Customer loyalty is one of the most important things you can develop for your brand. There are a variety of ways to increase customer loyalty, and a phone survey is a potential option if you’re interested in reaching out to customers. However, if you’re interested in using phone surveys, you need to do it properly. Here’s how you can use a phone survey to increase customer loyalty.
1. Decide on Your Goals
What are you hoping to get through your phone survey? There are many goals that you might have through your survey. For example, you might be looking to improve your profit margins in general, you might want to improve customer retention, or you might be hoping for more word-of-mouth marketing. These are all goals that can have significant overlap, but they’re unique and individual goals. Knowing your goals is a crucial part of developing your survey outreach.
2. Create a Survey to Meet Those Goals
Next, utilize your goals to create the survey satisfaction questions. Most experts recommend largely closed-ended questions, which are questions that have answers someone could choose from a list. For example, a closed-ended question may be, “On a scale from one to ten, how likely are you to buy from a local store over a national chain?” This is a question that has a prepared list of acceptable answers. You can end the survey with one or two open-ended questions, such as, “What’s the biggest problem you’ve experienced with our business in the last month?”
3. Test in Small Groups First
Before you roll your survey out to the entirety of your customer base, you should test your survey to make sure you’re getting the responses you want. Test your survey with just a handful of customers, scaling your initial focus group depending on the number of customers you have. In this test rollout, you may want to add a question at the end asking how you could improve the survey or if there was any confusion regarding the survey. Additionally, make sure you ask the same of the employees who are doing the survey on the phone.
4. Follow Up With Customers
Once you’re done with your survey, try to follow up with customers in the next 3-6 months. A good option is to provide something to entice people to do the first survey and the follow-up survey. It’s more difficult to get follow-up respondents, so you may want to increase the value of the second reward. For example, you may want to enter all respondents in the first survey into a gift card drawing, then send all respondents in the second survey a guaranteed gift card for a lower value.
Conclusion
A phone survey can help increase your customer loyalty, but only if you execute it properly. If you don’t, you run the risk of spending time and money to get results that are effectively useless. That means you’re wasting money and time. Keep to these tips and tricks for the best results in your phone survey, and make sure you have the best phone service to underly your survey process.