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    Five Ways to Improve Survey Engagement and Customer Insights

    A new urgency is uniting people in marketing, management and customer-facing roles: the need to capture insights from people to drive real-time, data-driven decisions. To stay competitive, enterprises face the challenge of collecting that insight, and are turning to new ways to help engage and encourage users to provide them with true, fast feedback.

    eHarmony is one company that uses accurate and fast customer data by tweaking its unique relationship questionnaire, and even mobile access capabilities, based upon users’ quickly changing habits. “Better, cheaper, faster feedback means better business results,” says Ryan Smith, CEO of Qualtrics, a software organization that helps businesses collect ideas and feedback from customers and employees to make better business decisions.

    With this in mind, organizations are now analyzing data to learn about the tendencies of their customers and to quickly act upon the findings – and these researchers now range from IT departments to senior management. While accuracy of data is important, it’s often crucial that any user can access this data, and visualize it using an intuitive interface. Big Data analytics software like Splunk and Tableau now offer data output dashboards and visualizations for users to track data trends and see results in real time.

    Often overlooked, organizations can also use visualizations to collect actionable, true customer data – from any type of customer – and return fast results. “While feedback is nice, results are better,” says Smith. Here are some examples of how businesses are using data visualizations to produce such results.

    Five Ways to Improve Survey Engagement and Customer Insights - slide 1

    Click through for five ways businesses are using data visualizations to produce better results, as identified by Ryan Smith, CEO of Qualtrics.

    Five Ways to Improve Survey Engagement and Customer Insights - slide 2

    Rather than just asking a customer for feedback on their last experience, recreate it. Organizations might offer images of their day-to-day materials that customers recognize, or even images of the product itself in use. Customers will give more honest feedback of how your offering could improve if they can accurately recall their experience with the product or service.

    Five Ways to Improve Survey Engagement and Customer Insights - slide 3

    An experience includes the combination of many moments. When asking users for their full feedback, create a map showing the different people, things and places the user has experienced, or even might experience. This will help people to choose their favorite moments and offerings, and precisely rate them against other options. This can also test the time it takes for users to identify or determine their choice, and allows organizations to prioritize offerings within the customer experience.

    Five Ways to Improve Survey Engagement and Customer Insights - slide 4

    Multiple-choice options don’t always capture users’ full range of ideas or feedback. For example, a respondent might be asked to rate a glass of water as hot, warm, or lukewarm, but temperatures, of course, range far more than this. Similarly, users’ particular sentiment can’t always be grouped into a limited number of categories. Use a sliding scale to help users pinpoint their rating of an idea or thing, and you’ll better understand the true preference and how to shift your offering accordingly.

    Five Ways to Improve Survey Engagement and Customer Insights - slide 5

    In many cases, data can only be collected if the test is completed in full, and if users are not incentivized to complete your test or survey, you likely won’t gather complete data. Gamify your test to create an engaging experience that persuades volunteers to provide complete feedback. Prompt your users to click on different offerings or ideas, or present them with the ability to drag or rearrange options based upon their preference. Users’ involvement in simple puzzles or image games can boost the chance that users will complete your test – and it may entice them to pass it on to their friends. As you increase your organization’s ability to compile data more quickly, your organization can rapidly take action to improve where needed.

    Five Ways to Improve Survey Engagement and Customer Insights - slide 6

    Show customers that you take their feedback seriously. Rather than asking customers to rank your product or services with an arbitrary number, link this score to something users can relate to – like a letter grade. The chances are that your users have been scored on their abilities at one time, so empower them now to evaluate you with a similar score! You’ll learn quickly whether customers are happy, or if you should make a change.

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