Customers are the lifeblood of every business. At its most basic, if you don’t have customers, you can close your doors. Consequently, engaging with your customers to ascertain what they do or don’t like about your company and its product or service offering is vital. The problem is that in today’s world where everyone is stressed out and people operate at warp speed, how do you engage with your customers without aggravating or disenfranchising them?
The Old Way
Technology has become such a large part of our lives that it is difficult to comprehend how we survived so long without it or what we would do if it was taken away from us. And it is through technology and people’s love and affinity of new technology that we can engage with clients in a mutually satisfactory manner.
Traditional methods of engaging with customers involved surveys – phone and door to door. Neither of these methods was particularly successful at developing better customer relations notwithstanding that, due to a lack of a better method, this was all that companies had on offer in their arsenal of “engagement” techniques.
Even though the technological revolution may be relatively new, people have always been busy. Therefore, when a phone surveyor would contact a customer in the early evening when they were busy preparing dinner for the family or bathing the kids, they were not exactly greeted with open arms. The company instigating the survey engaged the customer, just not in the manner they would’ve liked. Similarly, it was rare that people ever had patience from a stranger knocking on their door and requesting a minute or twenty of their time.
A Survey to Go for People on the Go
However, as technology evolved, there have been developments to assist businesses in keeping engaged with their customers whilst leaving a positive impression.
The mobile survey app has been a boon for the survey industry. Like any other app that can be downloaded to a portable device such as a smartphone, tablet, or phablet; users find mobile survey apps to be easy to use.
From a customer perspective, people these days are constantly engaged with their mobile devices and apps and find them to be fun and interesting. Consequently, when approached by a surveyor with a portable device in a neutral public place, customers are more amenable to giving a few minutes of their valuable time. Similarly, it leaves a positive impression on customers that you care about what they think and are willing to engage with them in novel new ways – the company with which they interact is keeping up with the times; it is in the 21st century and not the 20th century.
Survey apps also confer many benefits for the companies implementing them other than better customer engagement. They are cheap, easy to configure, easy to change, can be monitored in real time from remote offices, and offer interviewees novel forms of interaction such as movies that were not available with traditional techniques.
Mobile survey apps are the new way of engaging with customers and have gained rapid market acceptance due to the fact that they address so many of the problems inherent with phone and door to door surveys. It is most likely that as a consequence of survey apps, these traditional survey techniques will soon be rendered obsolete.
