5 Reasons Why You Should Be Using Conversational Surveys

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Source: Wizu

Conversational surveys such as Wizu massively improve the survey experience by offering a more engaging, interactive and personalised survey. In some ways conversational surveys are going back to the old-style face to face interviews by gaining deeper insight through conversations. However rather than deploying hundreds of interviewers armed with a clipboard, you can utilise one chatbot to conduct your surveys.

What Are Conversational Surveys?

So what exactly are conversational surveys? Essentially, they are surveys carried out on a conversational user interface. Similar to popular messenger apps like WhatsApp and Facebook messenger. Though in Wizu’s case we use a web page so the user is not required to download any app or software to take the survey.

They offer an interactive survey experience helping turn customer surveys into customer stories. Utilising a chatbot your survey can react to responses and route the conversation down different paths depending on what answers are given. They replace the traditional form based surveys with a more engaging interface, allowing you a deeper understanding of your customers.

What Can Conversational Surveys Be Used For?

Conversational surveys can be used to track and improve CX, using metrics like Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction or measuring customer emotion. They can also be used for market research, employee engagement, lead capture, case creation and more. They allow you to go beyond the metrics and gain a deeper understanding of your respondent.

Why Use Conversational Surveys?

So why should you use a conversational survey? A conversational user interface has become the default format we are all using so respondents are already conditioned to this platform. The combined user base of the top 4 messaging apps is now more than that of the top 4 social media networks. This type of interaction feels natural to almost everyone. The previous ‘one size fits all’ approach to surveys is no longer accepted with respondents expecting a more personalised, interactive experience that conversational UI’s can offer.

Using a chatbot allows you to have thousands of personalised survey conversations running at the same time. This allows you to connect more closely with your audience without having to dedicate more time and resources. According to a report from Gartner, Chatbots will power 85% of all customer service interactions by the year 2020. Customers are embracing this technology and are happy to talk to a bot as long as it is delivering a good experience.

So let’s take a look at the top 5 reasons you need to get conversational surveys into your organization…

1. They Offer a Better Experience

Firstly, they offer a better experience for the respondent. The interface is similar to WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger which most people are comfortable with and makes the survey more of a social experience. You can make it more fun and engaging and including personalisation feels more natural in this interface.

 

As you can see in this example the bot has personalised the greeting and is making the survey more engaging by utilising emojis and embedding images and animations.

2. Conversational Surveys Can Utilise AI

Conversational surveys can also utilise AI and real-time reactions to give the impression it understands the feedback and is listening. You can vary the conversation based on the sentiment or keywords in order to route to follow up questions or quit if certain stop words are mentioned. This allows each respondent to deliver valid insight about even the most specific features of a product or service. From a company’s point of view, AI surveys can use insight from multiple respondents to not only understand what features customer like or dislike, but to understand why and how.

Here you can see how Wizu responds to an open text question – understanding the sentiment and the topic being mentioned using the Artificial Intelligence. This works for both a positive and negative situation and then you can see it is routing to specific follow up questions relevant to the complaint the respondent had.

Creating Actions From Insights

Surveying customers and post-survey data processing can be a huge task that often requires a team of data analysts trying to make sense of numerous uncorrelated data and text. AI powered text analytics can do the hard work for you, allowing you to turn data into actionable insight. By analysing your open text responses, it can start to identify key trends in terms of the areas that are having the biggest negative impact on customer experience and show you the context and specific issues being most commonly raised. You can also track the sentiment trend to see if any changes you implement do have a positive impact on the customer experience.

3. Conversational Surveys Can Close The Loop In Real-Time

They can also close the loop within the conversation by offering reactions and routes relevant to their issue. Wizu can also let you create actions based around criteria so you can trigger emails to the respondent or a member of staff depending on what the respondent answers. AI can also close the loop in real-time by offering solutions to common issues and can let the customer know that the issue is being raised with the relevant department.

In this example you can see the respondent has mentioned an issue with the WiFi. An explanation has been offered and the bot also offered a discount code to the respondent giving them real time acknowledgement of the issue and taking immediate action.

From the example we just saw an email could be triggered to the customer sending them a relevant voucher code and a separate email could be sent to a member of staff to let them know about the issues raised. By including the transcript with the email or dynamically inserting certain responses you are able to provide the context making it much easier to take action. You can also generate custom reports or documents based on responses – we currently use this to automatically generate a report for people who take our free CX Maturity Assessment on the Wizu website to calculate a score and provide dynamic content based on their answers.

 

4. Conversational Surveys Allow You To Go Beyond Metrics

Conversational surveys allow you to go beyond metrics and delve deeper into the customer experience. They allow you to ask relevant follow up questions and uncover the route causes of the issues. This allows you a better understanding of the customer and helps you pin point areas of the customer journey that are having the biggest impact.

The survey is now routing to specific follow up questions based on the facilities the respondent has used. It can now collect satisfaction metrics around these particular areas and also follow up with the specific reasons why the respondent felt that way.

5. Conversational Surveys Allow You To Stay On Brand

Conversational surveys also allow you to maintain your brand voice and tone by ensuring your chatbot matches your overall brand identity. This also allows you to create a better connection with your customers leading to increased customer retention. By customising your survey interface you can also deliver a consistent brand experience. If you offer an engaging customer experience at all other stages in the customer journey then why should your surveys be any different?

 

Customer Benefits

Conversational surveys have a range of benefits that improve the experience for the respondent.

  • The familiar user interface mimics common platforms like SMS and Facebook Messenger making the respondent more comfortable and willing to engage,
  • The AI provides the basics of all good feedback experience by listening, understanding and responding and AI fits naturally into a conversational UI. In a standard survey form the inclusion of AI can feel a little more alien.
  • Even though there is no human interaction, it still feels like a social experience. It feels like you are talking to a person or a brand and so you feel like your voice is being valued.
  • These surveys can also close the loop in-survey, offering instant resolutions or explanations such as the Wi-Fi example we showed earlier.
  • They are also more fun and engaging. Surveys don’t have to be boring and conversational surveys can offer a more enjoyable experience for the respondent.

 

Organisation Benefits

It is not just all about the respondent though. Conversational surveys also have several benefits for the organization utilising them.

  • Higher completion rates ensure they are getting a larger sample of feedback and a better representation of their customers. Our clients are typically seeing 4 or 5 times the completion rates when moving from a traditional survey provider.
  • It also opens a new channel of conversational marketing. Allowing you to engage with customers and provide information about your products or services giving you an opportunity to upsell / encourage a re-purchase or direct them to your social channels.
  • This new channel also allows respondents to air their views on their terms – potentially providing insights that wouldn’t have been gained by sticking to a strict script.
  • Improved feedback also leads to better quality data, we have found that it is not just the volume of completions that increases but that respondents are more willing to spend time providing a higher level of data providing you with more insights. It also allows you to capture feedback from not just extreme advocates and detractors.
  • You can also capture the context of the feedback by asking relevant follow up questions and by using email actions can pass that context or the transcript of the survey directly to the relevant person.
  • Your organization can ensure they are talking to customers in the same way the brand talks to them at all other stages. Make it as formal or informal as you want to match your brand personality.
  • Conversational surveys are also CX positive. They give customers a good feeling. Surveys can often detract from the overall customer experience and are the last experience the customer goes away with. A conversational survey can ensure that it is an engaging one.

 

Summary

Traditional online surveys are losing relevancy but that doesn’t mean customer feedback is not as vital as ever. Conversational surveys offer an innovative approach to surveys that provides a more engaging and personalised survey experience that delivers higher completion rates and better insight. Combining that with the power of AI offers a next level of real-time understanding and routing creating a better respondent experience. It also allows you to turn your data and open text responses into actionable insight by automating your data analysis.

Why not book a demo to see how Wizu can help your organisation utilise conversational surveys to deliver a better survey experience.

Martin Powton
I have over 13 years' experience in digital marketing and am interested in all areas of marketing, customer experience and employee wellbeing.

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