It’s that time of the year again, and if you’re a parent and Customer Experience professional like me, you’re probably busy designing your post-Christmas survey right now.
We all understand how important it is to have an effective VoC (Voice of the Children) process to help improve the Christmas Experience. So here’s a few best practices which, like Rudolph’s nose, will help guide you in your survey design.
1. Timely Feedback is Important
Transactional feedback is much more effective in real-time. This is just as true at Christmas as other times of the year. You want to invite your children to participate in the survey as soon after opening gifts as possible, and in our home we try to offer the survey within five minutes. This real-time survey gets a higher response rate and much more detailed feedback than if we waited a day or a week for the survey.
Real-time feedback is important on the reporting side, too. Getting an immediate survey back about something that just happened a few minutes ago is a powerful tool to help both employees and grandparents really listen to the VoC and internalize the feedback they’re getting. We don’t ever want to let a coaching and training opportunity slip by, so when the survey is positive we make sure to acknowledge that to everyone (“Uncle David got all 5’s for the Minecraft playset! Keep it up, David!”). When the survey is negative, of course, we’ll use that to do some one-on-one coaching to make sure the underperforming relative is on his or her best Christmas game for next year.
2. Interviews vs. Online Surveys
There’s no one right answer about whether to use interviews or online surveys for your VoC program. Interviews have a higher response rate and get more detailed feedback, while online surveys are a lot less expensive. So when deciding which survey channel to use, take into consideration the goals of the VoC program and your budget.
Lately we’ve also seen a lot of interest in a hybrid approach, where some children are selected for the more in-depth interview format, and others for the online survey. This lets us target the detailed feedback where we think it will be most valuable (for example, if the VoC survey consistently shows that Grandma Joan’s sweaters always flop, we may target her gifts for the interview so she can get more feedback on how to improve), but still get a lot more surveys done than we could afford with a 100% interview approach.
3. Keep It Short!
Nothing ruins the Christmas spirit like being asked to sit still for a 15-minute interview, or answer 75 questions in an online survey. So keep the survey short and to the point, and focus just on your most important metrics. I suggest using one or two high-level questions (such as Net Promoter, Effort, and/or Christmas Satisfaction) along with a handful of more specific questions about things like gift quality, wrapping paper, anticipation factor, etc. Don’t forget to include a free response question!
My rule of thumb is to try to keep the VoC surveys to under 5 minutes for an interview, or a single screen (no scrolling) for an online survey. You’d be surprised what you can get done in a five minute interview, plus the response rate will be higher and the survey will be less expensive.
4. Implement a Closed-Loop Process
More and more people are realizing that much of the value of a VoC program isn’t in the survey data per se, but in what you do with it. And one of the most valuable things you can do with the data is use it to drive a closed-loop process.
That means that you contact dissatisfied children in order to resolve their problems and understand the root cause of the dissatisfaction. By going through this process you will both directly increase satisfaction, and also be able to prevent future Christmas disasters. So for example, if Sylvia is upset that she got the 75-piece chemistry set instead of the 150-piece set, you may be able to offer an apology and a small piece of candy in the moment; and also implement a process to ensure that in the future all relatives understand exactly which SKU she wants for each item on her list.
5. Have Robust Reporting
Improvement over time requires careful attention to detail and the ability to slice and dice the VoC data in a lot of different ways. You want to be able to track key metrics over time, by gift and by gift-giver, by wrapping style, etc., in order to understand what’s driving Christmas satisfaction and implement the appropriate process changes.
You will also want to make sure the data is delivered to the right people to enable improvement. Each year, before the gift buying season begins, each relative should have a report of prior VoC scores, along with the children’s comments and the reporting tools to allow them to dive deeper into the data. Just having the right reports is going to make a huge difference in your Christmas experience!
Remember: This Is a Process, Not a Project
Bringing the VoC into the Christmas Experience is not going to happen overnight. Some relatives are likely to question the value of collecting feedback at all (remember: those are also the same relatives who are likely to score badly on the survey). My advice is to be professional but persistent. Once everyone starts seeing real data, the value of a robust feedback process will become obvious to everyone.
