Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Satrick Solutions video series. My name is Jonathan Beretta. I'm Vice President, Client Services at Satrick Solutions. And with me today is Christian Mima, Senior Director

Speaker 2: of Customer Insight. Really look forward to today's conversation. Believe it or not, survey response rates are actually something I'm a bit passionate about.

Speaker 1: Great to hear. For those of you that may not be familiar with us, Satrick Solutions is a boutique consultancy. Some of you may be asking what sets us apart from software providers or other industry consultants. Well, we've walked in your shoes and understand the challenges you face. So Christian and I have been with Satrick Solutions for over seven years now. And we've seen many clients come to us struggling to get their customers to respond to their survey requests. After all, let's not forget that the purpose of any type of relationship or transactional surveys is to get as much candidate advice and feedback from your customers as possible. But how do you create the experiences which will establish advocates from your products and services? You need feedback. And that's where this discussion kind of comes into play. One of the biggest obstacles to collecting actionable data from online surveys is getting people to actually complete the surveys, especially in the environment and circumstances we now find ourselves in. One way to boost response rates is to ensure you're reaching as many people as possible by utilizing more than one distribution method. So let's talk about how do you distribute the surveys in a multitude of ways and use those to help you boost response rates. So as we go to the next slide about how do you maximize response rates, there's a number of audiences that you're gonna reach out to, different personas, if you will. Decision makers who are those individuals that have the most say on whether or not to continue to engage with you. Influencers who may be managers that are influencing decisions of which different organizations to utilize for products and services. And then of course the users of your products or services and how they're finding your product or service making their work more efficient or more productive and getting all of that information in a cohesive way so that when you maybe have your annual or quarterly business reviews with your customers, you can go in and discuss these aspects with them to show the value that you bring to them or the return on investment. So let's jump into this and we'll start with the type of distribution of survey emails. Christian, if you'd like to kind of cover this one first.

Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. Despite all the emerging technology and shifting landscapes, email still is probably the most effective way of getting your survey out there. So some things that I've seen that work really well in the past is good from lines. So are you using your CEO's name or somebody that's recognizable amongst your customers or are you using a generic do not reply? Believe it or not, who you have on that from line does make a difference. And if it's somebody recognizable, your open rates tend to increase. Additionally, let's look at the invitation itself. Is it readable or is it written prose with a lot of paragraphs and a lot of content for your potential response to sort through? Typically short and sweet to the point works best. Then there's also thinking about your actual survey link. Many software platforms allow you to embed the first question or other questions of the survey right into the email. And we found that this has increased our response rates. Not necessarily the amount of completions, but you do get more feedback upfront when you embed the survey question. And Jonathan, maybe I think you're best suited to talk about text messaging or SMS. I mean, you have a client that takes advantage of text message distributions, don't you?

Speaker 1: Yes, one of our clients is a multinational publicly traded organization in manufacturing and production area. Uses it for a voice of the employee program internally because they have many individuals that are out on job sites or places where email may not be readily available. And so we use SMS. For those of you that may not know, SMS is just simply mobile text messaging. And there's really two ways that you can do text messaging. You can basically write up a short brief statement with a URL so that when they receive the text message, they click on the link, open up the survey in their mobile browser. And the other way is called two-way communication. And that's basically where you send them the first question of the survey. They text back the answer and then are texted the next question in the survey. This can work great to allow people to complete it over time. They don't have to complete it all at once. The only downside is the additional cost if you have to pay for text messages in both directions for each question and response that you receive. But it offers a variety of methods for individuals that may not be in an office environment with regular email or things of that nature. Christian, for you, what about websites and pop-ups?

Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. This is something that's a little bit newer in most recent years, but survey software platforms sort of allow the ability to actually put something or a pop-up in your website. So depending on if somebody, if a potential respondent comes to a certain page, that's an opportunity to survey them and it just pops up and they can respond to a question. And it's actually proven quite successful. What I found that makes the feedback a little bit more meaningful is if you have the ability to track where specifically in your website the pop-ups are coming up, because then you can start segment identifying themes. Is there a certain sentiment that comes about when respondents are on a certain page versus somewhere else? So certainly something to consider. And then to the best of your ability, identifying the persona. So the people taking the survey from a pop-up, are you still able to identify the decision makers, users? To your point, Jonathan, that you made identifying these folks at the top of the slide is important. If not, adding in some demographic questions within the pop-up could certainly be useful. Talk to us about the QR code.

Speaker 1: Yeah, the QR codes is an interesting one. QR codes have been around for a long time, have not really been used or utilized as well as they could be. But basically it's a graphic visualization, if you will, of a web link. And you'll see an example of this later in our talk today when we offer up our free ebook. But basically you just point your cell phone's camera to it and it triggers within the cell phone, the URL, and takes them directly to the survey. This is great if you need to put it up in certain areas, maybe there's transactional surveys when certain things are happening at different locations. We've used this for a couple of our clients in various areas, including SaaS companies. Use this in a variety of ways to show adoption at different stages within the thing to gather feedback. It's another great way for people that may not traditionally be looking at email all the time or their inboxes may be so packed with information that they're just not seeing everything coming in. So it's another way to reach out and get additional candid, great feedback from your customers. And then our last one for today is in-application or in-app. Christian, if you'd like to discuss that.

Speaker 2: Yes, the concept is very similar to the website pop-up type invitations that you can deploy, but in-app is really something that SaaS companies can utilize. So as I was alluding to earlier, many survey software platforms have a lot of integration and other features that you could take advantage of. And certainly they can integrate with your particular SaaS product. So you can pop it up when respondents make it to a certain page and you can start surveying them. And because it's integrated, you already have that customer demographic information. You could maybe even identify who the individual is or maybe their location using their IP address, but it's really proven to be a robust way of gathering feedback. One particular application I've seen in this method is when there is a feature update in your platform and you wanna gather specific feedback about that update and how it's impacting your customers. And you could actually program the in-application pop-up to come up when somebody starts utilizing the new feature request or new feature that you just put into your product.

Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a great example, Christian. Another example that I'm thinking of, we have a very large, another publicly traded financial technology organization with just a multitude of products under their umbrella. And it really helps by gathering this information at different stages within those different products and then compiling that data to really get a good idea of a customer journey across all of their product lines. So it's another great way to do that. So, as we've discussed here, as you start thinking about your personas, as you think about the ways to reach out, it's not just the ways that you distribute the information to gather candid feedback, but it's also how do you maximize that? So that leads us into how do we increase response rates on top of everything we've just talked about? So let's start with number one, Christian, highlighting your upcoming B2B relationship survey early, even before the survey launches. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. When I think about highlighting your voice of customer program, I can't help but think of like NPR or any kind of public broadcasting when it's time for them to do their quarterly fundraising. If you're on, you're listening to the radio or watching a program, they're gonna let you know that it's fundraising time. They really put it front and center. And I've seen the most successful voice of customer programs utilize this method. So they're setting it as a collagen item that, hey, throwing it at the end, like, hey, our relationship survey is coming up. We'd love it if you took five minutes to complete our survey and let us know if there's anything else we can help with. They're also, I've seen clients even put it on their email signatures for the month that their survey window is open. So it's a really an effective method of boosting your survey response rates. And Jonathan, maybe you could take us to offering anonymity to your survey respondents.

Speaker 1: Yeah, so making things anonymous is usually thought of for voice of the employee types engagements, getting their input back so that they're not worried about manager retaliation or anything of that nature. But one of the other aspects that you can do with your customers, especially in situations where the customer contacts may have day-to-day interactions with your key frontline workers, they may be a little wary of providing feedback, knowing that the next day they're gonna be on the phone with that same person. So giving them the option of, would you like your feedback shared with your team member helps still get that candidate advice. And then there's not worried about that day-to-day relationships between your person and the customer stakeholders. And we found that that helps boost response rates, but also give a much more truthful, in-depth amount of verbatim feedback from like open-ended questions that you can utilize and help train your staff as well, as opposed to just everything's fine because they don't wanna quote unquote rock the boat. So thinking about survey timing, that's an important one. Christian, would you like to cover that?

Speaker 2: SAS companies, they're going through, they're gonna have feature updates and they're gonna go down for maintenance and maybe there's some kind of migration. So thinking about how you collect feedback around those changes is really important because undoubtedly, even if your changes are for the positive, you're gonna have some kind of impact to your survey results, especially if you're trending it over time. So allowing enough time for your customers to adjust to the changes and then provide much more objective feedback, usually has a very positive impact on your survey program. And Jonathan, I know some of our clients offer incentives. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Speaker 1: Yeah, this is an interesting one and it really varies by industry. I would say we're doing this probably nearly half of our clients over time. And a lot of times people think of incentives as gifts, but in many organizations, people aren't allowed to accept gifts or there's certain dollar values associated with them. And so what we found to be much better, especially in today's environment as well, is to offer donations to charity based on each completed survey response. So this is clearly communicated in all the survey communications. And we try to pick nationally well-known charities. Sometimes our clients, those organizations have connections with certain charities that they use all the time. So we utilize those. Sometimes they offer up to three or four different charity alternatives so that if you complete the survey, your dollars for completing that survey would be donated to a charity of your choice. It really just helps incentivize people, but without just giving a gift, but with helping society in general by doing that for these types of surveys. And we found that that really helps boost response rates and also get more people involved that normally wouldn't. But ideally above the four that you and I have discussed, the most important one is the last one. Let customers know that their voices were heard. I mean, this is simply the most important thing. If you're having a customer relationship type survey, over time, things should get better. That customer experience should get better. Wouldn't you agree, Christian?

Speaker 2: Absolutely. I mean, this is why you survey your customers, right? You want their experience to be better and you wanna create an army of loyal advocates. So let them know their voices are being heard. Take action after the survey, close the loop. One thing that we do with just about all of our clients is after the initial survey that we do with them, the next survey round in our invitation, advanced communication goes out and we let those customers know, hey, as a result of your feedback last time, these are the positive changes that we've made that's gonna have an impact to you. So let them know, and that certainly helps our response rates. And it's something that I think every successful customer program should take advantage of. So I mean, otherwise, why should they take their survey? Why should they take your survey? So let them know that change is gonna result in them completing it.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And not only that, think about who's gonna reach out to the individuals. We talked about personas earlier about decision makers, influencers, and users. Are you going to have the day-to-day stakeholder reach out to a decision maker or are you going to have your senior VP of sales or customer success or customer experience reach out to them? Have a strategy, have a plan and document that entire process so that you can make sure that you're reaching out to them in a timely basis and work each survey wave to improve that and show them that you're listening to them, improving. And you'll find that more customers seeing those changes, seeing those communications that other people have made suggestions and things have changed are more likely to respond to surveys in the future. So when it comes to researching how to increase your survey results, it's really important to recognize that there are obviously many different actions that you can take to encourage your customers participation. And by implementing a few of these best practices, you increase the percentage of customers likely to respond and therefore the statistic validity of the data that you're receiving. Working with an expert partner like Satrick Solutions will help you analyze your survey goals, determine your audiences and look towards a long-term strategy to get as much candid feedback as possible. But in the meantime, for watching this video, we would like to offer you our free ebook on maximizing response rates. It goes much more in depth into what Christian and I have just talked about briefly today during this video. Just put your mobile phone up to that QR code that I mentioned earlier in the presentation and it'll take you directly to where you can download that. We'd love to get on the phone with you, talk to you about maximizing response rates. If you're already have a survey wave, if you're thinking about building a voice of the customer or voice of the employee program, please feel free to reach out to us. We have a very flexible amount of different programs that we can work with you on. Not only that, but we can start a pilot program with you or even offer a free office hour to give you some insight and steps you can take moving forward. So please check us out on Twitter, LinkedIn or our website or feel free to reach out directly to either of us for any questions you may have. Thank you very much for listening to us today and have a great day, everyone. Thanks, Christian. Thank you, Jonathan.