This is the third in a series about how our team at BHN Rewards uses digital rewards and our own platform to boost our engagement among prospects and customers.
No matter what business you’re in, customer feedback is a must. That includes everyone from retailers and service providers to contractors and software companies — including us. But getting the right feedback from the right customers isn’t always easy, which is why we turned to SurveyMonkey rewards to help us get the insights we need.
BHN Rewards Customer Marketing Manager Chelsea Legendre conducts our annual customer survey through SurveyMonkey, one of our many platform partners. We want to know all about the way our customers use our software, the features they love, the enhancements they wish we’d make, and their experiences with our sales, account management, and customer service teams. By optimizing the survey process and invitee lists — and offering a $10 digital reward of the recipients’ choice — Chelsea was able to increase our response rates by 122% year over year.
Through that optimization, we’ve come up with four tips to help you as you incorporate SurveyMonkey rewards and work to get more out of your own customer feedback surveys.
Using SurveyMonkey rewards to incentivize participation can of course make a big difference in your response rates. But that doesn’t mean you can ignore the usual advice about your survey setup. For instance, SurveyMonkey has found that survey abandon rates jump when your questionnaire takes more than seven to eight minutes to finish, with completion rates dropping anywhere from 5% to 20%. In short: Keep it short.
Chelsea limited our survey to 10 questions, which consisted of mostly multiple-choice selections. Following another piece of proven advice, she made sure the few open-ended questions weren’t required for submission. Even so, thanks to the $10 incentive, we got a lot of great anecdotal feedback with those questions.
When in doubt, follow SurveyMonkey’s tools that estimate the likelihood of your survey being completed.
Chelsea and the rest of our team can’t stress enough the benefits of integrating your survey platforms and rewards tool. Since BHN Rewards has a native integration with SurveyMonkey, it was unbelievably easy for Chelsea to connect our two instances — just copy and paste a few codes in settings, and you’re done. By doing this, she was able to track those customers who responded to the survey in BHN Rewards, send their $10 gift cards, see who claimed the reward, and more. No more going back and forth between a survey platform and a spreadsheet to send out thank-you gift cards one by one.
When you allocate money to SurveyMonkey rewards to incentivize customer responses, the last thing you want is to waste that budget on feedback that isn’t useful. That’s why Chelsea took a few extra steps to make sure our data was accurate and from the right people. First, she sent the survey via SurveyMonkey’s own email invitation process, rather than copying the survey link and sending it out via a marketing email. All Chelsea had to do was upload a list of email addresses, and this way, the invitations had individualized, one-time-use survey links that prevented customers from submitting multiple responses or forwarding the survey to others.
Also, as an extra stopgap, Chelsea turned on the approvals workflow in the BHN Rewards platform, so she could review respondents before issuing their rewards. For instance, she was able to check unfamiliar names to make sure they were still on an active customer account. With bulk approvals, she could authorize a whole batch of rewards at once to make sure to reach every legitimate respondent — no matter what rating they gave in the survey. Setting up approvals let her keep a better watch on our rewards budget as well.
The other part of protecting your budget is prioritizing the answers you want. We wanted feedback from both our on-demand and subscription plan customers, but we prioritized responses from our subscription customers, who have access to more BHN Rewards features. Chelsea set the two groups up into separate surveys in SurveyMonkey and rewards campaigns in the BHN Rewards platform, so she could control approvals separately in each and keep track of the different cohorts’ responses. On the reward side, this gave us even more control and helped us better monitor where the responses were coming from and who was receiving rewards. Plus, when anyone emailed us asking about their reward, we could easily check and resend it, if necessary — all in the BHN Rewards platform!
The effort and rewards budget it takes to conduct a good customer feedback survey all goes to waste if you don’t act on the results. Not only that, it’s important for your customers to know that you heard them and are taking their input seriously. Once Chelsea compiles the feedback from our BHN Rewards survey, it’s shared with our leaders, as well as customer service, sales, marketing, and product teams. Those insights help us lay out a product roadmap for future features and launches, improve our customer care processes, and drive more relevant sales and marketing conversations.
SurveyMonkey users already know the ease of using that tool to collect customer feedback. By adding BHN Rewards, you can maximize your response rates, streamline processes, and prioritize the insights you need.
Learn more about our SurveyMonkey integration!
Hannah is a reformed journalist who has more than 15 years of experience and now focuses on content marketing for innovative tech companies.
Hannah is a reformed journalist who has more than 15 years of experience and now focuses on content marketing for innovative tech companies.
