Getting customers to consistently give you their thoughts on what you’re doing right and wrong can be an ongoing struggle, which is why conversational surveys are a huge benefit to your business. Consumers have developed an aversion to long-form written surveys and a blindness to emails asking them to take action. Conversational surveys collect customer feedback via short, unobtrusive conversations commonly conducted using mobile messaging, which helps to overcome that customer barrier. 

Reputation has developed a unique Conversational Surveys solution that launched in Q1 2021. Read on to learn how this new approach can dramatically improve your survey completion rates and response times.

What Are Conversational Surveys?

Conversational surveys take place through existing third-party messaging platforms, such as SMS or Facebook Messenger, or they can be surfaced as a popup on a web browser. Unlike traditional surveys, these conversations are more informal, friendly, and shorter in length.

Through a mix of images, texts, buttons, video, and audio files, these customer experience survey tools deliver a more casual and enjoyable way for consumers to share their feedback quickly. Additionally, these surveys reduce friction from the feedback-gathering process. You can create these chat-based surveys with customer experience survey software to ensure you have the insights you need to boost your customer service offering.

Why You Should Use a Business Messaging Platform for Your Survey

In the past, email was one of the top ways of reaching customers and distributing surveys. Unfortunately, this channel has become saturated. Billions of emails are sent each day, but only a small portion of those sent by businesses are actually opened. That’s where customer experience survey software comes in. 

Fewer consumers check their email regularly outside of business hours. However, more spend time sending and reading text messages, or communicating on social media and messaging platforms. In fact, messaging platforms are now one of the primary means of communication between people and brands.

• Text message open rates are 4X that of email (as high as 98%) 
• 1.3 billion people use Facebook Messenger each month
• 20 billion messages are sent between businesses and people on Messenger monthly
• 51% of people report that messaging apps have replaced other forms of communication

Related: Drive Revenue with Engaging Surveys

How Do Conversational Surveys Work?

Similar to a traditional survey, your company will come up with a set of metrics that it wants to measure from customers, as well as relevant questions to ask. After you’ve determined your metrics and questions, create a new “Conversational Survey” in the Reputation platform and add your questions to the Survey Builder. To maximize completion rates, we recommend limiting the number of conversational survey questions to three.

Depending on the customer’s response to a particular question, our Conversational Surveys will use artificial intelligence (AI) to route questions in a logical direction. For example, if a customer mentions “long wait” in a response, the next questions can reference customer service matters instead of product issues.

Once all questions have been asked and answered, the survey ends by sending the customer a customized thank you message. Optionally, and highly recommended, you can also surface a request for the customer to post their rating and comments to Google as a business review. This is an excellent way to generate more public-facing social proof from your survey initiatives.

The Benefits of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Conversational surveys offer a wide range of benefits for consumers:

• The surveys either use business chat apps that consumers are already using (SMS, Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, etc.) or mimic their user interfaces so that respondents are more comfortable and likelier to engage.
• They’re a softer ask — instead of “Please complete this survey,” which in the customer’s mind could take 10 minutes or more to do, it’s “Hey, can we ask you a few quick questions?”
• Even though human interaction is absent, thanks to conversational AI the chat still feels like a conversation and flows in the right direction to provide the most useful feedback.
• These surveys are more engaging and fun for the consumer, and they can boost the value of your brand among participants.
• Customer satisfaction survey helps to retain your most loyal brand advocates.

Organizations that use conversational surveys benefit as well:

• Conversational surveys enjoy staggeringly higher completion rates than traditional surveys. Survey Sparrow reported that completion rates on chat-like surveys are 40% higher than other types. This results in even more feedback to fuel your CX efforts.
• Most text messages are read within three minutes, so Conversational Surveys also produce faster feedback that allows you to act on hot issues quickly.

Related: 5 Critical Things Your Surveys Must Do

• Easily turn a customer’s feedback into a pre-populated review for your Google My Business (GMB) listing with just a couple more taps. This is a powerful way to build up even more social proof for your brand.
• These types of surveys open new channels of marketing, giving your company additional avenues to introduce products and services to consumers.
• Improved feedback leads to higher quality data to improve the customer experience. You’ll not only have a higher volume of data but also more insights from a wider range of consumers instead of just the highly satisfied and highly dissatisfied customers.

The Advantages of Customer Experience Survey Software

Our Conversational Surveys solution is available to existing Surveys customers at no additional cost. To learn more about this innovative surveying method and start getting prepared now, reach out to your Customer Success Manager for more information. Not a customer yet? Email sales@reputation.com, and one of our team members will be happy to give you a demo!

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