23 Jan 2019
Many businesses use receipt invitations to gather customer feedback, but are they effective? This article explores why many feedback requests fail and how to improve your survey's accuracy and engagement.
Many companies check customer satisfaction through receipt invitations. Surprisingly, many of these invitations don't yield useful feedback because the surveys are too long and the questions are not specific enough.
You've probably also received an invitation on a receipt to provide feedback on your purchase experience. While this practice is not as common in Slovenia as it is abroad, in the US, as early as 2016, 41 out of 51 of the largest retail chains were checking customer satisfaction via receipt invitations. The Interaction Metrics group researched their effectiveness and arrived at unexpected results.
They found that the return on feedback was very poor. The invitations did not attract attention and did not motivate customers to take action. Furthermore, 68% of the feedback obtained was completely useless. The research organization prepared some findings that would increase the yield of useful opinions. Considering these will improve the effectiveness of checking customer satisfaction in your company as well.
The research evaluated customer satisfaction by considering 4 criteria, which had a weighted impact on the final result based on their importance:
The organization approached the research by making an actual purchase and being invited to rate the purchase experience via a receipt invitation. Since the first two criteria are quite understandable and have a lesser impact on the final result, we will focus only on accuracy and engagement.
Incorrect data prevents companies from making the right decisions to improve the customer experience. It can also give the false impression that everything is fine with the service, while in the long run, you are still losing customers. Asking the right questions in the right way is most important when checking customer satisfaction. Yet, this is where companies make the most mistakes; as many as 92% of surveys showed critical errors at this level. Most errors stemmed from the question structure, which already guided the customer toward a specific answer. Instead of asking, "How satisfied were you with the checkout speed?", which already implies the customer was satisfied, it's better to ask, "How would you rate the checkout speed?". Customer responses are also influenced by overly positive wording. As many as 82% of surveys contain at least one question with too many positive words. However, the specificity of responses is most affected by poorly worded questions. If you ask, "Did the store's appearance attract you?", do you mean the store's tidiness, signage, cleanliness, item organization, etc.? Ask specific questions and try not to influence the answers themselves. While it's good to get positive results to present customer satisfaction to management or for advertising purposes, if they don't highlight existing shortcomings, you won't be able to fix them. In the long run, you will lose customers, even if the surveys show high customer satisfaction.
You will only get useful results if the customer is motivated to answer questions honestly and realistically. The survey should not be too long and must maintain the customer's interest and their desire to answer honestly until the end. In the research conducted by Interaction Metrics in the US, the average number of questions in a survey was 23, and they even encountered one with 39 questions. It's probably unnecessary to emphasize that this is absolutely too much, and the answers will not be realistic. Furthermore, it's necessary to realistically estimate the completion time. A customer's time is valuable, and if you tell them the survey will take 30 seconds, but in reality, it will take 4 minutes, that's not okay. The best surveys are short and easy to complete. They won't take too much of the customer's time, and you will get useful answers.