The pandemic has impacted every business, in every industry. Companies have had to take stock, weigh up priorities and consider how best to survive. There has also been an increased focus on all things digital to enable and support essential business change. Fortunately Enterprise Reboot, a report by KPMG International and HFS Research, has highlighted that there is a “clear link between digital preparedness and business resilience”.
As the decision to move online, embrace remote working and replace the physical with the virtual has become increasingly embedded, it’s clear that taking a digital-centric approach to business has not only become business-critical but simply a practical solution to the challenges we all now face.
It’s for this reason that there is growing recognition that websites now offer much more than a visual representation of an organisation’s brand, product or service, driving sales and engaging customers. They can provide a very real opportunity to understand how satisfactory the digital experience is for customers and prospects and to ensure that the digital channel is performing effectively.
Yes, I’m talking about deploying highly targeted, unobtrusive intercept surveys on websites to collect rich, real-time feedback which will enable you to accurately profile website visitors, better understand and improve website usability to drive sales and monitor transaction satisfaction. I’m also emphasising the need to analyse exit or cart abandonment data in order to proactively remedy any issues that may contribute to any reduction in overall customer satisfaction and ultimately sales.
However, at a time when teams and resources are under pressure to do more with less, it’s now vital that we as CX professionals are able to gather important insight without relying too heavily on web developers to assist us in the process.
If we can boost response rates by improving the look and feel of a survey, improving the sequence and phraseology of questions ourselves by using an intuitive digital feedback module, we will be able to gain much faster access to information about how customers behave during their digital journeys and make changes to the user experience accordingly.
Which brands are utilising digital feedback most successfully?
The Insight team at Market Research firm UserNeeds has been doing just this on a large scale for clients seeking to better understand the behaviour of hundreds of thousands of daily website visitors. They’ve used digital feedback to create and then test complex digital scenarios in order to identify and deliver the most satisfactory online survey experiences for their clients.
Insurer Bupa Global has found digital feedback to be a key component in its toolkit to improve its customers’ digital experience. The ability to listen ‘in the moment’ has provided rich insight which has enabled it to implement targeted and actionable change across the digital journey, almost doubling customer satisfaction.
Kingfisher, the retailer, has also benefited from intuitive survey-building and delivery to trigger the right survey at the right time on retail websites in five European markets. It’s developing a VoC Digital Ecosystem using recent innovations in its digital feedback platform to enable it to capture richer insights about its website visitors. It’s already achieved a double -digit growth in its NPS metric.
If you’re seeking to make greater use of digital feedback in your organisation to reduce friction and deliver a more flexible and agile service, here are three key steps to start the ball rolling:
- Open up a communication channel for your website visitors – a static feedback button allows them to self-select into the feedback process. Make sure that a static feedback button appears on every page of your website (as long as this doesn’t obscure any important features, of course!). This is easy to implement and often easier to get past the web/digital team who may not be keen on pop ups. Do get help from IT to ensure you’re not blocking important website tools though. It’s important to capture as many background variables as possible here (e.g. customer ID, browser, operating system) to avoid asking questions you already have the answers to and to segment site visitors. This also avoids annoying customers who self-select into the feedback process. In fact, this is important across all feedback collection channels – never ask for information you already have.
- Embrace the random intercept (pop-up) survey (like the static button) as a general and very useful website ‘health check’. You can use smart rules to trigger when individual visitors see the survey to ensure they are part of a random sample. For example, you might decide to present the survey to 20% of visitors after seeing x number of pages on the website, or when certain pages are visited. It’s also wise to set a non-repeat cookie so visitors are not repeatedly exposed to pop ups. This can be quite easy to set up and you can control how many days will elapse before a visitor sees the same request again.
- Use the information from the general health check to focus on specific areas that need to be addressed. For example, you may learn that people have issues with a check out process or completing a particular form. Your digital team or technology partner can review your site code and identify suitable triggers.
If we can focus on delivering improved digital customer experiences now when the online world is the only trading route available to many, there is every chance we will be able to build on customer satisfaction and loyalty developed during this time when more physical shops and offices re-open for business.
