Survey Alerts Transform Survey Projects into Survey Processes
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Oct 20, 2009
Adding
email triggers to a traditional questionnaire starts the transformation from a survey project to a survey process. This is especially important for transactional surveys. To add
survey alerts to an existing survey, you will need to consider the following issues:
- Move from a random sample to an attempted census to maximize exposure to negative feedback. By replacing your random sample with an attempted census of everyone, you will have the opportunity to intervene with more individuals to attempt to improve their satisfaction. The trade-off to balance against this is that customers are now receiving surveys from you more often; this can be worth it, though, given the new opportunity to right previous customer-service wrongs. You are now going to catch more dissatisfied customers than before. Typically, for such transactional surveys, you will want to automate survey invitations, using input from an internal system such as a help-desk to drive invites. Implement touch-management rules so that people do not receive more than one survey of this type every 60 days.
- Adding or expanding the series of reminders. Emailing reminder invitations to potential respondents who haven't yet taken the survey can be an annoying nuisance. In fact, we often argue for the need to respect your potential respondent's time and interrupt them as little as possible. Reminders are an interruption, but in the case of survey alerts, you really want to make sure unhappy customers raise their hands so that you can help them. A series of reminders, each spaced 3 to 5 business days apart, helps achieve this.
- Develop the business rules for customer-service responses. Some organizations simply have survey alerts delivered to a single email address, often that of customer service (for customer surveys) or the internal help desk (for employee surveys). Others use multiple questions for triggers, and set up elaborate business logic to notify the most appropriate staff to issues they can assist customers with.
- Integrate with case management. Most organizations integrate email triggers into their existing case-management systems, so that survey alerts are prioritized and acted on alongside more traditional cases. Integration can be as basic as using the emails as inputs, to more sophisticated systems integration involving web APIs (Application Programming Interfaces).
You can certainly simply slap on a survey alert to an existing project, but we encourage you to plan a more detailed implementation of email triggers, to move from measuring customer satisfaction to intervening to improve it.