Convenience for your customers sometimes comes with a price.
Businesses are all about saving money when possible, and improving the customer experience by making things as easy as possible. Both are good in theory, but some methods can be hurting other areas of your business; namely getting the all important feedback from your customers.
Below are two examples – both are good options for customers and can potentially save a company some money, but we’ll take a look at how they could be hurting your feedback responses.
Would you like your receipt? Customers are inundated with papers – receipts, business cards, you name it. One look in my own purse can be very telling – it’s like a receipt cemetery in there!
So, of course it was music to my ears when more and more companies asked if I would like a receipt at the end of a transaction. Nope, thanks, you can keep it! While that’s good for me as a consumer, it’s not so good for you.
Why?
If I don’t take a receipt, then there is no opportunity for the employee to tell me about the survey. Further, even if employees don’t mention it, I may be inclined to look for a survey link if I had a particularly bad (or good) experience. Now, without the receipt, I have no real way to offer feedback. Sure, if I really wanted to, I could look at the company’s website, but will I really do this?
Your customers don’t know what they don’t know. If they aren’t told about the survey and they don’t have a receipt, they will never know they had an opportunity to provide feedback.
Would you like your receipt emailed to you? Or sent via text? Or not at all? POS systems have come a long way, and this is a newest feature – offering options for receipts.
Here’s the issue: what if the majority of your customers prefer no receipt? Then you’re back to the earlier issue. If they want a receipt emailed or texted to them, does your POS system allow for inclusion of a link to a URL? Maybe, but maybe not. Or maybe you didn’t think to ask when bringing on the new system.
I recently worked with a company who had great response rates through their feedback program. They got a new POS system and were hopeful that it wouldn’t affect their numbers too much. Unfortunately, most of their customers were now choosing “no receipt” or a “text receipt” and they didn’t have the option to include a URL to a feedback survey.
Their response rates dropped quickly and significantly; it was painful, but they were eventually able to find workarounds to gain some of the missed feedback.
So, if your company is in one of these two situations and you’ve found a similar decline in feedback surveys, what can you do?
Below are a few helpful ideas to bring the survey back in front of your customers:
- Use QR codes & catchy shortened URL’s: create table tents and other signage to encourage customers to take a survey. Make it easy for the largest group of customers – coupling a QR code with a memorable and short URL will go a long way. Why stop with the traditional? Publish the QR code and URL on other items, such as napkins, bags, etc.
- Make sure you’re up with technology: if you switch to a POS system that offers email and text receipts, make sure your vendor allows URL’s to be included. If not, you may find out if the vendor captures contact information that you can later use to send a separate point of contact with a link to a feedback survey.
- Offer feedback surveys to all customers: make the survey visible on your website, include it in the company’s social media bios, reach out to your loyalty members, etc. Keep it alive outside of the receipt trailer.
- Know when it’s time to move on: Maybe traditional feedback isn’t relevant to your brand anymore. That’s okay (if it’s really the case). There are other ways to capture feedback, including monitoring of your brand’s social site, review sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, and social media monitoring.
There’s a lot to keep track of with all of the changes in technology and social media; take a step back before implementing a new feature or technology to make sure it will work well for you AND your customers; figuring out the bumps ahead of time will allow for a smoother transition all around.
