With more businesses popping up in the market, it is essential to churn out creative ways to stand out in the crowd if you want to have even the slightest chance for survival in the corporate market.
One of the best ways to become the go-to business for people is to offer what they want and serve your customers like no other firm in the market can. However, you must first find out what it is that your customers want. An efficient way to do this is to ask the customer directly.
Taking customer feedback and converting it into the biggest strengths for your business is a leading way to achieve corporate success. And one of the top ways of collecting surveys is via SMS surveys as billions of people around the world use mobile phones today, and SMS is considered to be the leading choice of communication.
If you haven’t started using SMS surveys to gather feedback and provide exceptional customer experience, then keep reading to know how SMS surveys can help improve customer experience.
What Is an SMS Survey?
SMS surveys are an efficient way of gathering customer feedback. You can collect data right on the phone by sending a link to your SMS survey. The customers can text you to get access to the surveys, or you can send the surveys yourself through text. The customers can take a survey from that link, and you will be able to access valuable data without conducting extensive research and without spending many resources.
This is an effective method of collecting feedback and is also cost-efficient. Text messages have a high open rate, and people tend to respond more and cooperate better on text messages as compared to other forms of communication. So, you are likely to get your survey filled in via the SMS link.
SMS Surveys Give a Quick Collection of Feedback
SMS surveys are the best way to get quick feedback from your customers. The process of taking surveys and collecting information from those surveys is not an easy task. It can take days and weeks to gather the same amount of information from paper surveys than text surveys. Even sending emails is not as efficient and quick as sending a text message on the phone because emails have a spam folder, and your message can land there.
With text messages, the customer can immediately open the SMS as it lands right in the inbox and take your survey from the phone without having to make out space and time for the survey. This ensures that you get quick responses with ample data for your business that you can then use to provide an excellent customer experience.
Improves Customer Engagement
As SMS has a higher open rate than emails and other forms of online communication, you can use SMS surveys to capture the attention of customers.
When you send an important message with a link to the survey to your customers, they might not even check your message on other platforms. But with phones and SMS, there is a higher chance of your business messages getting checked and responded to.
Make sure to not bore the customers with your survey links only. Try to mix them up and send engaging content before sending the surveys so the customers remain involved in the process. As customers will become more involved in your business processes, you can provide a better customer experience.
Track and Monitor Customer Insights
You can send surveys to determine the customer’s buying experience, gather insights about their interests, new trends, and more such stuff, which will help you align your business to what is needed in the market.
Instead of just sending surveys, you can send text messages asking about the person’s current purchases and how much they liked them. Then, add the link and ask them to take a survey for better feedback.
Take these valuable customer insights and mold your business to fulfill them. As you become a business that is more catered to customers and provides exactly what they need, you will grow to become a household name.
A Quick and Efficient Way to Communicate
There are several layers to making sure the customer experience is perfect. You can’t just build a quality product and expect the customers to be satisfied to their fullest. You have to build a whole experience to make sure the customer doesn’t turn away from your business.
Having a channel to communicate one’s frustrations about the purchases and voice objections is a central part of the customer experience. Customers must have a solid and quick way of making sure their complaints reach you. If they don’t get an outlet for your business, they might start voicing their opinions about your business somewhere else, and that will cut off several potential customers.
An SMS survey provides a much-needed channel to voice their opinions and share their complaints about the overall service and not just one product. Surveys will make sure the customers have a way of letting you know what needs improvement in your business and what is going perfectly.
Being able to provide feedback will improve customers’ satisfaction and their experience.
How to Use SMS Surveys to Improve Customer Experience
Knowing that SMS surveys help improve customer experience is not the answer. You must also act on it to create SMS surveys in the most efficient way possible. Not all surveys will get the same response. If the surveys are too long, they can end up being ignored and not taken at all. If the questions asked in the survey are not correct, your messages will be a waste of time as the end result will not provide any significant information.
So, before sending out the SMS survey, you must ensure that the surveys are built to support and improve customer experience. Here are a few things to keep in mind when building surveys to improve customer experience.
Work according to Your Audience
If you can send a text message to everyone, it doesn’t mean you should. If you send SMS surveys and they disturb the receiver, or they just don’t want to take your survey and think of it as an annoyance, you could end up losing that customer.
So, make sure to know the right time to send the messages such that they won’t be an intrusion. You should also consider the sample size of your audience. If a small number of people have taken the survey, it might not be a good indicator of what needs to be changed to improve customer experience. Ensure a bigger sample size for your surveys.
Moreover, there should always be an option for the audience to opt out of the survey’s SMS and choose not to receive it any further.
Be Brief and to the Point
While text messages are a popular source of communication, no one has the time to read messages sent with long wordy sentences. To make sure the customer not only reads but also responds to your message, make sure to keep it short, clear, and simple.
Send a short engaging message and ask them to take the survey at the given link.
Key Takeaways
SMS surveys can significantly improve the customer experience as the data gathered will tell you exactly what the customer needs, their frustrations, demands, purchases, and more about them.
If you want to use SMS surveys as a way of improving customer experience, make sure to send brief messages. Don’t overdo them. Keep them engaging. If your messages are on point, customers will be happy to take a survey.
Use this cost-effective method of improving customer experience wisely.