Key Objectives

A major national retailer operating in 42 states was having difficulty engaging with its hundreds of thousands of customers to gather useful feedback. With 1,200 locations all handling customer surveys differently, the process for customizing, sending and responding to customer satisfaction surveys was inconsistent and yielded little actionable insight.

To support a company-wide initiative to engage more effectively with customers at the location level, the Marketing team wanted total visibility into customer feedback from all sources, including surveys, online ratings and reviews.

They also needed a survey solution configurable at the local level, and wanted to stream survey results to their locations’ landing pages to boost search rankings and conversions.

They turned to Reputation.com for help.

Challenges

Although the client worked to solicit and act on candid feedback from customers, some shortcomings on the back-end posed serious challenges.

Missing Data:

Not only did they lack internal resources to customize surveys per location, they were having trouble accessing customer data for sending surveys in the first place. Customer emails were collected at the location level, but porting that information into the rudimentary survey tool they were using wasn’t possible. There was no consistent, reliable process for following up, and response rates were low.

No Integration:

Seamless integration between the client’s CRM system and the survey tool was needed to access accurate contact data and ensure reliable delivery of survey requests. Without access to this data or the internal resources to manually customize and send surveys from individual locations, it was impossible to accurately measure customer sentiment or take steps to address outstanding issues.

Solution

The client chose our integrated platform because it would enable them to not only customize and respond to surveys at the location level, but also respond to third-party online reviews, from a single image.

Reputation.com was able to meet all of the customer’s requirements:

• A flexible, true-to-brand survey builder to support scalable customization for each of their 1,200 locations
• A seamless integration between the Reputation.com Surveys platform and the company’s CRM system, enabling locations to integrate customer contact information and send surveys. An API ensures all contact data is accessible to the Survey tool, so surveys are sent consistently — and automatically — via email.
• Intuitive, easy-to-complete survey designs to improve response rates.
• Deep analytics at the location level for an accurate assessment of customer sentiment about individual managers, locations and the organization as a whole.
• A dedicated response team to take up the task of following up on survey responses and online reviews. The company also wanted response templates that are customizable to each location, ensuring follow-up is on-brand and appropriate across locations.
• Survey templates to enable locations to request and stream online reviews and survey responses to their local web pages, to boost star ratings and search rankings.

Results

Higher Response Rates

After implementing Reputation.com, completed surveys increased to 45,300, up from 11,600 with the previous vendor. Additionally, by leveraging Reputation.com’s managed survey response service, the customer was able to respond to survey feedback at the location level.

More Positive Reviews

The number of positive reviews increased by 67%. Website traffic for each location increased, as did overall review volume, elevating average star ratings from 3.2 to 3.8 in one year.

Higher Search Rankings

Importantly, our customer’s locations now outrank competitors. In fact, 79% of its locations rank among the top three Google search results, while just half of its main competitor’s locations rank in the top three. And the average ranking across all locations is 2.7, compared to 7.2 for its main competitor.

Tune Into the Voice of the Customer

Gartner predicts that by 2018, more than 50 percent of organizations will implement significant business model changes in their efforts to improve customer experience.

Reputation.com offers the only complete, self-service, voice-of-the-customer solution that delivers actionable insights to improve the customer experience, while providing a powerful, integrated platform that drives customer acquisition and revenue.

Learn more about Reputation.com’s Survey solution.