How We Listen To Customers to Create The Best Nifty Experience Possible

Crafting an effective customer feedback survey is not as easy as it might seem. Asking the right questions and getting pointed feedback is something that guys at Corus help customers with all the time.

We recently did an important job of asking for feedback from our customers to try to learn more about which features of our tool they “couldn’t live without”. The subtlety of asking in this way meant that we got better insights about which parts of our tool had become integral to our customers’ workflows and day-to-day operations. This feedback helped us choose what things to promote via campaigns, with pricing tiers to use, and with making product development decisions.

Leveraging Corus, free-to-use user research and analytics tool, we were able to effectively poll our customers while being respectful of their time. In the embedded video below, we’ll show you how you too can build something similar to get the most out of your creative marketing, pricing, and customer success efforts. Here are some quick tips:

Be respectful

Shorter is not always better, but when in doubt try to be as concise as possible. Your customers will thank you and appreciate that you are respectful of their time. Prior to sending out a customer satisfaction survey take it yourself, and if possible share in your email/post how long the survey will take (i.e. 2 minutes max!)

Understand your goals

Net Promoter Score isn’t very helpful if you don’t understand the scale you’re using (in the video we use a 5 point liker scale for simplicity, meaning that a 5 would be a promoter, a 4 would be neutral/passive, and a 1–3 would be a detractor). Understanding your goals also means shaping questions that target specifically what you’d like to do with the results — are you looking to determine which features to promote in next month’s newsletter? Maybe think about having a question that limits a respondent’s ability to pick features from a list (single-choice as we show in the video) and then compile the top two answers. Finally, it means thinking through choice architecture — don’t lead respondents and think about the logic (show if, hide if) when building out your questions. Jillian does a great job showing what this looks like in the video.

Gather information about your customers without violating privacy

It’s important to have context for your customers (how long have they been with you, which pricing tier are they on, what features do they subscribe to…) but don’t violate that trust. Make sure that you’re not veering into PPI with your questions.

Incentives work

It seems simple, but incentivizing your customers is the best way to ensure that they participate. Think about offering coupon codes or gift cards as a way to get them over the hurdle of carving out a little time to give you feedback.

You may also use a dynamic QR code generator to create a custom QR code for easier redemption with just a quick scan of their smartphone.

Getting insights from your customers is a great way to show that you care about making your product as intuitive and friendly as possible, and while you’ll maybe (probably) get some feedback that you can’t address — if you’ve constructed things well, you’ll have some great data-points to work off of.

Now get out there and have fun!