Best Practices for CX Touchpoint Surveys

Your customers deserve the best. Before you launch a CX project, ask yourself:

• What is the goal of asking these questions?
• How do the structure, questions, and design help me accomplish the goal?
• How will we use the results?

If you don’t have answers — good answers! — to all of these questions, get some advice before you go live.

What’s the goal?

At each touchpoint in the customer journey, choose the most meaningful key metric(s) to measure.

• Measuring a moment? A transactional survey checks in on the customer’s experience at a specific point in time.
  • If you’d like to know how pleased or displeased a customer is with a specific interaction, ask about satisfaction. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is a single question that gets right to the point. Satisfaction is one of the most straightforward measures you can use, and it’s easy for both you and your customers to understand.
    
    For example:
    If your customer has just received an order, ask how satisfied they are with the product they have in hand.
  • If you’d like to understand how easy or difficult a particular interaction is, ask about effort. Customer Effort Score (CES) asks customers to identify how easy you’ve made it for them to achieve their goals. Note here that the onus is on you as an organization to facilitate this process. Your customers shouldn’t have to struggle to get things done. Instead, you should be rolling out the red carpet to help them achieve their goals.
    
    For example:
    How easy was your sign-up process? A CES question can help you understand if your customers are facing too many hurdles in this critical first step.
    
• Checking in? A relationship type survey collects customer feedback based more on experience over time than a specific interaction.
  • If you’d like to understand a customer’s broader experience with your brand, ask a Net Promoter Score question. NPS measures customer loyalty, a deeper metric than simple satisfaction or effort. NPS asks customers how likely they are to recommend your company to others, prompting a higher standard for reflection than personal satisfaction alone. These studies may be launched at periodic intervals, such as bi-annual or annual check-ins.

How can the survey content and design impact results?

Once you’ve identified the key metric(s) to include, you really only have room for a few more questions. A shorter survey will result in higher response rates, so pick your questions wisely.

For each touchpoint or stage, consider the variables most likely to impact the customer’s experience. These variables are your Key Drivers.

Key Drivers vary throughout the customer journey, but all of them have the potential to impact CX metrics, churn, and revenue. Understanding the important variables at every point in the customer journey is an important step in your CX program.

How can we use results?

On your Dashboard, CX metrics can be reviewed quickly to see trends over time and to review and compare performance between Tags associated with critical touchpoints. Still, this is only part of the picture. CX metrics can deliver the answer to “What do they think of us?” but they don’t directly answer the follow-up question: “Why do they feel this way about us?”

Adding Key Drivers allows you to drill down on why your customers chose a certain NPS, CSAT, or CES rating. Whether you’re viewing a Key Driver Analysis Report for a specific project or reviewing Key Drivers for multiple Touchpoints together, these results give you a clear view of where and how you need to take action for the greatest potential improvement.

Plenty of companies review customer feedback, but most often they focus too much on performance alone. In fact, analyzing both performance and correlation to the target metric gives much more powerful, actionable insights, and often saves both time and resources.