Gaining Insights Directly from Customers Creates Exceptional Experience

You re-establish your agency’s brand every time you engage with customers.

But many agencies miss the opportunity to use feedback to improve customer experience. Even with regular surveys, many teams struggle to aggregate feedback in a centralized manner to prioritize both program and system improvements.

We recently made Salesforce Surveys available to our government customers. Natively built on our platform, short surveys may be offered across any app and designed for the most important parts of the customer journey.

Asking for feedback at the right time delivers a powerful message to your customers. It shows that you’re listening and that you care. What’s key is making sure customers associate feedback with the most meaningful aspects of how they engage.

In an effort to simplify, let me explain. It’s important to gather feedback only from the points within the customer journey that most inform how to improve and deliver even more exceptional engagement. What are your customers’ key interactions? What are their most vital relationships?

It starts with analysis. Utilize data analytics that cut across all your core apps to identify key needs that are top-of-mind for customers. You can generate reports that provide a “single pane of glass” for you to see:

• User trends
• Process bottlenecks
• Employee productivity
• Service continuity

Once you know where you need to gather input, you can quickly configure surveys to gain customer feedback on how to improve apps and features. How you deliver surveys also is important. Here are some tips.

1. Integrate surveys into your Agile practice

If Agile methodology is meant to increase time to value, feedback needs to be real time. Agile uses a practice called Demos and Retrospectives in order to achieve meaningful feedback from customers and your team. Keep an eye on the major touchpoints between program apps and customer experience to ensure the feedback loop is aligned to the creation of your user stories. Feedback also may be used to measure outcomes associated with program and policy changes (pre and post surveys). In more advanced methodology, customers and stakeholders prioritize features to ensure the highest value changes are incorporated into apps — see how Salesforce goes about this with the Idea Exchange.

2. Minimize questions to maximize value

The simpler the survey, the higher the response rate. Feedback starts with providing your customers with the opportunity to deliver meaningful feedback without overburdening them. Don’t feel like you’ll miss out on gathering key data, though. With Salesforce you’re able to use feedback within the context of customer and system data — to make course corrections fast. For instance, you might find a correlation between dissatisfied customers and gaps in service. Or highly satisfied customers and specific case workers.

3. Show customers how you use feedback to improve

Acknowledge customers and show them how their input enhances programs and services. Communicate results to customers on the channels they use most — email, mobile, social, etc. It’s also important for program staff to understand and communicate feedback-based improvement.

The show of appreciation, along with the actual program changes, reinforces trust and boosts your brand.

The full view of each unique customer is not complete without direct customer feedback. Surveys allow you to close the loop on understanding your customers. Including feedback within the very apps customers use drives mission-critical insights into design. Most importantly, it places the customer at the center of everything you do. Learn more about Salesforce Surveys.

About the Author

Darryl Peek
Senior Manager — Salesforce Global Public Sector Business Unit