As consumers, we’ve all likely experienced frustrating attempts from businesses to capture our feedback. Receiving surveys that are too long, unrelated to the transaction, or sent to us again and again is a big turn off. These are not effective surveys and not only do they annoy us, but they likely deliver poor quality insights.
So what makes a good survey? Good surveys use clear language to ask all the right questions shortly after a customer’s experience. Good surveys are timely, relevant, easy, and offer a convenient way for people to respond.
For a survey to go from good to great takes a few more steps. Great surveys target a specific audience and only invite them to participate a reasonable number of times. Also, simplicity is key, with clear survey fields that allow customers to offer specific feedback about their overall experience–how they feel, what they know, what worked or what didn’t work. Great surveys are mobile friendly and don’t use jargon or otherwise force respondents to interpret what the survey is actually trying to ask. Great surveys ensure quality feedback and allow room for customers to veer off into other areas not explicitly asked about in one of the questions.
In Cisco Services, we’re following this good-to-great survey advice. We truly value your input about your experience with Cisco, and we’re adapting our methods so you’ll want to share more with us.
Recently we streamlined and consolidated our surveys about Cisco’s Technical Services. I’ve asked Kurtis Yang, who heads up Customer Experience and Listening for Cisco Services, to share details about these improvements and how the changes will help us listen more and respond better.
Guest Author: Kurtis Yang, Senior Director, Customer Experience for Services
How are we doing? We count on you to tell us. Listening keeps us focused on what really matters to our customers and allows us to make improvements that put you first. As part of our journey to improve the customer experience, we recently introduced a new Cisco Technical Services survey.
Based on your feedback, we now have a new, simplified survey that streamlines several existing surveys into one. We’ve reduced the number of surveys you’ll receive by 50%, without compromising the quality. The new survey questions help us better understand your overall experience with Technical Services, including how effective we were in resolving your issue and how easy it was to work with us. This feedback, coupled with a system that ensures accountability in taking action, guarantees we stay focused on driving customer success. It also ensures we follow a new set of measures that are more aligned to what our customers care about.
You put your trust in us to support your business and we’re committed to doing just that. We must listen to understand when we have exceeded your expectations and, more importantly, when we have not. If you receive our survey, thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts and ideas that will help us enhance your experience with Cisco.
To make it even easier, you can access our survey anytime, anywhere from your mobile device. As an added bonus, we’re offering customers who provide more detailed feedback a chance to receive a Cisco gift – you might be next!
Also, since you’re helping us with your feedback, we want to help others by giving back. To show our appreciation to customers for taking the time to provide valuable input, Cisco Services will make a quarterly donation to JA Worldwide. In over 118 countries, Junior Achievement focuses on delivering experiential learning to over 10 million children and building an entrepreneurial spirit to prepare young people for the future. There has never been a better time to change the world by empowering our youth – thank you for participating with us to make this happen!
What matters to you, matters to us. That’s our focus. We look forward to your feedback and to sharing the improvements we make in the near future.
Thank you for being part of this journey and we look forward to hearing from you!
Hi Curt and Curtis.
Congratulations on listening and making it simple for customers. This is a great example of customer-first mindset I learned at Cisco.
Listening is an important pillar of delighting customers. What if you could listen to more customers, more often, more effectively? I have a suggestion that will help you do that!
Look at these two companies for collecting customer feedback automatically, and they are fairly inexpensive – teamhively.com and temper.io.
I am not affiliated with them, but I see how companies use them to measure and track all interactions to get quantitative and qualitative data. Then use this data to understand how to improve customer experience.
These types of tools are continuous, real-time and AI-enabled. You learn more about how customers feel because you listen to the social channels they already use, all the time even when they don’t have a service request.
More listening. Effective. No extra work for customers.
People will not remember every interaction they had with Cisco. But they will remember the overall feeling they have about the company.
Congratulations for practicing continuous improvement – Good. Great. Amazing.
Thanks for the positive comments, Hadi, and for offering ideas for social listening solutions. In one of my previous blog posts I talked about how Cisco actively listens across various social media channels in order to drive proactive customer support, track and respond to sentiment about our products, services, customer experiences, and concerns. It’s good to hear this is important to one of our readers!
Amazing. Cisco Services finally gets a starring role