By mGage

For businesses looking to continually improve their customer service and experience, the need for thorough feedback cannot be underestimated. Without a true indicator or picture of the consumer experience, there is no way organisations can ensure that they are supplying the best service possible. Hence, SMS surveys are a vital tool in the ongoing relationships between brands and consumers to further develop and enhance services or products.

With Gartner predicting that 89 percent of businesses are facing competitive points based primarily on customer experience, it is imperative that brands make customer satisfaction their priority to remain engaging and relevant.

By initiating surveys brands can have access to a continual feedback loop to make the necessary changes to their business. Therefore, it is important that they listen to customer comments and learn from their suggestions to ensure the continual upgrade of products or services are in line with customer expectations. Research by Kolsky found that 70 percent of companies that deliver best-in-class customer experience use customer feedback.

Further research suggests that one happy customer can lead to nine referrals, whereas one unhappy customer can result in 26 other unhappy people; this highlights the implications that negative customer experiences can have on current and potential consumers.

Why use SMS for surveys?

SMS surveys are a quick and efficient tool for any business wishing to gather valuable insights and essential feedback to improve their customers’ experience. As mobile has become an integral part of our connected lifestyle and with people checking their phones 58 times a day on average, it is an easy way to reach your audience. In return it allows your customers to respond any time and from any place. While email may cost less, SMS has proven more beneficial as it has a 7.5 times higher response rate than email, an average 90 second reply time, and a 98 percent open rate.

By launching SMS surveys, the sender can look forward to receiving higher response rates and increased customer engagement. Here are some great examples of how you can collect feedback from your audience:

• Customer service feedback – when a phone call has ended you can send an SMS survey to your customer asking them to rate their experience and the advisor
• Delivery feedback – ask your customers to rate a recent delivery to see if the service met their expectations
• New purchases feedback – find out how a customer got on with a recent purchase and how they found the overall experience.
• Update contact details – allows a customer to update these to ensure your records are up to date

How to integrate SMS surveys

Using a mobile campaign management tool like Communicate Pro, brands have the ability to quickly and easily launch a SMS survey campaign. Brands can create interactive surveys using decision tree functionality and receive open ended responses to collect the most useful data for them. All messages can be personalised and automated and can include features like emojis.

It is important for brands to use tailored questions to ensure that they ask the right questions to the right people to increase engagement and ensure that the questions are relevant. With the data collected through SMS surveys, brands can quickly understand what their customers want and allow them to take on board any constructive feedback in order to grow as an organisation and curate better satisfaction in the future.

Final thoughts

To continue to enhance customer loyalty and satisfaction it is critical to collect consumer feedback via SMS surveys. By incorporating it into your multi-channel communication strategy it offers your audience a choice of response.  With more people now on their mobile phones for longer you can expect high response rates via SMS – highlighting its capability as a highly engaged channel and a great way to connect with customers to gather valuable insights for your business.