Getting the Most Out of Delighted Templates
In this article:
- Choosing who to send to.
- Segmenting customers and adding additional information.
- Adding people regularly.
- Digging into your feedback.
- Customizing the experience based on the score given.
- Getting your colleagues involved.
Suggested next article: Dashboards and Filtering
Choosing who to send to
The most effective way to use Delighted Templates is to send at a regular tempo, ideally triggered by a key activity. This enables you to address any acute issues the moment they emerge, while providing a broad view of where you are strong and where your customers see opportunities for you to improve.
And while every organization is unique, most of our customers apply one of two approaches when deciding how they gather feedback with Delighted Templates.
1. People who perform a key activity
This approach works best for organizations where the key activity is, for the most part, the same for everyone. Some examples may be ordering a product, booking a hotel, becoming a paid member of a subscription service, etc. We’ve also seen companies survey after a customer care interaction, or after interviewing someone to join their company.
Surveying people soon after they have completed a key activity is a beneficial way to use Delighted Templates — as with this customer effort survey (CES) often used after a support encounters. You’ll get feedback from people who have recently gone through your entire customer experience and have fresh insights to share. This approach will capture feedback from all types of customers with a variety of expectations and perspectives.
2. Time-based snapshot of people
If your organization is more relationship-based like a SaaS business, web agency, law firm, etc., you may opt to survey using a snapshot approach. This "sampling" method involves sending to a cross section of people on a regular basis. This method works well when you’re interested in capturing feedback from both new and old customers. The below NPS question, gauging loyalty, is an excellent tool to deploy in this instance. And, with snapshots, you’ll have greater predictability around how much feedback you can expect, as you will be controlling how many people you survey with each batch.
Some customers choose to survey 1/12th of their user base each month. Others will survey 1/52nd of their user base each week. This approach allows you to connect with your entire user base at least once a year while still getting steady feedback on a regular basis.
Segmenting customers and adding additional information
Regardless of the approach you choose for surveying, it’s likely you’ll have important information about the customer experience or transaction that would be helpful in providing context for their feedback. You may want to know how new customers feel in comparison to returning customers. Or you may want to compare feedback from customers of different product lines.
You can also send along very specific information about the customer such as email or User ID. You’ll then have a unique identifier that you can use to tie that customer back to your other internal systems, making closing the loop even easier.
What are properties?
The above segmentations are easily achieved using what we call Properties. Properties in Templates allow you to instantly segment feedback into categories that are meaningful to your business:
For example, our fictitious clothing company Hem & Stitch might add a property for the Collection a customer purchased and a property for where they placed that purchase (Website, Retail Store, etc.) Then, in their Delighted Dashboard, they can filter to see their score and feedback for customers who purchased from the Men’s Collection from a Retail Store — without any technical knowledge or complex database queries:
You can add properties very easily — whether via Email, Web, or Link. When you survey people, you’ll send along the properties you want, and we’ll take care of the rest. There are no restrictions on the type or quantity of properties you can send. It’s totally up to you.
The majority of our customers opt to send as many properties as possible, even if they do not plan to filter on them initially. This approach keeps the door open to retroactive filtering you may want to perform in the future on all feedback you’ve collected to date.
Check out section 5. Managing People & Properties for a more in-depth look at segmenting your feedback.
Adding people regularly
Once you’ve decided who you want to survey, the next thing to decide how you will survey them. There are three key ways to add people to Delighted Templates for surveying: CSV/Excel, API, and Web.
CSV/Excel
Our Survey people page (ex. Email) allows you to send without using any of your organization’s engineering resources. We have many customers who send regularly using this method. Some send monthly, some weekly, and some each morning. All you need is a collection of email addresses. Once you have that information ready, simply load those details into a CSV/Excel file and upload it to Templates.
Many customers manually upload batches of people to survey for a while, then transition to the API later. The import interface is a great way to start collecting valuable feedback immediately, and gives you much more leverage when you begin rallying for vital development resources. You’ll know exactly which extra properties you want to include and how valuable the feedback you’ve been getting has been.
API
Our API allows you to automate the process of sending to people. While it does require engineering work, it is usually quite minimal. We’ve had customers integrate in less than 10 minutes. The API allows you to automatically trigger a send anytime a customer performs a key activity. For example, you can tell Templates when someone places an order and we’ll queue them up for a survey send. You can even send along a delay, so you can tell us when an order has shipped — but instruct us not to send the survey to the customer for X days. This allows the customer to fully experience a product before being asked to provide feedback.
Web
You can also survey visitors directly on your site with a simple code snippet. Similar to the API, our Web platform offers a great way to automate the survey process while requiring minimal engineering resources. Whether focusing on returning visitors, customers who just completed a purchase, or otherwise, you can fine-tune your Templates web surveys to reach your site visitors at the best possible moment. We also apply adaptive sampling to optimize the rate of feedback you’re receiving.
Throttling allows you to choose an amount of time that must pass before someone receives another survey from that Template. You can change your Throttling time period (2 weeks, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months) by visiting your Template settings.
Digging into your feedback
Once you’re receiving a steady flow of feedback along with a bunch of attached properties, you’ll likely begin to notice patterns in the feedback. Some of these patterns may already be on your radar, while others may be things you’re hearing for the first time. Use Trends to keep an eye on these patterns and monitor them on an ongoing basis.
Creating trends
A Trend can be created from any search and/or combination of property filters from the dashboard. For example, our fictitious clothing company, Hem & Stitch, might create a trend that shows them everyone who leaves a comment, or mentions Quality or Refund. You can create as many trends as you like, and sort through them quickly with the help of filters and search.
When you use trends, not only will you be able to zero in on feedback surrounding an area of interest, but you’ll also have a clear view as to how this is affecting your survey metrics (ex. NPS) and ultimately your organization.
Sometimes a customer will leave a vague comment or no comment at all! A way to provide more color to a score is to look for any tell-tale interactions with the customer prior to them responding to a Delighted Templates survey.
For example, an ecommerce company may notice that a customer who gave them a 4 was also recently trying to process a return for an order, or had a lengthy exchange with a customer support representative.
Digging into those interactions may provide the context needed to address the customer’s dissatisfaction. Using Delighted Templates alongside your existing business tools can also yield valuable insights.
Customizing the experience based on the score given
After someone responds to a survey, they are shown a page thanking them for their feedback. This experience can be customized to include a short message and/or a link. This gives you the power to leave different customers with a contextually sensitive last moment.
Our customers commonly use this to encourage those who provide positive feedback to follow them on social media, to share an upcoming promotion, or to inform people of a referral program. For detractors, they may apologize for the less than stellar experience and offer a VIP email address.
Getting your colleagues involved
Once you’re collecting feedback on a regular basis, you’ll likely want to share the insights across your organization in an effort to align everyone towards delighting customers.
Inviting other people
Anyone you invite to Delighted Templates will have read-only access to the account and all feedback, and will be able to create trends visible to the rest of the organization. You can also choose to make certain users Admins. This grants them the ability to set up surveys, invite other users, as well as update billing information.
Email digest
Everyone is busy, but most people want to stay focused on creating a great customer experience. To help keep customers top of mind for everyone, we send out an Email digest at the beginning of every week or month. The digest contains some recent feedback and your current 30-day score. You can adjust the frequency of your own digest in settings.
Alerts
In addition to inviting users, you can also turn on Alerts that will trigger an email notification when a response from a certain group is received (ex. NPS promoters, passives, detractors). This allows you to route responses to the people you deem responsible for addressing that particular group. Many customers use alerts to route detractors to their customer care team, who then address the feedback immediately.
