Best Practices for Using Templates

Connect the dots in your XM program

Experience Management (XM) research connects each and every touchpoint in the customer or employee journey. Consistently monitoring, improving, and evolving each step along this journey is the imperative of a competitive XM program. In this article, we'll use the terms "CX" and "EX" for Customer Experience and Employee Experience.

Focusing stakeholders on "why"

Bad experiences currently cost global businesses around $4.7 trillion in consumer spending annually (no, really— check out our blog for more), so it's important to build a strong business case convincing your stakeholders that investing in CX is worth the time and effort.

If you find yourself having to build a case for your survey campaign, you may find this best practices article, Proving the Value of a Templates Program, helpful.

Delighted Template's self-serve experience management platform is perfectly suited to help you design, create, and launch powerful XM campaigns. Get set up in minutes—no technical knowledge required.

After setup, your Delighted Dashboard becomes your control panel, with you at the helm. Each customer touchpoint, from onboarding to churn, has its own independent controls. As you listen to your customers, new insights will help you to drive improvements, pushing every experience touchpoint up and to the right.

How many Templates do I need?

The short answer is that you’ll need a unique Delighted Template for each separate survey that you want to send to your respondents. One survey, one Template—no matter how many different ways you distribute it (ex. Email, Web, Kiosk, Link, SDK).

However, this rule of thumb doesn't mean you can't reuse the same Template over and over again, or delete obsolete Templates in favor of entirely new campaigns. (See Creating and Previewing Templates in section 1. Template Options & Settings.)

Let’s dig in deeper by examining the difference between relational and transactional surveys.

Relational vs. Transactional Surveys

Relational surveys assess a relationship with customers. They are designed to sample participants at a regular cadence. For instance, NPS surveys are reusable. Sent to sample customer loyalty to a brand quarter-over-quarter, they are filtered by date range to segment quarterly performance metrics. (There is little reason to have one Template called NPS Q3 2022 and another named NPS Q1 2023.) Use a single NPS Template and tap into Properties and Date filters to distinguish one NPS survey outreach from the next.

Transactional surveys are triggered by key touchpoints in the customer journey, such as a purchasing event, a product return, or an interaction with a support representative. Generally speaking, each transactional touchpoint requires a unique survey, yet they can actively gather longitudinal data for years to come. Segmenting by “date range” allows a single transactional CSAT survey to comparatively track satisfaction on a “daily,” “monthly,” “quarterly,” and “annual” basis.

Through the use of properties, the same transactional survey can be used to identify experience gaps by segmenting results by “location,” “product line,” “gender,” or by any other demographic built into the survey. To learn more about the power of properties, visit this Core training video: 6: All About Properties and Alerts or read our Properties overview article in this Help Center.

Choose the right methodology for your program

When adding a new Template, the most important decision is which methodology and question type best fits the specific issue being studied. Each unique methodology is designed to collect feedback strategically along the customer journey, including:

Net Promoter Score or NPS (a loyalty metric)
Customer Effort Score or CES (an effort or frustration metric)
Customer Satisfaction or CSAT (a satisfaction metric)
Product Market Fit or PMF (a product match to the consumer metric)
And more

The benefit of designing multiple Templates with unique question types, metrics, customizations, settings, and integrations is that you can push and pull data more specifically around your organization and craft unique survey experiences for every touchpoint.

And, you can add a lot of detail to your analysis. Each Delighted Template follows the core metric question with an open-ended comment, which gives respondents a chance to give detail and nuance to their score selection. Delighted also allows up to 10 Additional Questions which can add depth and insight to the initial responses.

Regardless of your project choices, get the most out of your efforts by:

Setting up triggers: Set up a separate CSAT Template to fire off support-focused surveys, or a CES Template to survey customers after they visit your Help Center. Run your NPS survey based on rules you’ve defined—with no disruption to your sending cadence or survey logic!
Sharing while also protecting your data: For example, you can configure NPS and CES Dashboards to sync and share survey responses to Slack while keeping PMF or CSAT feedback anonymous within your Delighted account. You can also assign user roles and configure the levels of security around who can and can’t manipulate the incoming data. (See Admin training video 3: Addressing security.)
Carefully designing your Templates: Design your Templates to best fit the various moments in the customer lifecycle. This will keep data regarding the onboarding process separate from post-purchase or post-support touchpoints.

Visit our Best Practices archive

Take your Templates to the next level by reviewing some of the industry leading practices found in section 11. Best Practices of our Help Center. Here’s a sampling of these curated articles.

What's New in Delighted?

Stay abreast of our latest product improvements by visiting our Product Updates located in section 12. Training & Tutorials.

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