-first platform, since mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a mobile environment that’s not built for them.
The online survey platform you opt for should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, disqualify low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.
It should also allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.
With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to motivate your customers into making repeat purchases.
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How to Promote Repeat Purchases with Survey Research
How to Promote Repeat Purchases with Survey Research
You’ll need to cultivate repeat purchases from your customers given the weight of customer retention. Even if you operate a B2C retail establishment, your business will greatly benefit from existing customers shopping from your business continuously.
90% of customers are more likely to purchase more, and 93% of customers are more likely to make repeat purchases at companies with excellent customer service.
61% of SMBs report that more than half of their revenue comes from repeat purchases of existing customers, rather than from new customers. These statistics demonstrate how clear the value of repeat purchases is.
However, despite these perceptible benefits, 96% of customers stop doing business with a company due to poor customer service. This damaging statistic proves that almost all customers will not simply make fewer purchases with a business, but abandon it entirely.
As such, brands must elevate their CX and understand their customers to retain customers.
This article explores the concept of repeat purchases, their implications, importance and how to foster it with survey research.
Understanding Repeat Purchases
A self-evident concept, repeat purchases refer to instances of customers purchasing more than once from the same business. This behavior is usually associated with buying from a business multiple times, instead of just twice.
As such, repeat purchases result from customer retention, which is the result of consumer loyalty. There are many building blocks of loyalty, including providing a great customer experience, reasonable prices, product satisfaction, brand equity, brand trust, satisfying all of your consumer preferences and more.
When strategizing how to stimulate repeat purchases, businesses can create various campaigns, from advertising to PR, social media and various others to facilitate repeat purchases through different purchasing methods. This means that although you may have customers who purchase in-store, you can still pique online or phone orders.
For example, assume you have a customer persona who prefers buying via the brick-and-mortar way. They can still be swayed to make an online purchase, should it be compelling enough. You can achieve this by offering a special online promotion, introducing an online rewards program, or appealing to this persona in some other way that makes it tempting for them to buy online.
At any rate, you can forge repeat purchases through omnichannel communications and various purchasing options.
The Importance of Repeat Purchases
Repeat purchases are important for several reasons.
First off, when customers buy from the same company, it is a sign of customer loyalty, which means that not only will your customers continue buying from you, but they will be less inclined to shop from your competitors.
As such, you’ll be drawing in a larger customer retention rate, and as you’ve read across multiple CX, marketing and eCommerce outlets, customer retention is more profitable than acquisition. Various figures prove this, such as the fact that acquiring new customers costs five times as much as keeping existing ones and that selling to existing customers has a success rate of 60-70%, while it is only 5-20% for new customers.
High levels of repeat purchases also point to a low customer churn rate, another necessity for keeping your business afloat, given the need to retain a stream of customers. In addition, once customers churn, it is going to be difficult to bring them back to your business, as they've already made up their minds — and not from hearsay but their experience from being your customers.
If your customers didn’t like your products, they wouldn’t buy them — unless it was due to utter necessity and no other choice. As such, when customers buy repeatedly from you, not only are you lowering your customer acquisition cost due to higher retention, but you’re also building trust around your brand. The more customers buy from you, the more reliable you are perceived to be.
Customers who make repeat purchases are also important given their higher expenditures, as repeat customers spend 67% more than new customers. This isn’t surprising, as retained customers know what to expect from their favorite brand(s), therefore being more liberal with their spending.
Customers who buy from you year after year are critical, as they signify a segment that has the potential or currently carries a high Customer Lifetime Value. This metric relays the worth of customers during their entire relationship with the company. It involves both purchases and the length of a relationship customers have with businesses.
Value also increases in reverse, meaning that a brand appears to be more valuable to customers who make continuous purchases. As such, these purchases exemplify high levels of customer value, which is the perception of what a product or service is worth to a customer versus its alternatives.
All in all, when customers make repeat purchases, they are easier to sell to, improve a brand’s reputation and generate higher overall value for a company.
7 Effective Ways to Increase Repeat Purchases
Businesses can try experimenting with different methods to increase and strengthen customers by making repeat purchases.
The following enumerates 7 methods you can use to increase repeat purchases:
- Offer perks via VIP programs.
- These programs grant elite status to customers who buy more, directly leading to repeat purchases.
- Create referral programs with incentives for current customers that bring in new ones.
- This will whet customers’ interest in staying customers, as they will be rewarded.
- Create discounts and seasonal campaigns to draw in continuous purchases for special occasions.
- This will entice customers to buy repeatedly by buying more than just one kind of product. For example, various Halloween candy or Christmas decor.
- Retarget customers via email marketing.
- Target your customers directly after they make their first purchase via email marketing.
- You can give them the option of subscribing to a mailing list or suggesting similar products now and then.
- Create exclusive deals for customers through rewards programs.
- While creating seasonal promotions is useful, you can extend your deals and discounts by creating rewards programs for customers.
- This directly leads to customers buying more.
- Appeal to customers with marketing personalization.
- No one likes to be marketed to, especially in generic ways.
- Creating personalization makes customers feel seen, heard and far more special than they would as recipients of non-personalized offers and messages.
- Ask for user-generated content.
- This involves content that your consumers produce via using your products and services, which you then feature across your website and other digital properties.
- This method creates bonds between brands and customers, which gives brands an edge in that customers view them as more than just another business.
How to Stimulate Repeat Purchases with Survey Research
Market research is the underlying mechanism for increasing repeat purchases. This is because, to appeal to your customers, you’ll need to understand them at a deeper level. This way, you can properly market to and serve them.
When you understand all of your customers’ desires, needs, aversions and perceptions, you’ll be able to create marketing campaigns that compel them to interact with your brand, as you push them further down the sales funnel until they convert.
There are various market research techniques that you can apply to better understand your customers; this involves gaining insights into customer behavior and your customer’s needs, along with their reactions to your current marketing campaigns.
Wheel secondary market research is a good starting point for learning about your customers, your best bet is to gain insights that are timely and unique to your target. You can achieve this by conducting survey research, a kind of primary research.
Surveys allow you to inquire into any topic, granting you full control over your market research study. You can create surveys for several purposes, as there are various surveys and different types of survey questions you can ask.
The following lists some of the key survey types to use to increase repeat customer spending:
- The customer service survey
- Bad service can deter customers from making any further purchases from you and this survey gauges your customer service.
- The customer retention survey
- Given that repeat purchases indicate retention, use this survey to help you determine your degree of customer retention.
- The CES survey (Customer Effort Score Survey)
- This survey measures customer effort, the degree or amount of effort that a customer puts into a certain interaction with a company.
- The longitudinal survey
- You can measure the opinions your customers have on your products and services by surveying them over longer periods with this kind of survey.
- The product satisfaction survey
- Especially useful for observing attitudes and opinions of your products, this survey allows you to get direct feedback on the products themselves.
- This helps you improve your product features and innovate new ones.
Fueling Your Business
You should always aim to encourage your target market to make repeat purchases. After all, these are the lifeblood of customer retention, yielding all of its benefits. To spur this shopping phenomenon, you’ll need to understand your customers at a deeper level.
You’ll need a strong market research platform to host your survey campaigns. Such a platform should run on random device engagement (RDE) sampling, so that you can reach customers in their natural digital environments, instead of pre-recruiting them. This removes social pressures in the surveys and will cut back on survey bias.
You should also use a mobile-first platform, as mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a mobile environment that’s not built for them.
The online survey platform you opt for should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, offer a broad range of survey and question types and disqualify low-quality data.
It should also allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature.
This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.
With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to motivate your customers to make repeat purchases.
The Best UX Survey Questions to Power Your Surveys
The Best UX Survey Questions to Power Your Surveys
You need to have a reliable set of UX survey questions to power your UX survey. The questions steer the direction of your entire study and campaign and should therefore be woven carefully.
This kind of survey assesses user behavior in relation to your products, services, digital experiences and other user experiences. It is meant to reveal how your consumers experience your offerings firsthand, revealing the difficulty and ease of using your products.
Achieving a good UX is critical for numerous reasons, such as the fact that top companies that lead in UX outperformed the S&P index by 35%. Good UX also has a strong ROI, as every $1 invested in UX, brings $100 in return, indicating an ROI of 9,900%.
You ought to avoid bad UX like the plague, as it even turns away the customers who love a brand. In fact, 32% of customers who love a brand will leave it after just one bad experience.
This article presents various examples of UX questions, their importance in different settings and where in the customer buying journey to use them, so that you are never at a loss of how to fill your UX survey.
The Importance of UX Survey Questions Throughout Different Touchpoints
There are various touchpoints that you should use as the basis of your UX survey questions, as the experiences your users undergo there are critical to study.
By asking questions based on different moments in the buying journey, which include pre and post-sales, you’ll paint an accurate picture of how your consumers perceive all of your UX offerings, whether they are digital or physical.
This includes understanding the difficulty and ease of interacting with your company and using your products, services and experiences. As such, you can use the insights from your UX survey questions to improve across all customer touchpoints, accelerate product innovation and ease the process of your experiences.
Additionally, by studying UX across various touchpoints, you’ll unearth your consumer preferences, see what’s driving demand in your offerings specifically, understand what’s inciting repeat purchases and much more. The key is to ask relevant and specific questions.
Where to Use and Draw Inspiration for UX Survey Questions
While it is important to look at your customer experience as a whole, there are several key moments that you should zero in on to study your UX.
These provide excellent opportunities for asking UX questions, whether they involve questioning users then and there, or following up with a UX survey that asks questions on different points in their UX.
The following lists key moments in the buying journey to pay attention to and use for UX survey questions:
- The first visit(s) to your website, mobile site, app or other digital property
- When: Pre-sales
- After an asset download
- When: Pre-sales
- This is especially useful for B2B consumers.
- Interactions with a UI element or experience
- When: Pre or post-sales
- This can involve quizzes, games, UI marketing collateral and more.
- Subscription sign-ups
- When: Pre (if free) or post-sales (if paid for)
- This can be a free or paid subscription to content.
- Trying a product via an in-home use test
- When: Pre-sales
- This involves the users trying out your products, who are usually recruited for market research purposes.
- For customer development
- When: Pre-sales
- This is a framework used to discover whether a product satisfies the need(s) of a target market, part of the lean startup concept in order to bring a product to market more efficiently.
- After a week or more of purchasing a product or digital asset.
- When: Post-sales
- This is especially necessary if you collected the customers’ email addresses.
- During present usage of service, product or app
- When: Post-sales
- Example: UX with an app, a subscription, a product, a feature, etc.
Examples of UX Survey Survey Questions to Use
Now that you understand the importance of using UX survey questions across different stages in the customer buying journey, along with the specific times to use them, let’s analyze the heart of the survey: the questions.
Aside from being able to come up with reliable UX questions, it is key to be able to organize and label them. This will help you think up and sort new questions as they arise.
The following provides examples of useful UX survey questions to use in your UX survey:
- Have you used the [new tool/feature]?
- Question type: Yes or no
- When to use: After (or during) the first visits to your website, mobile site, app or other digital property
- Follow up? If yes, go to Question 2
- How easy was it to use [new tool/feature] on a scale of 1 (very difficult) to 5 (very easy)?
- Question type: Likert scale
- When to use: As a follow-up to the previous question, during present usage of product, service or app
- Follow up? If the answer is between 3-5, follow-up with an open-ended question
- Was this [asset name] helpful?
- Question type: Yes or no
- When to use: After downloading an asset
- Follow up? Yes, with an open-ended question about how it was helpful.
- What are your first impressions of [UI element]?
- Question type: Multiple-choice, multiple selection and open-ended questions
- When to use: After interacting with a UI element
- Follow up? Yes, with an open-ended question to explain the reasoning
- Did you enjoy [UI element]?
- Question type: Yes or no, or multiple selection ranging from “not at all” to “very much.”
- When to use: After interacting with a UI element
- Follow up? Yes, with an open-ended question to explain this answer.
- How easy was it for you to sign up for this subscription?
- Question type: Likert scale
- When to use: After signing up for a content, SaaS or physical subscription
- Follow up? Yes, with an open-ended question on how to make it easier/better.
- Did this product have any glitches or things you would change?
- Question type: Multiple-choice of “none at all”, “1-3 things, but they aren’t major,” “1-3 things and they’re important,” etc
- When to use: As part of an in-home use test
- Follow up? Yes, with an open-ended question on what the problems the customer incurred or features they would like to see improved.
- What is one thing you would change about [tool/feature]?
- Question type: Multiple-choice, multiple-selection
- When to use: As part of customer development/ product innovation
- Follow up? Yes, with an open-ended question to explain further.
- What are the best / worst parts about using this [product, service, digital experience]?
- Question type: Multiple-choice, multiple-selection
- When to use: After a customer has used a product for a certain amount of time
- Follow up? Yes, with an open-ended question to explain what they like and dislike about their UX.
- Did this [UX/UI element] help you? Was it easy to use?
- Question type: Yes or no or Multiple-choice of “not at all” to “yes, completely.”
- When to use: Interactions with a UI element
- Follow up? Yes, with a multiple-choice question on the easiest and most helpful aspects or those that aren’t.
Excelling in UX
Improving your UX and keeping customers satisfied in this regard goes a long way towards providing customer satisfaction and building consumer loyalty. You should therefore strive to optimize your UX whenever possible.
To do so, you’ll need a strong online survey platform, one that offers advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their previous answers. It should also make it easy to form a customer journey survey to survey your respondents across their customer journeys.
The best-in-class platform uses random device engagement (RDE) sampling, for reaching customers in their natural digital environments, instead of pre-recruiting them. This removes social pressures in the surveys and will cut back on survey bias.
You should also use a mobile-first platform since mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take surveys in a mobile environment that’s not built for mobile devices.
Your online survey platform should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, disqualify low-quality data and offer a broad range of survey and question types.
Additionally, it should also allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of only deploying them across a vast network.
With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to collect data on cultural awareness and virtually any topic.
All About Panel Surveys: 5 Panel Survey Examples and More
All About Panel Surveys: 5 Panel Survey Examples and More
A survey panel also referred to as a panel survey, is a common research method used to gain insights from the same group of participants over a certain period.
This technique relies on examining research participants who join a market research study voluntarily. Aside from this, the participants are pre-recruited by researchers, to ensure they fit the respondent criteria they set for a particular research project.
This kind of research technique may appear to be a buzzword, given its prevalence in the market research space. However, whether it is useful and effective for your market research is entirely up to your research preferences and campaign needs.
Nonetheless, it is crucial to understand what a panel survey is before you can decide on whether you ought to implement it into your research strategy or not. Or, perhaps you want to use it in conjunction with another research method.
Either way, you should have a holistic view of everything this research method entails. This includes comparing it with random organic sampling and online surveys. Luckily, this guide provides all of this information and more.
This guide explores panel surveys, explaining them in full depth, along with their pros and cons, 5 examples of them and a comparative analysis of random sampling and survey panels.
Note: If you’re looking to do market research without the drawbacks of conducting panel surveys, try Pollfish. Our unique methodology guarantees authentic high-quality data, and it’s a fast and reliable way to survey targeted (yet randomized) people while they’re already engaged on their devices.
All About Panel Surveys: Table of Contents
- Defining Panel Surveys
- Panel Surveys: A Kind of Longitudinal Study
- Using Panelists in Your Target Market
- What to Study with a Panel Survey
- The Importance of Panel Surveys
- Panel Survey Examples: What Do Researchers Use Panels For?
- Pros & Cons: The Advantages and Drawbacks of Panel Surveys
- Organic Sampling: A Better Alternative to Panel Surveys
Defining Panel Surveys
Also called survey panels, panel surveys are a distinct form of market research that relies solely on panels to carry out the research study, as its name suggests.
Thus, it’s key to understand what the term “panel” means in the context of market research. A panel is a selection of participants who help researchers conduct market research by providing them with feedback on various studies.
The panelists do not join the study randomly, rather they are pre-recruited and pre-screened, based on the researcher’s panel needs and criteria.
A kind of research panel, a survey panel operates in the same way, except that it is strictly used within survey campaigns. As such, this panel is used for survey research alone, as opposed to other methods of panel usage.
Panels can be used in various research settings, including the following:
- One-on-one interviews
- Focus groups
- Survey studies
- All 6 main types of research, which include
- Exploratory research
- Correlational research
- Causal research
- Descriptive research
- Experimental research
- Explanatory research
- Field research
In the context of this guide, we’re going to focus on panels used in survey research alone. Hence, they are called survey panels, or panel surveys.
One of many market research techniques, this kind of research process uses a consistent group of participants, with the researchers returning to them repeatedly, either for a single survey campaign, which can require using multiple surveys or for multiple campaigns.
Panel Surveys: A Kind of Longitudinal Study
It is important to know that when referred to as a panel survey, this kind of research method is known as a longitudinal study. As such, this process is paired with longitudinal surveys.
This type of research study is often associated with correlational research.
As a type of longitudinal study, panel surveys involve correlational research because they examine the relationship between variables over an extended period. The period itself can vary.
As such, this kind of research method can be conducted in the following ways, occurring throughout:
- Weeks
- Months
- Years
- Decades
Regardless of the time dedicated to performing this research, it always involves the same survey target audience. By surveying the panelists at different points in time, researchers can glean a wide variety of changes and consistencies within their research subjects, aka the panelists.
Using Panelists in Your Target Market
While the panel remains the same, the topic(s) that can be scrutinized are virtually limitless.
For market research, the topics deal with a business’s target market. As such, all members of the panel survey must also have the qualities of those in your target market.
You can perform panel survey studies by zeroing in on your target market’s various market segments and customer personas. These are more distinct and defined groups of people who fall under your customer base.
This is the ideal way to conduct this kind of research and many others, as your target market can include a wide range of subgroups, whether they differ based on the following categories:
- Geographical locations
- Demographics
- This involves groupings based on gender, age, income level, ethnicity, employment type, education, etc.
- Psychographics
- This involves their attitudes, lifestyles, aspirations, values and other psychological criteria.
- It also involves whether they engage in a particular customer behavior.
- Firmographic
- This label is particular to studying a panel of business personnel, which you may do in B2B research.
- As such, it requires running B2B surveys.
Whichever categories you intend to group your panelists into, remember that they must fit into the qualities of your target market, as this group is the population of people most likely to purchase from your business.
What to Study with a Panel Survey
As aforementioned, you can explore a wide variety of topics in your panel survey. The following list enumerates some of these topics. Note that this is not a comprehensive list, as various other topics of concern may crop up, depending on your business, your customers and your research needs.
Here’s what this kind of research method allows you to study:
- Changing attitudes, opinions and sentiments
- Changes in customer buying behavior
- Changes in customer lifestyles
- Changes to consumer preferences
- Developments in your target market needs
- How your target market views your competitors
- The willingness of your customers to make repeat purchases
- Gaining a more in-depth glance at your market segments and customer personas
- Performing time-based research, such as longitudinal studies, retrospective studies and prospective studies
- Acquiring a snapshot of the present through cross-sectional studies
In this post, we’ll look at five-panel survey examples, which delve deeper into some of the topics on this list. But first, we’ll explain why this research method is important for researchers and their market research campaigns.
The Importance of Panel Surveys
Panel surveys are important for a variety of reasons. Some of these reasons may hold more weight than others, depending on your research needs and preferences.
Firstly, these panels are ideal for longitudinal research, as the same group of participants agreed to partake in your study. You would make it known that they would be used in continuous studies.
Aside from facilitating longitudinal studies, panel surveys are also ideal for another time-based research campaign: retrospective studies. As such, these panels aid researchers in completing their retrospective surveys.
This kind of study is used to examine changes over a long period, except the survey itself is only administered once. That’s because retrospective studies invoke occurrences from the participants’ past, whether they are experiences, inclinations, feelings, or attitudes.
The study may ask participants to compare past phenomena with how they feel in the present. The purpose is to study historical data and compare it with the present.
Panel surveys are also necessary for prospective studies, which also can last for years and study changes and developments. However, unlike retrospective studies, they involve participants who do not have a certain outcome. Instead, prospective studies seek to study people before they develop a certain outcome, such as a disease or a new shopping habit.
Aside from enabling researchers to study changes, these panels also make it possible to conduct cross-sectional studies, which are different from the prior three kinds of research studies — longitudinal, retrospective and prospective studies. Nonetheless, cross-sectional studies are still one of the key survey research methods.
As opposed to studying survey subjects at multiple points in time, a cross-sectional study entails gathering research about a particular population at one fixed point in time. Because of this, this type of research method is often referred to as a snapshot of a studied population.
This kind of study is conducted by using cross-sectional surveys, which are designed specifically for the cross-sectional model and can be sent to your panelists. Although cross-sectional studies don’t require a panel survey, given that they focus on a single point in time instead of several to examine changes, they can still be administered via these panels.
That’s because you can recruit panels for virtually any study, whether it includes partaking in a survey, an in-person interview, field research, or a focus group. Thus, panel surveys are not limited to any form of study, making them multifunctional.
This grants plenty of convenience to researchers, especially those bogged down by various other tasks they have to uphold, instead of putting together a group of respondents.
Panel surveys are especially important, as they provide an ongoing sampling pool of participants, which researchers can turn to whenever they seek to conduct more research. This can be to jump-start a new research campaign or conduct further research for an ongoing campaign.
This constant access to a sampling pool can also assist researchers who initially thought they had enough data, only to later discover they need more information. After all, if the panelists have already opted in, there is no need to seek out participants any further.
Panel surveys are also useful due to the quality of the panelists. Although identifying and vetting panel members may take some time, the result is a quality survey panel, one that ticks off all the panelist criteria you have. With this, you can mitigate fraud and rest assured you’re studying the correct populations.
All in all, panel surveys are useful for a variety of market research campaigns and come with a good share of benefits, despite some of their shortcomings.
Panel Survey Examples: What Do Researchers Use Panels For?
Now, let’s get to the heart of these panels, by going over what they can consist of, when, where, and how to use them.
The best way to explain the uses of a panel survey is by providing several panel survey examples. In this section, we’ll review five examples of when panel surveys can be used to good effect.
This will allow you to understand how panels work, along with some of their best-case scenarios for usage.
Example #1: Tracking Changes Over Time
Given that studying changes over time is the main purpose of leveraging a survey panel, it’s key to review this use case.
As such, one of the strongest examples of a panel survey is when researchers ask the same question(s) to a group of the same participants over a long period.
For example, if you were conducting a sociological experiment to understand if (or how) age correlates with wealth, you can set up a survey that studies panelists on the following:
- Income
- Expenses
- Assets
- Changes in employment
- Willingness to change jobs
- Willingness to switch job fields
A survey covering this topic ought to be conducted every two years, possibly spanning a decade (or more if need be).
That way, you can track changes relative to the scope of the issue you’re researching. Given that people typically stay at a job for about two years, it is key to follow up every two years on this research subject.
However, this has changed due to the Great Resignation, which saw the largest exodus of employees quitting their jobs in recent history.
The Great Resignation is not slowing down any time soon, with large numbers of people seeking better pay and benefits, along with the rise in job openings and remote work. This makes it much easier to switch jobs.
As such, the length of time you devote to tracking changes will depend on the circumstances of your study.
Alternatively, if you run a business, you’ll need to acquire ongoing insights into the market – and into audience behavior. For example, if your gym wear company wants to track the fitness habits of people over the year, a panel can be questioned every three months. You can run surveys with the same questions about how long people exercise, where they exercise, and how they do so.
For any business endeavor, you can implement the brand tracking survey, which allows you to track any changes that deal with your brand. This involves studying how your business is perceived, how in-demand its offerings are, what concerns your target market has that your business can address and much more.
Example #2: User Experience Research
Another common example of using a panel survey is for UX and UI design research. While UI refers specifically to designing web experiences, UX is far broader.
User experience can refer to a wide range of experiences that your customers encounter when interacting with a product, digital experience, or service. As such, it covers a wide range of aspects, all of which have some impact on how users experience your business’s offerings.
You can use these aspects as key considerations for driving your UX research. The following lists the four key components of user experience, which you should use in your research:
- Value: Does this experience give customers value?
- You can ask your panel whether a certain product, service, or digital experience provides them use and how so.
- It is key to study how your offerings can be made more valuable.
- Also, you should inquire about the products/services that your customers don’t find useful.
- Function: Does a product or product feature work?
- Ask your panel whether there are any bugs or glitches in how a product, feature, or service works.
- You can also study whether new needs arise in terms of your product’s functionalities.
- Usability: Is it easy to use?
- While your offerings may provide value, ask your customers whether they are easy to use, regularly.
- Study if your offerings can be made simpler over time.
- Also, look into whether customers seek other ways to access your offerings.
- For example: different devices, operating systems, web and app access
- General impression: Is it pleasant to use?
- Track changes to the overall sentiment towards your products, services and business at large.
- Ask your customers whether your offerings delight them or upset them.
- Ask customers to reveal anything else they’d like to see from your business to improve their UX.
When a company is building an app or a digital product, they want to gauge the customer experience as they go.
While usability testing (i.e. tracking how a person interacts with a specific feature), is often done using different methods, you can conduct qualitative research about design and experience by way of panel surveys.
The benefit of a panel survey here is that the participants remain constant – which removes a key variable.
Additionally, you can select panel participants based on their background or expertise, which will allow your pool to answer questions in a way that adds value to your product development process.
Example #3: Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Customer satisfaction is central to keeping your business alive, whether you want to release new products or build a steady base of loyal customers. As such, you can use panels to keep a watchful eye on your customers' satisfaction with your business.
Doing so will allow you to increase your customer lifetime value, a metric that measures the total monetary value a customer will bring to a business during their relationship with the business throughout their lifetime.
If you want to gauge customer satisfaction and positive/negative sentiment over the lifetime of their interactions with your offering, use a select group of long-term customers and ask them questions periodically about your value proposition.
Use a customer satisfaction survey for this campaign, which can be framed to reveal hidden sentiments, or can be explicitly focused on asking how satisfied they are with what you offer.
For example, use the following questions/considerations to measure customer satisfaction:
- On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with [a product, service, experience]?
- A rating scale question
- What would you change about [a product, service, experience, or your company] if you could?
- Open-ended question
- How easy was it for you to [do something] with our product?
- Options include a scale of extremely easy to extremely difficult
- This is a Likert scale question,
- How would you rate your experience with our new [a product, service, experience]]?
- This can be a Likert scale.
- Or, it can involve multiple choices of varying answers.
In this panel survey example, the business would be able to track patterns of customer happiness over time – for example, to see whether features continue to add value months or years after the customer signs up. And you can incentivize participation with gifts, reduced subscription fees, or extra services.
Consider discussing the following topics with your panel:
- What are their overall thoughts about your business?
- How do they receive product updates? (Poorly, well, etc.)
- What kind of value does your business provide and where does it lack in value?
- What else can you do to delight your customers?
Example #4: Employee Engagement
Another crucial panel survey example deals with studying your human capital, aka, your employees. After all, it is the employees that allow your business to function daily.
As such, your business needs to track employee engagement and team morale. In essence, here, your staff are the members of the panel survey – and you might survey them every week, month, quarter, or year. In this case, you’re surveying the same people about issues that answer the following:
- Are employees engaged at work, or do they have low morale?
- Do employees enjoy their work?
- Are they meeting their goals?
- Do they understand the company's mission?
- Do they understand the company roadmap and high-level goals for the coming weeks and quarters?
- Are they happy with their compensation?
- Where can the company improve?
If this is the type of panel survey you’re looking for, there are plenty of surveys that are specialized for human resources and employee engagement purposes.
This includes the following surveys:
- The employee satisfaction survey
- Used specifically to measure satisfaction, this survey focuses on what customers like and dislike about their jobs and the company,
- The employee feedback survey
- This is a general survey that should handle high-level topics.
- The employee burnout survey
- This survey focuses on the negative aspects of employees’ jobs and your company.
- You can use it to avoid burnout by asking them what they’d like to see change in their employment, workflows, job processes, schedules, etc.
- The employee recognition survey
- This is conducted to measure and understand the degree of employee recognition within a business.
- It gauges the perception of recognition that employees feel they have from their managers, peers and the company at large.
- The eNPS survey
- This functions the same way as a Net Promoter Score survey but for employees.
- Employees are asked how likely they are to recommend their company to others, on a scale of 1-10.
- The employee retention survey
- This is used as an instrument to retain employees.
- It delves into the topics that business owners and HR workers need to understand, to forge ideal work environments and cater to the needs of their employees,
Example #5: Customer Loyalty
It takes years to build solid consumer loyalty, which is a must, given that it is the core of the aforementioned customer lifetime value. By retaining your customers, you’ll spend less on attempting to acquire new ones, have a steady pool of revenue and maintain a good brand reputation.
Your panel survey can help you keep track of your customer loyalty. As you gain their insights, you’ll discover how you can raise their loyalty to your brand. To do so, use a market research platform that offers a brand tracker.
This tool allows you to keep track of a variety of brand issues throughout the year and beyond. It enables you to uncover whether there are any shafts in your brand perception or reactions to your marketing campaigns.
Consider tracking the following on customer loyalty:
- What excites my target market about your offerings?
- What kind of brand news incites the most interest?
- Which segments of customers are most likely to make repeat purchases?
- Which customer groups are the most loyal to your brand?
- Which actions and offerings inspire loyalty to your brand?
Pros & Cons: The Advantages and Drawbacks of Panel Surveys
Now, it’s time to analyze the advantages and disadvantages of using panel surveys for your market research.
One of the primary advantages of a panel survey is that the participants learn to trust the researchers, and therefore may be open to deeper and more truthful answers.
In addition, this ongoing relationship can allow researchers to dig deeper with follow-up questions.
Another advantage is that with screening having occurred at the start of the research, all following surveys are quicker to carry out than starting from scratch.
However, the disadvantages of panel surveys include:
- Panel conditioning: When you’re surveying the same people repeatedly, previous surveys might influence their responses and/or behavior. For example, if they know a certain question triggers a longer process, they may choose an answer that offers the path of least resistance. Or if you’re asking about a particular activity, like eating donuts, they may eat less (or more) thereafter.
Note: Furthermore, panel surveys don’t tend to occur within a “natural” setting, and therefore the artificial environment might affect thought processes and responses to questions. - Panel fatigue: If a person feels like a pay-off for participating in a panel survey is no longer worth the effort, the quality of their response may drop. This leads to incomplete or poor-quality survey responses, and survey “straight-lining” – i.e. answering the same to every question.
- Declining participation: Over time, inevitably, participants will drop out of the process – either due to panel fatigue, or other reasons. This will damage the quality and depth of your data.
And with survey panels, you run the risk of accidentally signing up “professional” panelists – especially when there are cash-based incentives on offer. Though screening should be designed to pick up these people before they enter the process, they’re adept at slipping through the net.
Organic Sampling: A Better Alternative to Panel Surveys
With increased pressure on people’s time, survey response rates have been decreasing. It’s harder than ever to guarantee consistent high-quality data, and as conventional survey companies scramble to include as many willing participants as possible, the quality reduces yet further.
At Pollfish, we don’t use conventional panels. Our unique methodology, called Random Device Engagement (RDE) uses the organic sampling approach for finding and procuring survey participants.
A kind of organic probability sampling, RDE polling relies on advertising networks and other device portals to engage potential respondents wherever they are voluntarily. This includes a variety of digital platforms and properties, such as:
- Mobile sites
- Apps
- Website
- Mobile games
All respondents gathered via the RDE method have no biases, as they are not pre-recruited and therefore face less pressure to answer things in a certain way. Due to this, they are less subject to a wide host of survey biases.
This includes the following survey biases:
- Sampling bias: This bias occurs when the respondent selection process, specifically when a survey sample is not chosen at random.
- This leads to under or overrepresentation of a certain segment of your survey target population, as only certain types of respondents are going to partake, while others aren’t.
- Acquiesce bias: Also called agreement bias, this occurs when respondents gravitate towards positive or agreeable answers.
- In this bias, respondents feel more social pressure to answer in a particular way, as their identities are known in panel surveys.
Organic sampling and Random Device Engagement obliterate these two (and other) biases. That’s because this process is completely randomized, stamping out sampling bias. Not only does it reach people randomly, but on Pollfish, this method is paired with our state-of-the-art survey platform.
Our online survey platform reaches specific populations based on demographics, psychographics and specific screening questions you can input. This ensures you’ll reach all the required target audiences to partake in your study.
Aside from reaching respondents organically and randomly, the respondents are completely anonymous. They don’t need to provide their names, contact information, or any identification to take a survey. Instead, they are simply reached and opted in.
They may also have the option of gaining survey incentives. This eliminates virtually all forms of acquiescence bias, as there is no pressure to provide certain answers over others.
Each screened participant has a unique ID, which prevents them from taking the same survey more than once, weeding out bias and survey fraud.
When working with Pollfish, you don’t need to use conventional panels – which are slow and subject to conditioning, fatigue, and declining participation. Instead, get authentic insights from our pool of over 250 million people (and growing) – who are already engaged on their devices and ready to participate.
As such, organic sampling, coupled with a potent online survey platform like Pollfish, provides a better market research option over panel surveys.
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Producing Customer Convenience with Market Research
Producing Customer Convenience with Market Research
Despite the generality of its name, you should never ignore customer convenience, as you’re not competing on product and price alone. Customers seek convenience wherever they can find it and they strongly value it in the age of ecommerce.
In fact, 83% of customers rate convenience while shopping as more important to them now compared with five years ago. It is clear to see why customers will choose one brand over another, given the weight of the convenience factor.
On the contrary, an inconvenient customer experience will drive customers away from your business — this isn’t an exaggeration. 97% of customers have abandoned a purchase because the service wasn’t convenient enough.
Convenience is the mainspring of the growth of ecommerce; businesses should therefore work towards developing in all parts of their business.
This article explains customer convenience, its importance, common places to include it and how you can produce it with market research.
Understanding Customer Convenience
Customer convenience may outwardly appear to be a broad term. However, despite that it comes in many forms, customer convenience is bound by the concept of easing all customer-facing activities so that it is painless for customers to do business with a company.
Customer convenience does not merely entail making it slightly easier to buy products from a business. Instead, it involves creating ultimate ease across the entire customer buying journey.
Customer convenience involves making any element in the customer experience, including the digital experience, saving customers time and effort. Although many products, services and other offerings were designed and marketed for their convenience, not all areas of business offer it.
What Determines Customer Convenience
This concept is determined by the ratio of pleasure and pain in the user experience, which in turn, affects customer behavior. The more glaring and latent obstacles customers undergo while engaging with your business, the less convenience your business offers. On the other hand, the more friction-free and seamless your processes are, the greater your customer convenience becomes.
Consider all the interactions and undertakings involved with your business that customers face. Are they all designed with ease of use, speed and general convenience? Chances are, with all the campaigns you’re running, that not every customer-facing facet of your business is optimized to save your customers time and effort.
Given that customers prioritize convenience, your brand should too.
The Importance of Customer Convenience
Customer convenience is important for several reasons.
As the intro mentioned, close to 100% of shoppers value customer convenience. This is even more pronounced by the fact that more than one-third of shoppers feel they have less free time now compared with five years ago. These shoppers seek out businesses that help them save their time and effort.
52% of those shoppers say that half or more of their purchases are influenced by convenience. As such, these statistics prove the importance of customer convenience, as it influences purchases and customer buying behavior. Customers are more inclined to buy from businesses that offer convenience, whether it is retailers offering various sizing options, or several delivery options.
As such, customer convenience affects how customers make buying decisions, including what products to buy, what services to get and with which businesses to engage with. Businesses should thus cater to any convenience-related whims and expectations that customers may have.
To achieve this end, they should remove any pain points or causes of discomfort across their customer experience. This involves digitally, physically and across various other customer touchpoints, such as on the one.
When it is easy for customers to get the information they need and to complete a purchase with you, not only will they be more inclined to buy from you, they’ll also be happier, owing to the convenience you provided. As such, convenience is a vital factor in customer satisfaction.
Satisfaction is a key factor in patronage and when customers are constantly satisfied, then you’ll earn their loyalty, which in turn yields customer retention and finally, customers with a high Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). Building up to the status of a high CLV requires the starting point of delivering customer convenience.
As such, creating customer convenience is a necessary long-term strategy for growing your business.
Common Ways to Create Customer Convenience
To reiterate, customer convenience exists in many forms. You should forge customer convenience whenever possible, not just during a transaction or a point of sale. This is because it exists in five dimensions of service: time, place, acquisition, use, and execution.
Aside from service, there are also several other key instances in the customer experience that require establishing customer convenience. These involve various marketing and UX concepts.
The following lists the various common ways you can use to create customer convenience, along with examples on how to create convenience in each category:
- Usability
- This involves the core of convenience, referring to the ease of using something.
- This can involve using the product, a service, or a digital experience,
- Digital experiences involve digital products, content and mechanisms for ordering, purchasing or subscribing to something.
- Example: Create convenience in the checkout with a one-click purchase capability
- Location
- Create products and services close to the customer or that the customer can access quickly.
- For example: advertising to a target market segment that lives near the location of your shop or where your products/services are sold.
- Create products and services close to the customer or that the customer can access quickly.
- Saving Time
- Saving time is one of the major components of customer convenience. No one likes having too much of their time taken up, not least by interacting with a business.
- Assure your website, mobile site and apps quickly load.
- Create a quick checkout and agility in all of your digital experiences.
- Personalization
- Personalize everything to show customers you understand them and don’t merely offer generic communication.
- Use marketing personalization in all of your marketing, outreach and communications practices.
- Make sure to customize your marketing content, as well as your products to your target market’s liking.
- Example: an online service or machine with menus that customers can use to personalize their experience.
- Scheduling
- This involves arranging appointments, meetings, repairs, calls with customer support and even conducting market research at times most convenient for your customers, or, in the case of market research techniques, your respondents.
- Offer various scheduling options, include custom scheduling, so that your customers choose the exact time and date of their appointments, etc.
- Delivery
- Always offer delivery services to your target market
- Ensure you offer delivery to all neighborhoods of a city, not just the main ones.
- There are various restaurants and food service businesses, for example, that only deliver to Manhattan, but not other boroughs.
- Offer various delivery options.
- This involves expedited delivery and contactless delivery options.
- Portability
- This refers to mobility and the ease of carrying items around.
- To remain competitive, create items that weigh less, are more compact and are easy to carry.
- For example, air conditioners are known for being unwieldy; you can keep your business competitive by making them portable.
- Automation
- This involves computers and software performing work that a human would otherwise do.
- When it comes to market research, this includes using a provider that runs on artificial intelligence.
- Certain products for everyday use can also be automated, for example, a dishwasher, soap dispenser, etc.
How to Create Customer Convenience with Market Research
Market research opens doors to your customers, from being able to segment your customers with market segmentation, filtering them further by creating customer personas and studying them for various campaigns.
Since customer convenience is centered on the customers, gleaning insights from the customers themselves is the most ideal way to produce it. Market research brings you these insights and the fastest and most convenient way to reach these insights is through conducting a survey campaign.
When you apply custom research, as opposed to syndicated research, you are entirely in control of your market research campaign. You’ll be able to create surveys by extracting the exact target audience you need, build your own questionnaires and qualify respondents on categories that go far beyond age and gender.
When creating your questions, you’ll be able to quiz your customers on a host of convenience-related matters. The surveys you create will uncover a host of customer intelligence, including consumer preferences on various aspects of your business.
This grants you firsthand insights into how your target market defines customer convenience for itself. By understanding your customers’ preferences, wants, needs and opinions, you’ll be able to inject convenience across all areas of your business, from the workings of your products, to customization, to UX and much more.
Here are a few key ways to create customer convenience through market research:
- Use a reliable online survey platform to complete the following steps.
- Begin by segmenting your customers via market segmentation using an online survey platform.
- You can create as many segments and subsegments as necessary for your campaigns.
- Create customer personas for granular representations of your actual customers.
- Survey your customers on customer satisfaction to discover gaps in your service, communications and overall CX.
- They will provide opportunities to improve your offerings and forge convenience.
- Create surveys with themes from the prior section on the common ways to produce customer convenience.
- To learn how difficult it is for your customers to interact with your company with the Customer Effort Score or CES survey.
- This shows the degree of difficulty a customer has experienced to try to get an issue resolved. It also refers to the ease (or difficulty) a customer had with a certain touchpoint with a company.
- Create campaigns to improve the gaps and points of friction you discovered from doing survey research in Step 3.
- You may want to conduct causal research and experimental research to determine if your changes correspond with customer happiness and truly hammer out convenience.
- Probe further by creating effective surveys on the campaigns you’ve created in Step 4.
- Here, you should assess the effects of the changes you’ve made and whether they’ve been able to foster customer convenience.
- Iterate what customers find convenient and remove all areas of difficulty that you discover from your survey studies.
- You can create follow-up surveys to continue optimizing your customer convenience.
Keeping Your Customers Comfortable at all Times
The way to stay ahead of the competition is to keep customers returning to you as opposed to patronizing your competitors. In order to stimulate customer loyalty and this kind of retention, you’ll need to produce customer convenience whenever possible.
Market research provides an avenue for creating customer convenience, as it involves studying your customers to understand them at a deep level. Given that convenience can exist in many forms, market research allows you to understand which are preferred by your customers, as well as what they find inconvenient in their customer experience.
In this way, customer convenience serves as the antidote to customer attrition, allowing you to keep more customers happy and most importantly, retain more customers. To do so, you’ll need to use a strong market research platform.
Such a platform should run on random device engagement (RDE) sampling, allowing you to reach customers in their natural digital environments, instead of pre-recruiting them. This removes social pressures and will cut back on biases.
You should also use a mobile-first platform, as mobile dominates the digital space and no one wants to take part in a difficult mobile session.
The platform you opt for should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, offer a broad range of survey and question types and disqualify low-quality data.
It should also allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature.
This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of just deploying them across a network.
With an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to extract quality customer data and forge customer convenience at every turn.
Diving Into the UX Survey to Improve User Research and UX
Diving Into the UX Survey to Improve User Research and UX
You’ll need to use a UX survey when conducting user research and all things relating to the use and functionality of your offerings. Whether you’re working towards improving the user experience (UX) of a product or a page on your website, the need to offer a superb UX is critical.
88% of users won’t return to a website after a bad user experience. Needless to say, you’ll be losing most of your website traffic and all of its implications, such as a loss of brand engagement and conversions, when your UX is less than stellar, much less when it is below par.
On the contrary, providing a good UX has substantial benefits. For every $1 you invest in UX leads to a return of $100. That is equivalent to an ROI of 9,900%.
Due to the weight UX carries and developments across various user-facing interfaces, you must always strive to improve your UX.
This article explains how to do just that, as it covers the UX survey, its importance, when to use it, how to create one and more.
Understanding the UX Survey
A UX survey is a survey designed to collect customer feedback to assess user behavior as it relates to your products, services, digital experiences and other user experiences.
The purpose of this survey is to grant you insight into how your consumers are experiencing using your offerings. This is critical given that it gives you direct access to the effectiveness, ease, difficulty and other associations your users have with your various properties.
A user experience survey can extract both quantitative and qualitative market research about a user’s interactions with a website, a digital product and all others. The data from this survey can be used to support and complement other Martech and SaaS integrations, such as website analytics and UX metrics.
As such, you can use it alongside methods such as A/B testing, heatmaps, usability testing, and more.
The feedback you receive from this kind of survey shows you exactly what customers are experiencing, what works in your UX, what needs improvement and what should be completely scrapped. This way, you’ll know directly from your users what changes you should prioritize.
There are various instances in the customer buying journey where you should study user behavior. This survey is the ideal method to use as part of your study, as it gives you timely insights into your UX.
The Importance of the UX Survey
The UX survey is important for several reasons for designers, end-users and ultimately, your business. This kind of survey is the ideal tool for using data for decision-making for various UX-related campaigns.
It gives firsthand insight into the usability of your various offerings from your consumers themselves. While it is important to give your experiences a test by your team and its designated participants, it is the experiences and opinions of your users that ultimately matter.
The UX survey is a crucial tool for the methodical study of target users, also known as user research. It provides access to your users’ needs and pain points. This way, your team becomes aware of how to improve various offerings, including what to keep as it is.
As such, this survey aids product designers, web developers, UX designers and other creatives with insights on how to establish the most sought-after designs, the kind that improves the user experience on many fronts.
User researchers can use the UX survey to expose problems they didn’t know existed in their UX and discover design solutions. In this way, this survey helps uncover various design opportunities designers can assuredly take, rather than basing their decisions on intuition alone.
Aside from aiding the design process, businesses can use the knowledge they derive from this survey to innovate product features, updates and even create new products.
The UX intelligence that business owners get from this survey allows them to make informed decisions and avoid running into past bugs and glitches.
The UX survey doesn’t simply allow businesses to unearth what their users want, need and are frustrated with. Instead, it provides these insights by first allowing you to discover who your customers are since this is a kind of consumer survey.
As such, you can use it to ask questions that contextualize their usage of your products and experiences by asking them about their customer buying behavior, lifestyle, needs and much more.
In short, the UX survey provides a window into how customers interact and experience your products, services and digital properties. It allows you to access all of their thoughts regarding your UX so you can make informed and agile improvements.
When to Use a UX Survey
There are various times in the customer journey when you should apply this survey. These include both post-sales and pre-sales periods and activities. It is evident why you should probe into your UX after your customers buy from you.
As for pre-sales interactions, these are also key instances to study your users, as they show what your potential customers in your target market need and feel in regards to their UX with your company. In this way, their UX before making a purchase is key for building brand awareness and brand equity.
It is also significant to building their brand trust— if they buy from you after their experiences. First impressions are essential, so their UX with your business can also be the deciding factor in becoming a customer or bouncing/ patronizing your competitors.
Here are the several key times to implement a UX survey:
- During their first visit(s) to your website, app, or other digital property
- Pre-sales
- After your users download one of your assets
- Pre-sales
- This is especially useful for B2B consumers.
- After your users interact with a UI element or experience
- Pre or post-sales
- This can involve quizzes, games, UI marketing collateral and more.
- After your users signed up for a subscription
- Pre (if free) or post-sales (if paid for)
- This can be a free or paid subscription to content.
- After users try your product via an in-home use test
- Pre-sales
- This involves the users trying out your products, who are usually recruited for market research purposes.
- For customer development
- Pre-sales
- This is a framework used to discover whether a product satisfies the need(s) of a target market, part of the lean startup concept to bring a product to market more efficiently.
- A week or more after customers have purchased a product or digital asset.
- Post-sales
- This is especially necessary if you collected the customers’ email addresses.
- During the present usage of a service, product, or app
- Post-sales
- Example: UX with an app, a subscription, a product, a feature, etc.
How to Create a UX Survey
Creating an insights-rich UX survey involves more than just coming up with a few questions. Instead, there is a process of best practices you should heed to reap the best results from your survey.
These will ensure your respondents stay engaged in the survey and you extract relevant UX-related data.
The following explains the key steps to take when creating a UX survey:
- Begin by focusing on a UX problem you may need to solve.
- If you don't know what the problem is yet, come up with preliminary questions to identify your users' pain points to find any UX issues they’ve experienced.
- Begin with close-ended multiple-choice questions before probing further with follow-up questions.
- For example: Have you used the [offering]?
- If yes, follow up by using advanced skip logic to ask: How easy was it for you to use [offering] on a scale of 1 (very difficult) to 5 (very easy)?
- Use the following more specific types of survey questions in your UX survey:
- Task-driven feedback questions open-ended questions. Example: Tell me about your experience using your current fitness app.
- Expectations and impressions open-ended questions. Example: What is your favorite feature?
- Follow-up questions Example: How would you rate your experience of the app?”
- Keep your survey quick to complete and focused on one area of UX.
- Too many will confuse, bore or irritate the respondents.
- It is also best to hone in on one experience as a means of dividing and conquering and providing full attention to one issue.
- Analyze your results by sharing your findings with your team.
- Improving UX is a team effort.
- Use a survey platform that makes it easy to partake in data democratization.
Giving Your Target Market the Best User Experience
Closing off, it is important to not only understand your customers, but also their particular user experience. This gives you massive insights into design, product innovation, content marketing strategy.
As such, you should conduct a UX survey, but only on a potent market research platform. You wouldn’t want to waste your time and efforts on a less-than-stellar platform.
You’ll need a strong online survey platform, the kind that runs on random device engagement (RDE) sampling, which enables you to reach consumers in their natural digital environments, instead of pre-recruiting them. This removes social pressures and will cut back on biases.
You should also use a mobile-first platform since mobile dominates the digital space and so many of your respondents will find your survey while using their mobile devices.
The platform you opt for should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, offer a broad range of survey and question types and disqualify low-quality data.
Most importantly, it should allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. This is especially important in the case of UX surveys, as you’ll need to send your survey to specific users based on what product or service they interacted with.
When you use an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to perform quality user research and reach millions with your UX survey.
Using Customer Service Survey Questions to Complement Your Survey
Using Customer Service Survey Questions to Complement Your Survey
All brands should carefully construct their customer service survey questions, as the questions make up the core of any survey. Thus, the effectiveness of this survey largely depends on the questions you use.
Brands use the customer service survey to understand and improve all instances that involve their customers receiving some form of customer service. Customer service should not be a secondary concern for any organization, as the success of a business largely depends on providing good customer service.
As a matter of fact, 58% of American customers will switch companies because of poor customer service. This would be especially devastating for businesses who work towards strengthening other key aspects of their company, such as the product or UX, proving that you shouldn’t cast aside customer service.
In contrast, 89% of customers are more likely to buy from the same company again after a positive customer service experience. It’s evident that maintaining good customer service has tangible benefits.
This article observes customer service survey questions, presenting key examples of each type so that you can correctly craft them in your survey with ease.
Common Types of Customer Service Survey Questions
You can survey your customers about any touchpoint or experience relating to customer service in this survey type. At times, you’ll notice that these involve other key aspects customers face in their customer buying journey.
You should expect to deal with other matters as customers usually receive customer service in relation to some issue when they’re not using it to ask general questions.
There are several key points in the customer journey that are most apt for sending the customer service survey to your customers, whether they are loyal buyers or casual browsers. As such, you should form your survey questions around these instances.
The following sections provide examples of substantial customer service survey questions to use in your customer survey.
Customer Service Survey Questions to Use Before They Go to a Store
Sometimes customers will be in talks with customer service representatives before physically visiting a store or other establishment. You should survey them after they received this customer service that led them to take a trip to your store.
- On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with the customer service you received?
- Question type: Scaled from extremely dissatisfied to extremely satisfied
- Did the representative help you find the store?
- Question type: Likert scale from Not at all to I wouldn’t have found it without the representative’s help.
- Did the representative help you get to the store?
- Question type: Likert scale from Not at all to the representative gave me sufficient assistance in getting to the store.
- Did the representative answer all of your questions about the store?
- Question type: Matrix question from No to the representative answered all of my questions.
- Which question or concern did you feel the representative didn’t fully answer?
- Question type: Open-ended question
- A follow-up question to the previous
- How else could we have assisted you in getting to the store?
- Question type: Open-ended question
Customer Service Survey Questions to Use As Customers Are Being Helped
There will be times in which it is best to survey customers as soon as they receive their customer service. Sometimes, this may be in the midst of the session (towards its end). This is important as their customer service experience will be fresh on their minds. In order to do so, preface the customer service session by mentioning the survey.
You should also tell the customers the importance of completing it ASAP. In this case, it may be useful to offer survey incentives.
- On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with the customer service you received?
- Question type: Scaled from extremely dissatisfied to extremely satisfied.
- Did you receive all the information you needed?
- Question type: Yes or no
- What else did you need more information on that you didn’t receive?
- Question type: Open-ended question
- A follow-up question to the previous
- How comfortable were you speaking with the customer service representative?
- Question type: Likert scale of Extremely comfortable to extremely uncomfortable
- Rate the following statement: the customer service representative spoke with you in a polite manner.
- Question type: Matrix scale of Extremely agree to extremely disagree
- Was there anything you didn't like about your customer service experience?
- Question type: Likert scale of No, I was satisfied with everything to I didn’t like any aspect of the service
- Was the customer service representative able to resolve your issue for you?
- Question type: Yes or no
- If no, follow up with: Do you still have this issue? Or: what else can we do for you to help resolve your issue?
- What would you change about your recent customer service experience?
- Question type: Open-ended question
- Do not use this question if the answer to the previous question was NO, I was satisfied with everything
Customer Service Survey Questions to Use After a Purchase
Whether your customers make an in-store or online purchase, this is an appropriate time to survey them on customer service. After all, many customers rely on customer service before finally buying. This may have been months, weeks or even seconds leading up to customers making a purchase.
- Did you receive any help today?
- Used best in: in-store and other brick-and-mortar settings
- Question type: Yes or no
- How did you receive help?
- Used best in: in-store and other brick-and-mortar settings
- Question type: Multiple-choice and multiple-selection
- Who helped you today?
- Used best in: in-store and other brick-and-mortar settings
- Question type: Multiple-choice
- The customer service representative did a fantastic job helping me find what I needed.
- Used best in: in-store and other brick-and-mortar settings
- Question type: Likert scale from Extremely disagree to extremely agree
- Did you receive any help in making your purchase today?
- Used best in: digital purchases
- Question type: Yes or no
- How did you receive customer service leading up to this purchase?
- A follow-up question to the previous
- Used best in: digital purchases
- Question type: Multiple-choice and multiple-selection
- If they select multiple answers, follow up with questions about their preferred method of receiving customer service and why.
- How would you rate the customer service you’ve received on a scale of 1-10?
- Used best in: in-store, brick-and-mortar settings and after digital purchases
- Question type: Scaled question
- How much did the customer service you received help you in making your purchase?
- Used best in: digital purchases
- Question type: Likert scale of not at all to I wouldn’t have made the purchase without it
Customer Service Survey Questions to Use When Customers Miss a Scheduled Session
There will be times when you encounter customers who have scheduled a customer service or support session and missed it, either by opting out officially or by simply not showing up.
Showing up can refer to in-person services, as well as digital and phone services. In these cases, you should use customer service questions to get to the bottom of the situation and prevent future such cases.
- Did you miss your scheduled customer service session intentionally?
- Question type: Yes or no
- If yes, what was the main reason behind your absence?
- Question type: Multiple-choice
- A follow-up question to the previous
- Use answers specific to the nature of the appointment, along with general ones, such as:
- My issue was resolved.
- Someone else helped me.
- I do not wish to receive customer service from you.
- I figured out how to resolve this issue without getting help from you.
- I’ve gotten help in the past and used that knowledge to fix my issue.
- Would you like to schedule another [name of your customer service session]?
- Question type: Yes or no
- If no, why not?
- A follow-up question to the previous
- Question type: Multiple-choice with an open-ended answer option
- Use answers specific to the nature of the appointment, along with general ones, such as:
- My issue was resolved.
- Someone else helped me.
- I figured out how to resolve this issue without getting help from you.
- I don’t have the time.
- I do not wish to receive customer service from you due to a poor experience in the past.
- Follow up by asking about the nature of this experience with an open-ended question.
- I try to avoid unnecessary customer service sessions.
Customer Service Survey Questions to Use After They Made a Complaint
Some customer service sessions involve customers reaching out to a business — but not to get assistance, but to complain. Whether it is in-person, over the phone, or through a Voice of Customer (VoC) program, many customers won’t shy away from airing their grievances.
While this may appear negative and undesirable, this kind of feedback is valuable for avoiding any similar issues with the same or other customers in the future. No business is perfect, whether in its products or customer satisfaction. Complaints help you steer your business in the right direction.
The key is to use the proper questions.
- How well did the customer service representative help you address your issue and how to resolve it?
- Question type: Likert scale from Extremely poorly to extremely well
- What can our customer service representative do to improve your service in the future?
- Question type: Open-ended question
- This can be a standalone question, or used as a follow-up to the previous question, if the customer’s answer is on the lower end of the scale.
- Is there anything you would suggest we do to address, resolve or improve your issue?
- Question type: Open-ended question
- On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with the customer service you received?
- Question type: Scaled from extremely dissatisfied to extremely satisfied.
- Do you have any other comments or suggestions about the customer service you received today?
- Question type: Open-ended question
Excelling at All Customer Service Endeavors
Excelling at customer service involves surveying your customers at appropriate times, with appropriate questions on hand. The above questions provide examples of how to survey customers during various instances in the customer service process.
However, aside from using the correct questions, you’ll also need to use a strong online survey platform to carry out all your survey research.
First, you’ll need a platform that offers advanced skip logic in your questionnaire. This feature routes respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their answers to a preliminary or previous question. Given the nature of the questions in this article, and survey questions in general, you’ll need to have this functionality.
Additionally, such a platform should be mobile-first, since mobile dominates the digital space and many of your qualified respondents will be on their mobile phones.
Most importantly, the survey platform should allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature. This is especially important in the case of the customer service survey, as it involves specific customers and their feedback, as opposed to anyone in your target market for a market research study.
When you use an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, coupled with these questions, you’ll be well adept at collecting customer service data and outperform all future customer service endeavors.
Tapping Into Consumer Research Hacks for Your Market Research Campaigns
Tapping Into Consumer Research Hacks for Your Market Research Campaigns
In today’s digital, mobile-first age where brands are jockeying for customers’ patronage and attention, brands need to conduct consumer research to understand them. This way, they can align themselves with their consumers and excel at serving all of their consumers’ needs.
81% of consumers buy based on their trust in a brand and 77% of consumers buy from brands that share the same values as they do. Clearly, there is much to consumers that businesses must stay aware of, with values and brand trust making up just two of these matters.
However, despite the importance of this kind of research, less than 40% of marketers use consumer research to drive business decisions. This is a problem for various evident reasons, the most important one being the lack of key insights on the population of people who purchase from you.
Many brands simply don’t know how to conduct proper consumer research or don’t have the time to learn how.
This article delves into consumer research, its importance and four key hacks on conducting it to reap quality consumer intelligence.
Understanding Consumer Research
Although consumer research largely makes up the bulk of market research, the two are distinct concepts and shouldn't be mistaken for one another.
Whereas market research is the all-encompassing practice of studying customers, consumer research is a part of market research that focuses on customer behavior, specifically customer inclinations, motivations and customer buying behavior. In this kind of research, businesses identify these aspects within their target market as a means of studying the psychology behind their customers.
The results of this kind of research allow businesses and organizations to understand their customers on a more granular level. By doing so, they can then create detailed purchasing behavior profiles which they can use to inform all of their marketing campaigns.
There are a variety of consumer research methods to gather this information, which include the overarching approaches of market research techniques. Businesses can use these methods to gain deeper consumer insights, essentially learning about their customers beyond their demographics, location and other outward traits.
Although there are no set-in-stone rules for conducting consumer research, there are several approaches, or hacks you ought to take to hone in on your studies.
This way, you will be able to create well-targeted campaigns on specific consumer segments.
The Importance of Conducting Consumer Research
It’s important to conduct consumer research for a number of reasons.
Consumer research grants you insight into the minds, behaviors, actions and other aspects of the people most inclined to buy from you: your target market. In turn, you’ll have access to in-depth information about your consumers’ desires, needs, expectations and more.
Most importantly, you’ll have access to insights that reveal the “why” behind these phenomena, meaning, you’ll understand the motivations, tendencies and other thought processes that cause your consumers to think and behave in the way that they do.
As such, consumer research provides granular customer intelligence, the kind that allows you to tap into consumer mindsets.
By obtaining this kind of information, businesses can craft tailored marketing personalization and a host of other marketing strategies, including those that make up the strategic planning process.
Unlike strategies and campaigns built on intuition or secondary market research alone, those conducted via primary consumer research provide quality data for decision making — and not just any data that you can easily extract from online sources, but data that is unique, timely and most relevant to your particular target market.
In turn, businesses will be able to form campaigns that don’t merely win over existing customers, but acquire new ones. When you are able to successfully acquire new customers by understanding them on a deeper level, you’ll be able to lower your customer acquisition cost.
By understanding what customers want and how they think, you’ll establish a customer-centric brand in practice as opposed to in theory alone.
You’ll thereby increase your customer satisfaction and keep your brand relevant. As such, you’ll be poised to retain your customers, which is a stronger long-term strategy in comparison to acquiring new customers. This will allow you to increase your customer retention rate, keeping a steady source of customers and the profits they yield.
All in all, consumer research provides the necessary intelligence to win over customers, build consumer loyalty and retain customers, as well as boost your business overall.
Consumer Research Hacks
As aforementioned, there is no hard and fast rule when it comes to conducting consumer research. No technique or set of techniques is set in stone. As a marketer, business owner or market researcher, it is up to you to settle on the methods of running consumer research.
This can be difficult to execute, as there are so many tools and sources available, from secondary sources such as statistics websites and trade magazines, to primary methods such as using a focus group or types of consumer surveys.
Aside from research sources, there are also different research approaches, market research campaigns and types of research you can conduct to learn about the psychology behind your customers. To wade the seemingly difficult waters of consumer research, we’ve laid out four major hacks for conducting consumer research.
The following explains these hacks:
Hack 1: Decide on the Broader Campaign
While there are going to be times in which you simply need to learn how your target market ticks in terms of its consumer preferences and behaviors. However, most of the time, your curiosities about your consumers will not be for stand-alone affairs.
Instead, you may need to collect some in-depth information on how consumers would react to a certain advertisement. You may want to see how they receive emotional marketing, as personality types within your target market will vary.
As such, you should first find the anchoring campaign behind your consumer research. Perhaps it is for a campaign that is already currently running, such as an ad campaign you’d like to A/B test.
Or perhaps, before you embark on another marketing campaign, you seek to gain consumer insights before running it at all. For example, a campaign with a new theme and you need to discover how your customers feel about it.
Come up with your questions or the subject of the questions, at the very least, to guide you and tether your research to a broader business campaign.
Hack 2: Determine the Length and Duration of Your Study
After you tie your consumer research endeavor to an existing or new campaign or undertaking, determine the length and duration of your study. This involves choosing to run another major type of sub-campaign of market research, as certain studies are organized due to their time dependence.
For example, for longer-term consumer research, you may need to conduct longitudinal studies, which aim to gather data on the same set of respondents over a longer period of time. This can last between months and decades.
For short-term consumer research, you may want to conduct cross-sectional studies, in which researchers gather research on a targeted population at one fixed point in time. This type of survey research method is known as being a snapshot of a studied population.
Perhaps you’re interested in studying your consumers’ past habits and experiences. For such a study, you would need to form a retrospective study. Such a study is useful for observing the changes your consumers have undergone, along with picking up on patterns.
Hack 3: Conducting Market Segmentation
The makeup of a target market can be vast, no matter how niche your company and product(s) are. From different age groups, to behavioral aspects, your target market is not composed of a single entity. Rather, it is made up of smaller groups, known as market segments.
It is crucial to conduct market segmentation when executing your consumer research project. This way, you’ll be able to identify the various market segments making up your target market and target them accordingly. Additionally, you ought to segment your target market even further by organizing your segments into customer personas.
These are fictional characters that represent real people in your market segments, except they contain traits that are far more specific than that of a market segment. Personas usually include hobbies and lifestyle aspects. You can then label your different customers by their relation and fit with your personas. Personas allow you to make your messaging even more targeted and satisfy various personalities.
Hack 4: Use a Mixed Style and Multi-Pronged Research Approach
A multi-pronged approach when it comes to conducting and analyzing your consumer research involves using a strong online market research platform. Such a platform should allow you to conduct research via a number of survey types and question formats.
The platform you use should also offer a variety of options for filtering data that you collected, so that it is easy to view and parse. As such, a mixed style involves running multiple kinds of surveys to multiple audiences and relying on numerous kinds of data visualizations.
Variety is important, as different team members aren’t all going to favor the same method of collecting or viewing data. As such, a market research platform that offers a multi-pronged approach to collecting, viewing, exporting and analyzing the data fosters a culture of data democratization, allowing all members of your team to easily take part in consumer research and analysis.
Using Survey Research to Tap Into Consumer Research Hacks
It can be difficult to conduct the proper consumer research with so many sources of information at your disposal. Keep in mind that many of these sources can have dubious or outdated information, rendering your research efforts worse off than they would have been had you never used them.
This is not just a caveat for conducting secondary research via online and offline sources, as certain market research techniques, such as using syndicated research can also be faulty. Although syndicated research can provide you with fresh and original research, it is at the helm of the market research firm conducting the study. Therefore, the firm is in control of how the consumer research study is set up, from its duration to the types of survey questions used.
Instead, you should conduct your own consumer research by using an online survey platform that facilitates the process of creating a DIY survey. Given that online surveys are one of the fastest, affordable and most reliable methods of conducting research, you’d be remiss not to use them for conducting consumer research.
A strong online survey platform grants you quick access to your desired target market sample, extracts data quickly and disqualifies low-quality data.
Delivering the Best for Your Target Market
To deliver the best products, services and CX for your consumers, you need to understand them at a deep level. As such, their age, gender and location alone are superficial aspects in comparison to their behaviors, opinions, needs, sentiments, aversions and more.
In order to tap into all of these consumer aspects, you’ll need to conduct survey campaigns through a potent online survey platform. Such a platform should run on random device engagement (RDE) sampling, which enables you to reach consumers in their natural digital environments, instead of pre-recruiting them. This removes social pressures and will cut back on biases.
You should also use a mobile-first platform, since mobile dominates the digital space.
The platform you select should also offer artificial intelligence and machine learning to remove low-quality data, offer a broad range of survey and question types and disqualify unattentive respondents.
Most importantly, it should allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature.
This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of just deploying them across a network.
When you use an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to perform quality consumer research.
Diving Into the Customer Service Survey to Meet All Customer Service Demands
Diving Into the Customer Service Survey to Meet All Customer Service Demands
All businesses must conduct a customer service survey from time to time to ensure their consumers are satisfied with their service and all of its associations.
This is because few other things contribute to the success of your business as much as your customer service.
In fact, 90% of Americans use customer service as a factor to decide whether or not to do business with a company. As such, for the vast majority of American consumers, customer service is a make-or-break aspect that can mean patronizing your company or going to your competitor.
Customers have high expectations when it comes to customer service, as they expect to receive customer service from any channel and device. However, 60% of customers don’t see customer service as becoming easier, as 86% of customers have had to contact customer service multiple times for the same reason.
This signifies that brands don’t take care of customer needs, even when they are told upfront through a Voice of Customer (VoC) program.
This article delves into the customer service survey, its importance, when to use it, how to create one and more.
Understanding the Customer Service Survey
As its name suggests, the customer service survey is a kind of consumer survey that deals with the specific matters, concerns, interests, considerations and other feedback that customers have in regards to the customer service of your organization.
Dealing specifically with the customer service aspect of their customer buying journey, this survey provides your customers with an avenue to express their opinions on all things relating to your customer service.
Customer service refers to the support you offer your customers both before and after they buy and use your products or services. Providing customer service ensures that your customers have an easy and enjoyable customer experience with you.
This is of utmost importance because CX is a combination of all the opinions and experiences customers have and associate with your brand. It can mean the difference between them casting aspersions on your brand, thus going to competitors, or enjoying it, raising their consumer loyalty and Customer Lifetime Value.
To improve your customer service and your overall customer experience, you should use the customer experience survey, as it provides various means for understanding your customer service.
As such, the following lists all the functions and abilities that this kind of customer survey provides for your business:
- To rate your customers’ satisfaction with your customer service
- To explain their grievances
- To file complaints
- To express what they liked
- To give suggestions for improvement and more
- To give insight into their consumer preferences as they relate to your service
- To relay their chosen mode of providing feedback
- To discover gaps in the service
- To help customers achieve a certain goal
- To understand your customers’ own questions about your service
The Importance of Customer Service Survey
The customer service survey is important for a variety of reasons, all of which contribute to the success of your business, whether it is with a particular customer segment, for a certain campaign or otherwise.
Firstly, offering good customer service is an important factor for retaining customers and customer retention is more cost-effective than customer retention. This is because it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to keep an existing one.
Additionally, the success rate of selling to current customers is 60-70%, while only 5-10% when selling to new customers. When you deliver consistently good customer service, you’ll be able to build consumer loyalty and retain customers. The longer you keep your customers, the longer you’ll benefit from customer retention.
Moreover, in today’s competitive marketplace, customer service involves far more than merely a telephone support agent. Customers get support via various channels, such as email, chat, text message, social media, in-person and more.
It is imperative that brands adapt to these customer service methods. In doing so, they’ll need to understand exactly what bothers and satisfies their customers as they receive this service in an omnichannel setting.
This kind of survey is also important to use in self-service scenarios, as many companies provide self-service support for their customers. This method allows customers to access customer support at any time convenient to them, rather than only during business hours.
The customer service survey is also useful, as it provides flexibility. It is apt to send this survey before, during and after a customer receives some sort of customer service. Doing so will grant you complete insight into what customers are experiencing and how they perceive all the customer service your employees provide.
While you may consider your employees to be well-trained and adept at providing customer service, your customers may think otherwise, at least at certain points. Thus, the customer service survey provides you with a clear view of customers’ experience with your customer service when you aren’t there to see or hear it — which is impossible to do all the time, even if your company is small.
Lastly, the customer service survey is a critical tool for improving your brand image and reputation. As such, it can help you augment your brand equity, which is the value your business derives from being recognizable. Most importantly, by surveying customers on their customer service, you’re showing them you care and are open to making adjustments to best serve them.
Utilamely, the customer service survey allows you to carry out these improvements, enabling you to increase your brand trust. This is a crucial concept to maintain for your brand, as high levels of trust spur customer retention and interest in your brand, thereby fostering customer acquisition as well.
When you lure new customers with minimal effort, you’ll also be lowering your customer acquisition cost.
When to Use a Customer Service Survey
As mentioned above, you can deploy a customer service survey at various times, not just after customers received customer service.
In fact, when you distribute surveys before your customers receive any customer support, you’ll know their expectations beforehand, arming you with the knowledge of how to serve them during any support session.
The following provides examples of when you should use the customer service survey:
- After your customers bought from you, whether it is in-store or digitally.
- In this example, you inquire into whether or not they asked or received any help from your employees.
- This will let you know whether your employees asked customers if they need help or if they hadn’t, what stopped the customers from asking for help themselves.
- Before your customers head into your store.
- Whether they chat with your company on the phone or via a chat, make sure to send them a survey prior to their arrival at your store.
- Simply ask them first and then send them the link to your survey.
- This also applies if they received customer service before continuing their online customer journey.
- As your customers are speaking with you.
- You can preface your customer service session by mentioning the survey and asking for their consent.
- You can also mention survey incentives if you offer them to raise your survey completion rates.
- When you scheduled a support session, but customers missed it or opted out.
- Send a survey to understand why they missed the scheduled customer service session.
- If the customers opted out beforehand, send a survey to find out why and what would have made them keep their appointment.
- After a customer complains and before they receive customer service to help resolve their issue.
- This involves times of dissatisfaction, whether it’s with a product, service or experience.
- Send the survey after the customers complain, but before you serve them with follow-up service.
- This way, you’ll know the issue and how to go about providing the best customer service to resolve it.
How to Create a Customer Service Survey
There are many approaches you can take with your customer service survey, as laid out above. If you’re still not sure how to go about creating one or need a few pointers, the following will help you.
The following steps guide you on how to create a customer service survey. Check out how to create customer service survey questions.
- Define the goal of your survey.
- Refer to the above section to help you decide what to accomplish with your customer service survey.
- Decide on the correct online survey platform.
- There are a host of online survey tools but they don’t all offer the same capabilities and speed to insights as does Pollfish.
- In the screener section of the survey, select the demographics, location and other traits with which you're going to qualify who gets to take the survey.
- Use screening questions to select respondents even more granularly, as only those who answer in the way you choose will take the survey.
- Come up with a few key preliminary questions for the questionnaire portion and guide the direction of your survey.
- Choose the survey type you need for your campaign.
- In the questionnaire section, add in your preliminary questions. Choose from a multitude of types of survey questions.
- Use advanced skip logic to route respondents to relevant follow-up questions based on their answers.
- With skip logic, you can ask a quantitative question using multiple choice and follow-up with a qualitative, open-ended question.
- Decide who to send your survey to. This may at times include a broad study with all customers on a mailing list or specific customers who will receive or already experienced a customer service interaction.
- If you’re deploying your survey to a mass network via your online survey platform, decide whether to use your brand name logo and other indicators.
- Always make the survey unique to your brand if you send it to specific people instead of mass-sending it as in Step A.
- Write an effective email invitation if you’re sending your survey to specific customers via email.
- Mention the importance of the survey and that you value your customers’ time.
- You can include incentives.
- Include a call to action (CTA) to an online survey, such as one that exists on a landing page, or post-checkout.
- Be sure it stands out to your respondents.
- Thank your customers for taking your survey with follow-up emails and a “Thank You” on the final page of your online survey.
- Analyze your survey and use it to make changes and key customer service decisions.
Satisfying All Your Customers
Brands should always work towards delighting their customers with amazing customer service. Your customer service is a reflection of how your company treats its customers. No matter the values associated with your brand, if you provide poor customer service, customers will always go elsewhere.
To create an insightful customer service survey study, opt for the proper online survey platform.
Such a platform should run on random device engagement (RDE) sampling, enabling you to reach customers in their natural digital environments, instead of being pre-recruited. This removes social pressures and will cut back on biases.
You should also use a mobile-first platform since mobile dominates the digital space.
Most importantly, the survey platform should allow you to survey anyone. As such, you’ll need a platform with a reach to millions of consumers, along with one that offers the Distribution Link feature.
This feature will allow you to send your survey to specific customers, instead of just deploying them across a network.
When you use an online survey platform with all of these capabilities, you’ll be able to collect key customer service data and outperform on future customer service endeavors.