Do you listen to your customer’s voice by conducting satisfaction surveys? Perfectly! However, you should know that research alone is not enough. The point is, after all, to receive as much information as possible from them – especially about what customers rate the worst and which areas of the company’s operation fail. The Startquestion tool allows you to send notifications when our products or services are evaluated negatively during the survey. And this allows you to close the so-called “small loop”, i.e. allow a specific employee to contact a dissatisfied customer, and his supervisor – to track how this contact took place.

This instruction is designed to guide you through the all steps of research conduction – from creating a survey to generating reports and sending invitations to the survey.

The Voice of Customer instruction will consist of 5 parts:

The questionnaire we create will consist of three parts: for the respondent, categorization and closing the answer in a small loop.

a) Part for the respondent

For example, we will create a survey based on the Net Promoter Score question. It may look like this:
​

It should contain key questions for assessing customer satisfaction for your business. Remember – the goal is to create alerts, i.e. notifications about situations in which the customer is dissatisfied. Therefore, ask questions so that you can easily find out this from the answer (NPS, matrix, closed question). Step by step instructions how to create a questionnaire can be found in the Startquestion Guidebook.

b) Categorization

We make categorization to determine the topic that the client touched on in his opinion, i.e. his point of view. At this point, we create a part of the survey, thanks to which after completing the customer satisfaction survey, you will receive a special alert to your email address. By choosing „Categorize” in the e-mail, you will immediately go to the survey (hence only one answer in the question), in which you see which answer in the NPS and the additional question the respondent chose. Then select which area this answer applies to and enter the email address of the person responsible for this area who will continue the process. (e.g. your supervisor, head of customer service, person responsible for the interior of the store, etc.). The categorizing part of the survey may look like this:

c) Closing in the “small loop”

A small loop in satisfaction surveys gives you the opportunity to respond to negative opinions. This involves locating the source of the negative opinion and establishing contact with the customer – conducting a conversation with which we can learn more about the reasons for his negative assessment.

This part of the survey is intended to gather information about such contact. Is made to organize feedback divided into closed and unsettled matters. It may look like this:

This part of the survey could be very similar or even identical to Categorization. The employee whose e-mail address we entered in the previous part receives an e-mail, and already from the content of the message goes to „Start”, i.e. opens the survey (hence only one answer in the question). Then he completes the questionnaire after contacting the client and closes the case.

After each of these parts of the survey (for the respondent, categorization and small loop) we choose the option: finish the study
​

In the instructions, we will show you how to create 4 basic filters that will facilitate the sorting of information and will later be used to create alerts and reports. They will be used to segregate information on: dissatisfied customer, the effects of conversation with the customer, open loops and unclosed matters. In our Guidebook you can find detailed instructions on how to create filters and use them.
​

a) Filter: New dissatisfied customer

Thanks to this filter, we will later create an alert that we will use for categorization.
​

b) Filter: Alert number 1 – after contact with the customer

This filter allows you to get information about what happened after someone categorized the results and went on to close the loop. In a word: what were the results of a conversation with a dissatisfied customer.
​

c) Filter: Open loops
​

With the help of such filtering of results, we will later create a recurring report with non-closed cases, which no one dealt with, e.g. 2 days. Such a report is sent automatically to a supervisor or manager who can quickly respond to a delay without the need to contact the employee (automatic report sending).
​

d) Filter: Unfinished cases
​

This sorting of results allows you to control which cases are completed and in which conversations with the client are still ongoing. The supervisor may follow the reasons for the lack of contact or negative resolution of the case. Unclosed cases can be reported less frequently than open loops – e.g. once a week.
​

Of course, in your survey more such filters can be created – for example, if a given customer has incorrectly rated customer service, you can create a separate filter and thus set an alert that will be sent directly to the service department manager. And vice versa – if the specificity of your business does not require informing about unfinished business with such a high frequency, you can opt out of the creation of a filter c).

III. Creating the alerts
​

Below we will describe how to create two basic alerts: categorization and VoC (Voice of Customers). In our Startquestion Guidebook you will find all the information on how to create alerts in accordance with the set filter.
​

a) Alert: categorization
​

If the answer of a dissatisfied customer appears in our survey, an alert with a categorization will be sent to the designated person. You use the filter: New dissatisfied customer to create this alert.

In the content of the message sent as an alert, you need to take into account several issues: include there information about what the alert (unsatisfied customer) relates to, what was the NPS indicator, how the customer answered the question, and the so-called postfill, which will allow you to go to the second part of the survey you previously created – categorization (how to set it all you can see on pictures above). You will automatically enter all this information into the message body, using the function: tags. A drop-down bar will appear there with the option of automatically inserting answers to questions, links, etc. You can shape the content of the message yourself – depending on your needs.
​

b) VOC alert
​

We create the Voice of Customer alert from the technical side exactly the same as before. However, in this case this alert should be made after the categorization stage. It goes to the person whose task is to contact the customer. You use the filter to create this alert: Alert 1 – after contacting the customer.
​

Here, when creating the message content, we need to add dynamic postfill from the question: Select / change conversation / alert status. Then the person who received the alert can immediately proceed to closing the loop – a link will appear. For other elements of the message, you can add them by clicking the functions: Tags.
​

IV. Creating reports
​

For our purposes, we must create a minimum of one report. As mentioned earlier, information selected on the basis of filter c) and d), i.e. Open Loops and Unfinished Cases, will be reported. We only mentioned one report earlier because sometimes there is no need to report inaction within 2 days (as was the case with the Open Loops filter). You can only settle reporting on Unfinished Cases.
​

Therefore, we will create the report (or reports) based on filters. It can look like this:
​

In order to create a report, go to the Results tab and then: Recurring reports. There we call the report and choose the result format: Raw results (XLSX). What is important in this case is the choice of the right filter – Unfinished Cases. According to him, the results will be filtered.
​

Then we can specify not only how often the report will be sent, but also on which day of the week and at what time.
​

The next steps are already known to you – as in the case of e.g. alerts, you can create the content of the message yourself, adding automatically selected information to it using the button: Tags.
​

V. Sending invitations
​

The last stage is ahead of us – sending invitations to complete the survey. In this case, it does not differ in any way from the standard procedure. In short: the function of sending invitations allows you to send information encouraging to take part in the survey to your own database of respondents, i.e. people to whom we have an e-mail address. By using the Startquestion survey tool to send invitations, it is possible to monitor later whether individual respondents not only completed the survey, but even read the message or clicked on the study link.
​

You can read about how to send invitations step by step with the help of the Startquestion Guidebook.
​

Good luck!

​