Response Rate: The Foundation of Your Experience Program

And they got a 90, I think 90% response rate. So these are people that actually, when they sent it out, they actually took the survey was 90%, not their open rate. The response rate was 90%. Wow. And the secret and the hack was literally just this very simple. Hello everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Account Experience podcast. And I'm excited about this next episode because it's something near and dear to my heart as an experienced and marketing professional. Can you guess what it is? That's right. Today, my co host and I dive deep into response rate. We talk about why you should care about your response rate and what a low response rate could actually mean for your business. And we dive into a great list of tactics that will help you increase your response rates, like testing the sender, the subject line, the sending time customization. We talk about using your CEO to your advantage. And we talked about a few other great strategies that will help you get more feedback into your business. And, and that's really what it's all about. At the end of the day, this episode is jam packed. So let's just dive right in and get right to it. Hello everybody. Welcome to another episode. I am Ian, your host and I'm here with Kerry T Self. Say hello, Kerry.

Hello everybody.

And today we got a pretty cool episode for you plan. We're going to talk about some foundational things. So specifically, response rates. How do you get your response rates up on your B2B relationship surveys and even your transactional service? How do you get that up? Because that feeds into everything. Get your response rate up, you'll get more feedback, you can close the loop with more customers, your retention rate goes up. We know that. We've done research with MIT that says the more you close the loop, the better your retention rate, the lower your turn rate. So Kerry, how do you increase your response rate?

Am I supposed to give you like a real quick answer on that? Okay, well, you know, let me share with you. I think what something that we've learned ourselves, even just in the last year, I think, and to boil this down to some basic, basic things, I think the key in anything is, and I'm going to throw this back at you, Ian, so prepare yourself. But you know, open the email. How do we get our customers, our clients, our accounts to open the email? Because if that's your main channel that you're utilizing to get that feedback, you gotta find a way. So why don't we start there? Why don't we. And again, I told you I'd throw It back at you. So, Ian, what are some of your suggestions? What do you do to get someone to open an email?

Yeah, so anybody without the background. I'm VP of Marketing at Customer Engage. That's why Kerry's asking me about opening the email. So that does kind of fall under my purview. Yeah. So there's a couple quote unquote tricks, and I hate to use that word, but there are some things you can do and they're not simple, they're not necessarily easy. But I'm going to start here because I talked to a customer recently. When they sent it out, they actually took the survey was 90%. Not their open rate, the response rate was 90%. Wow. And the secret and the hack was literally just this very simple. Reach out ahead of time and let them know you're going to send a survey. Let them know it's important to them that you get their feedback because they can then take that feedback and change the business, operate more efficiently on that feedback, yada, yada yada. But reach out ahead of time, have their sales team, their CSM team reach out and say, hey, we're about to send you the survey. It's really, really important to us that you fill this out. This is how we better our business. And they got a 90% response rate from that simple thing. It's crazy, isn't it?

I can't wrap my head around that.

I know.

So, okay, so you're saying reach out. So my question for you is, who's reaching out? Is it the account owner? Is it the marketing team? Is it the product? Is it the CEO? Who is it that's doing that? Reach out?

Yeah, and I think it really depends on the organization. So these guys, they had specific account owners, right? So they would. They're B2B, old school, B2B. They didn't have CSMs. They basically have account managers or relationship managers. And these are the people that are reaching out. So I would recommend the person or people that have the best relationship with your customer, that have the closest connection, reach out and prime that. Because I think that's really what it's about. It's creating that awareness of, instead of just receiving the survey one off randomly in your email inbox, prep them a little bit, tell them they're about to get it. It's gonna be around this time and date. This is what it will say. This is why it's important to us and why we really think you should give us your feedback. I think that's such an underrated tactic that's why I led with that. There's obviously a million different ways we can increase email open rates, but really the goal of the email open rate is to get a response. Right? I mean, that's at the end of the day, what's going to really drive changes if they actually take the survey. So I wanted to start there and work my way backwards. Another trick that I've actually personally done is lead with the CEO. So create a video, basically that is a personal video from the CEO explaining why this feedback is important for the business. That works extremely well. But you can also send the email from the CEO as well. Now that can create some back channel issues like angry customers kicking back to your CEO. But I think the, it's worth the squeeze because I think that also puts the CEO front and center on customer feedback. And I think that shows that, you know, this organization is kind of backing up what they say specifically when you lead with the CEO. So that's kind of interesting. Have you ever seen that one, Kerry? Out in the wild?

Well, it's, it's funny because, you know, the last two examples you just gave there was one of my, one of our partners that we work with who kind of runs our education platform has taken both approaches we had two quarters ago, they put a message out from their CEO. It was a very big, broad one. And I'll be honest, my interest might have gone 50, 60% on that one. I was like, okay, that's interesting. You know, is there something he's talking about that I want that strikes it? But the following one that I recently just got within a month ago happened to be from my customer success manager. And to me, she is the holy grail. She is the most important contact I have. And if she sends me something, I know it's valuable. So I immediately opened it. I immediately heard her call to action and she did exactly what you're saying. She did a really neat job of kind of putting in there a message that just called out, hey, next week you're going to get a survey. Could you go ahead. This is why it's important to us. That's why it's important to me. And this is why it's important to you. It's kind of neat. She shared all three aspects. So the CEO. Yeah, if I was more brand loyal, which again, a CEO call. And we've done that right. Even our thank you email. I know we'll probably talk about that on the. But we had a reverse effect on that where the thank you almost became a call to action. On the next survey campaign from our CEO worked really well. So, yeah, I've seen a couple of examples of that recently, and I think. I think you're right. You got to look at yourself as a business and look at your customer base and go, what do they value the most? Is it that CEO vision, or is it that personal relationship that they built? Or is it product? Sometimes even product reaching out and asking for that rings a bell, too. But, yeah, seen it used on and off. I've seen it done successfully, and I've seen it missed, too. There's nothing I hate more than that generic templated email, too, that just is like, okay, I saw that last month. Why would I do anything different this month with it?

I actually got one. It was a couple years ago now, but it was from the CEO, and it was one of those unfortunate marketing errors where every marketer that's listening to this has been here before, so I can empathize with this person. But it was from the CEO and the name was hi, Token. So literally, it was like the marketing personalization fill token that just aired out. And so it's from the CEO saying, hi, Token, no fixing. That went out to all the customers. So it was. It was a. So that's the risk. So there's upside, there's downside. But actually, one of our customers had a really cool video from their CEO, too. I forget who it was, and I wouldn't mention it out loud without their permission anyways, but they had a. Their CEO was climbing a mountain, I think, and they kind of related it to climbing the mountain. We need your feedback to get to the top. It was really cool. And that did really well for them as well. And that was. That was a couple years ago, but interesting. So you mentioned something that I want to dive into right now. I mean, it's our podcast. We can do whatever we want, right? I mean, let's just do it. So following up from the CEO. So, like, sending a summary email explaining what feedback you received and what kind of changes you've made in the business as a result of that feedback. And we did this, or we do this every quarter with our CEO, Adam. Um, and you're. You're a big part of this, Carrie. So I really want to dive deep on this one. Um, but I just want to kind of frame it. So the reason we do this is because if people see that their feedback had an impact on your business, you're going to be so much more likely to open up that email to get that response back to you. And to do it again and again and again. So it's super important that, you know, we're not just asking them to fill it out once for no reason. You need to show them that if you fill this out, you're gonna have a real change on the way we do business. And that is such. Again, like that first tip we talked about, that is such an underrated piece of getting your response rate up is showing them that you've actually taken action on their feedback. So talk to us, what you guys did, Carrie, at CG with Adam, and walk us through kind of the results of that.

You know, I love, and I'm gonna use a word here that, you know, I think we sometimes throw around, but when you love something or someone, you're personally invested, you want it to be better, you want it to grow. And I think we suffer from having such a huge account base, customer base of people who love us. And because of that, they are very motivated to give us that feedback, to give us their input. You know, it's funny. We have the most critical. I think we talked about this recently. We. We have the most critical group of promoters, and I mean that in the most positive way. Like, here's your 10, but you're going to have to earn it. These are the things that I want to see because I'm, you know, because I love you this much. But those are the ones that give you the best feedback because they genuinely do appreciate care, but their expectations are through the roof. And really, you know, the challenge was, how do we take this feedback and then how do we respond to it? We could just throw lip service out there and go, look, these are the enhancements we heard and make it generic. Or we can kind of tear away that shield or that protection we put up and kind of put ourselves out there. And I think that's a little bit of what we did. I literally remember our leadership team sitting in a room, and we literally put every single comment up on that screen. I'm not even exaggerating. We went through them one by one, and it was. For me, it was amazing to see the different departments start off a little bit defensive and protective. Like, oh, wait, we fixed that. Or, wait, wait, wait. That was because. And then as the meeting went through, what we realized, this was an exercise. And wait a minute. This is loving your customer and your client. This is not about justifying or protecting yourself from the feedback. And I think it's an important thing going into this. And I think our whole exercise was, all right, what are they telling us that we could be better at, you know, And I think we took the top five or six, and we said, okay, these are hard to hear. There's a lot of people working really hard to make us great. And some of these comments kind of sting a little bit or a lot, depending on who you are. And, you know, we sat in the room and we talked about that, but what were the things that came out of that? We changed. We had some enhancements to production. We changed our approach to our sales. I remember there were some key takeaways. And what Adam did a really good job of doing was he then took those notes and those actions, and he crafted them in almost an email. It was almost like he walked into a room and sat down with each of those customers and says, you know what, Ian? You told me this. I'm gonna tell you. Yeah, you're right. And this is what we're doing about it. And we literally went down that line of the top four or five of them, gave that feedback. We talked about. We took it on the chin, but we said, this is exactly what we're doing, or this is what actions we're taking based on what you told us. And that went out in the form of an email. It was quite simple, but it was dynamic in the way that it spoke to all those different comments. And where we could grab an individual comment, we shared that. So I think that spoke volumes to us listening, but taking a step further and putting action behind that, you know, how do you grow from that, that feedback?

Yeah, And I think that was such a great exercise, too. Um, and it's worth noting, too, that there were some things he actually put in the email, too, where he's like, you know what? That's a really good point, but we can't do that right now. There's nothing we can do about that right now.

Yeah.

So it's not like we're ignoring it. If it's a really good point. It's just. And it's okay to say, you know what, guys? That's. That's a really good point, but we just can't do that right now. And you can stop it right there. And I think people respect that as long as you address the fact that we heard it and we've addressed that. You know what? There's not much we can do. But I think that that exercise is a quarterly exercise for us. But it's so powerful, man. Not only for the impact it has on our customer base and our account base, but. But what it has on us. I Mean, like you said, we were going through the comments and it's like, oh wait, no, no, no, no, that's not, that's not product. Like they get, everybody got defensive about certain things, right? Their world, they're like, wait, no, no, no, we fixed that. That they don't know what they're blah, blah, blah. But I mean it really does put things into perspective. It's like, all right, let's just make sure that we communicate this properly. And I mean there's so many valuable things that can feed in your business from that feedback. And I think that just really hits home. The whole point of this conversation is like if you drive your response rate up, you get more of this type of feedback. It's just going to do great things for your business. And that's really what it's all about. At the end of the day. I mean I don't care if you're customer success, customer experience, account experience, the end of the day the goal is to improve your business and make your business more customer account centric. I think that's, that's really the end of the day what we're here for. So that was, that was a really cool one that I think I wanted to dive into. So thanks for that Kerry. So moving on, we got a couple other ones that might be obvious, but let's lead off with this one. Keep your survey short. You want a better response rate. Don't do a 15 page survey with CSAT and all this crap that nobody is ever going to see or use. It's for you at that point. It's not for the customer, it's not to get that feedback and make it actionable. If you ask me even a 10 question CSAT survey, like it's not necessarily for you at that point or that's not necessarily for the customer, it's for you. Again, I think keep your survey short is a huge thing for us specifically because we preach this all the time. We have customers that want to do the 20 page CSAT surveys and we have to talk them out of it. Basically say, you know what, we are a system of action. And if you have a 20 question CSAT, you're not going to take action on that data like prove to us can and you know, maybe we'll lay off but we haven't seen a customer that really does take true action off a 20 question CSAT survey yet. So what's your feedback on that one? Keep it short. Anything you want to mention on that one?

Yeah, and I think your key word was Right. It's action. You know, we talk about this constantly, but don't ask a question unless you're going to do something with it. Right. And I think sometimes the statistics and the. In the. And the analytics and all this data we think is power and that we want to build to make a case. Well, is there anything you're really going to do with that? What are you going to do with that information? And yeah, I think you nailed it. I think if you're going to ask a question in a survey and you want it to be healthy, make sure that there's going to be an action attached to that particular question. There's a reason why we embraced NPS and we love it so much. It's one simple question. It's a set of drivers, right? After that, it's very clear action. Frontline knows what they need to do. Management can be very tactical. Pull that stuff together, and then it really helps a company make really quick strategic decisions. So. Yeah, and the other thing is, you know, we talk about abandonment. If we're going to jump into a metric here and we talk about response rates, you know, abandonment. How many people start a survey and leave it.

There you go.

I'm guilty, too. You know, how many times do I get a. Do you have a minute to fill out a survey? And, you know, four minutes in, I'm thinking, well, someone didn't time this. These are a lot of questions. And I feel like. And then I get kind of irritated, and I just want to finish. So then even the data on the back end of a lot of those surveys aren't necessarily valuable anyway. So, you know, really, you're going to capture. I think, unfortunately, your attention span for a good survey is 30 seconds to a minute. Think that's where you get your quality data that you can take action on.

So my favorite trick, and I. When I say favorite, I hate it, is the. And I think one of the companies that I won't mention by name, but it rhymes with small tricks they do, which is basically they start the survey and then you take that first page of questions, right? And it jumps up to like 75%. You're like, oh, wow, what a short survey. I'm in. Awesome. And then next page goes by, and it goes to 80, and the next page goes by, it goes to 85. And you're like, oh, my God. All right, so this is not at all what I signed up for. And it's. It's that type of stuff. Like, even if you get the end result, which is a response like, I'm gonna remember that and I'm not gonna take the next one.

Right.

Like true, true talk. I'm not going to take the next one that is coming from you guys because I know that even if it says 75 after that first page, it probably won't be. I, I mean, that stuff I might give you short term games, but if you want long term customer feedback coming into you, that is not the way to do it. It just isn't. People don't have patience for that stuff anymore. They really don't. And I kind of chuckle every time I see it now. It used to get me pretty angry, but I just like, oh my God, guys, you're still, we're still doing this, huh? Okay, got it.

Well, it's funny, you know, we align our surveys with touch points and when you do something like that, you make the survey itself an annoying touch point.

Yeah.

Which is ironic. So the tool that you're using to measure these touch points with your accounts, you now have turned into a very annoying touch point in itself. So you start to get negative feedback about the survey that you're using to get feedback. And you're right, people just leave. People just don't do it the next time.

This episode of the Account Experience podcast is sponsored by CustomerGage, the leading B2B account experience software that ties right revenue to your experience data in real time to help you make better account centric decisions that drive revenue growth. Quick question. What do you guys think is the number one reason B2B experience programs fail? Believe it or not, it's lack of C suite buy in. In Customer Gauge's research with mit, they've found the quickest way to align yourselves with the C Suite is to actually align with what they care about most, which is revenue. That's why Customer Gig is literally built from the ground up to maximize and track the revenue contribution from your experience program in real time. Companies like dhl, Anheuser Busch, Heineken, uh, yeah, we get a good amount of free Bear 1 login, Iron Mountain, H&R Block, SuperOffice and SugarCRM are already using Customer Gauge to maximize their growth by tying their programs to revenue. And with over $10 billion worth of account revenue active actively being managed in Customer Gauge. Yeah, that's billion. With a B, they're the leader in the space. But maybe even more interesting, they found that once you get alignment with that C suite, the needs of these B2B practitioners or the program champions are evolving too. In such a complex account environment, it can be really tough to measure and act on feedback quickly across multiple departments, divisions, or even locations. Luckily, Customer Gauge has you covered there as well with account native features that easily help you not only measure the feedback for multiple stakeholders in an account, but act on that feedback in real time. Because at the end of the day, if you're not empowering your frontline staff with the right insights to address customer issues, you're going to be dealing with a churn issue. It's not a matter of if, it's really a matter of when. Customer Gauge helps you distribute this experience data across your entire organization, regardless of department, regardless of location, regardless of division, all in real time. No manual spreadsheets or a team of analysts are needed. CustomerGage's mission is to help B2B companies harness the power of account centric growth to drive meaningful change in their businesses. And that's a powerful thing. If you want to see Customer Gauge in action, go ahead and check out CustomerGage.com and get a demo of account experience today. You won't regret it. Yeah, I think your point about the abandonment rate is a very good one too. Like you shouldn't just be tracking response rate, you should be tracking how many people hit that page and just don't finish it. Because I'm guaranteeing you on those long surveys, it's probably 60%, which is crazy. You've given up 60% of the people that could have given you a customer feedback and you guys could have done all the stuff we just talked about, but yet here you are. You want to get the 100 questions answered so you guys can fiddle around with data on the back. And that's not what this is about, guys. Account experience. B2B experience is not about analysts running data models and giving it to the CEO. Do you think the CEO cares about your significance or anything like that? I mean, it's just, it's about action. Like it doesn't have to be statistically significant to take action on it. That's the thing.

And our sweet spot. Two to six questions, right?

Yeah.

And really, if you can't figure out what you need to figure out in six questions, you know, you might have something you might need to be break this apart more or there's data in there that doesn't need to be in there.

Yeah, the drivers too. I think you mentioned those earlier and that's something that maybe we do a whole separate episode on. But drivers are a great way to get that root cause analysis 98% of the time without asking a thousand Questions? It's just a very simple way of doing it. We basically set it up in our system to basically be standard, and our clients pretty much exclusively use those drivers. And it's one of the best ways to do it without pissing people off. All right, moving on. So test your subject line relentlessly. So this is where the marketing side comes in. Most people think that you can just send out the survey and say, hey, give us your feedback. Pretty common subject line for that. And magically, your response rates will go up and everything will be great. And some people even think that, you know, what it is, is what it is, and it won't really change. That's just not true. So the way I look at this, this marketing side of it is it's a math equation. Right. So the more people you get to open your. Your email, the more people will take that survey, the more feedback you'll get. It's. It's a funnel, right. It flows down. It kind of waterfalls into this math equation of if you get. And it starts at the top, if you get more people to simply open that email, you will get more feedback, you will get more actionable results, you'll get higher retention gains. So that might be a stretch for some people, but I'm confident because I've seen it in action. I used to run a program at a large bank. I saw this in action. So my suggestion is to test your subject line relentlessly. Don't that. Because something got you at 20% open. That's enough.

So, Ian, so I hear you about the testing. I love that. But come on, people want to hear what works. So come on, give us a handful of what's worked in your past, and then I'm going to flip it around. Be prepared. What doesn't work, what stuff you should never do in that subject line that just. It might get you a quick response, but it's going to end up hurting you in the long run.

Yeah. So there's a lot of things you can try. And again, this is very dependent. I'm hesitant to give, like, specific ones, but I will throw a couple out there. But again, my caveat being here, guys, is that it's very dependent upon your audience. Right. So as anything in marketing, I can tell you something, and it probably would do amazing for some of you, and it would crash and burn for others. So again, your audience is your audience. You need to test internally. So what I mean by that is take two subject lines, send out the email, split half your audience on one subject line, half your audience on another subject line. Figure out which one wins.

Great.

That's the champion for that week. Next week, send out the next one. That winner Champion subject line versus another subject line. Keep testing whether it's your weekly transactional surveys or your quarterly relationship surveys. Test, test, test, test. But again, going back to that kind of like personal approach, I've found as a general rule that emails from people versus companies do better than company emails. So basically corporates customer gauge take our survey that doesn't work as well as for example carry self at customer gauge. Hey, I really care about this. Please take my survey type of deal I think at a high level. And it's also proven there's a lot of statistics out there where like you're going to get better open rates from people. So I'd recommend leading with somebody in the company that is highly visible like a carry to send out that survey or a CEO second piece is like something that's a little bit out of the ordinary. So most subject lines I see are we want to hear from you or take your feedback. Sometimes it's like, hey, do you have two minutes or can you answer this for me real quickly? They're a little bit more aggressive and some people might disagree with that. But again, it's a math equation, right? So if you put all of these things into the strategy of hey, we're going to be sending a survey two days from now, it's going to be from this person, please take it, we really care about it. And then you send that survey, hey, do you have two minutes to take this question mark from Carrie? So you have that name recognition. All these things work together. It's not like, it's not like your whole strategy should be based around your subject line so you can get a little bit more experimental on those things. I feel like people are afraid to. And at the end of the day, guys like, you need to figure out what works and if it, if it, if it's something like that, that you know, you've prepped people and you can kind of just say, hey, here's the survey we talked about. Make it personal. That tends to work way better than we care about your feedback or something along those lines. Granted, that can work, but I would challenge you guys to try other ways to do that. Because think about it from a competition standpoint, right? So if everybody else is doing that same subject line of hey, give us your feedback, you're going to blend in. You're going to be just another number that you know, if they're getting 10 surveys in a month. If you guys all have the same subject line, I mean, they're, they're just going to tune it out after a while. So you have to kind of go, I don't want to say outside, but you have to kind of go on the periphery of that generally accepted approach. So let me stop there. But I would say just test again. Test, test, test. And I know that's hard for some of you because you're most likely not marketers, or maybe you are marketers and it's not. But I'm sure somebody in your company can help you get your system to a point where you can split your audience and start testing subject lines, because that is super, super important. And test people too. So I did a test when I was running my program where we tested the CEO versus, like the carry of the company versus me, the marketer. Don't just test subject line, test people, test senders, test formats. Do plain text versus branded. You can test everything, everything, everything. It's crazy what you can test these days and do it. Absolutely do it. Because even if you get 10% additional open rates, that's going to matter downstream.

I was going to ask you, I was going to go. And I guess you did answer that. So you said you wouldn't. But in a way, I think you gave some really great input on that subject line. But let's go beyond the subject line. Let's talk about the body of the email, the content of the email itself. You know, because there's one thing to open the email, there's another thing to click on that link or in the email to go to that survey. So what works? What doesn't work, what would you recommend in that? And where have you seen success?

Yeah, so this one's kind of a various answer, but in general, what we've found to be more successful in marketing lately is plain texting emails. That's going to be shocking to some people that say marketing is branding. It's making it look pretty. It's shifted, I think, a little bit where specifically brands need to pick their spots, right? So like sometimes a plain text email from a person is way more effective than a branded email. Sometimes a branded email, like a welcome email, for example, is a great example of this. Like sometimes a branded email with like a ton of content on it is way more effective than a plain text. Hey, welcome. It doesn't have that same effect. So you need to pick your spots. I think surveys are interesting because we've tested it a couple different ways, but I think in General, you can get away with an embedded survey where it looks like the 0 through 10 in the actual email itself, a small header. I think that works pretty nicely. We try to keep them very simple because you want them to do one thing. If they open that email, your next job is to get them to actually click on that link link and go to the survey. Right. So my philosophy on marketing is keep it very simple and ask them to do one thing. When you send that subject line out, I want them to do one thing. When you drop them on that email, I want them to do one thing which is click on that link. When you drop them on that survey, I want them to do one thing which is fill out that survey and complete it so the format matters. Again, that's one of those things you're going to have to test for yourself. But we've done a good amount of testing and found that an image header with an embedded survey link with just a little bit of text, keep it simple is the best way to kind of present that data and it generally works really well for us.

I was just on a side note and this might have a place, this might not have a place. But let's go beyond the email. Have you seen any other channels that work successfully in getting better response rates or better feedback from accounts or clients?

Email is still king. So that's what we've seen. So email is definitely still king text in certain countries. Right. So then this gets interesting where like depending on the country, certain mediums are better. Right. So I think in general US and northern west northwestern Europe is basically email. But if you get into Africa, for example, like text is generally the best way. Or WhatsApp even is another really strong way because there's not a ton of wifi in certain areas. So they have cell service. So WhatsApp surveys we found work really well. Text work really well. And it really depends on the region. And there's preferences too, I think as well, like almost. I think the US is maybe even shifting to especially in SaaS, like in app maybe might be more interesting or like chat might be more interesting. But I think as a whole, if I'm being very generalized, email is still heads and shoulders better than everything else. I think you actually have some experience here. You went from a telephony or a telephone based surveying system, mystery shopper type of deal to email. So talk to us about that.

Yeah, I think what was important was the immediacy of the data. I think when you start depending on human beings to collect data and to feed it to you like a mystery shop, let's say, or a call center, which are still good vehicles for certain environments. But there's a delay in that. There's also the risk of multiple hands touching that data before it gets directly back to you. So yeah, I do think that email and embedded URL link is a quick way. You brought up something too. I was going to ask you and you beat me to it, which I love. But in product, I think it's a mixed bag sometimes. I think sometimes if it's very product specific or destination specific, meaning if I'm logging into a platform for a specific reason and the survey is about that makes perfect sense. But I think I've seen some companies really mess up the relationship by jamming them in a product. If I'm trying to log in and pull a report from my boss and I need it on the fly and that pop up is there, do I really want to slow down, stop and give some survey, you know, a survey feedback in that moment. So I think it works if it's strategic like you said. I think you're right. I think it's understanding your audience and what works well. But.

Yeah, let's dive into that real quick. So that's a really good point, Gary. If your surveys or your in app pop ups aren't based off of a specific journey point and you're just randomly throwing it out there, like what are you actually gaining? Like what are you, what are you measuring in that scenario? I think that's a really good point to bring up. Like a lot of companies, I think specifically SAS because they're, they just run so quickly, they think NPS is just throwing it in their app. And I think it's way, way more than that. And it goes beyond NPS too. I mean it's literally you need to map your journey and understand the touch points that you are trying to measure and trying to improve and trying to act on. And I think if you just throw it in your app randomly, like you said, when you're trying to pull a report for your boss, you're gonna get bad feedback. But it might be situational. You have no idea what that situation is. So what are you actually measuring? What are you actually going to affect? It's kind of interesting that that's become. Hate to say it, but kind of the new Norman SaaS for a lot of companies, like just throw it up randomly and it's, it's just not a good look in my opinion. You need to have it tied to a specific touch point. And maybe some do, maybe some don't. I'm not saying they're all bad but. But I do. I mean I use a good amount of sass as marketer and more often than not I get the random pop up because that's really all these systems, some systems are capable of is just saying hey, we have a pop up for that. And you can't really trigger it based off of like logic or smart routing or anything like that. So I think it's important to really make that clear. Is like an app 2 is historically pretty ineffective for anything outside of education.

Well, it's interesting to use a good example of that because you're talking about SaaS. But almost every company now is advancing how they speak to other accounts or to their customer. And I'll take my bank for example, my financial institution. I've seen this evolution because I'm in the industry so I pay a lot of attention to it. But I've seen this evolutionary change not only with what's going on with current situations. I mean the in person engagement has been non existent almost in the last three, four months. Right. But even before that they were finding ways for people to bank online bank quicker. You know, instead of hiring foretellers, let's hire one teller. And you know, even when you walk up they had signs you can log in online and get the same services. And when they first started it, I was getting hit with these survey requests and part of me is like I need to move money right now. I do not need to be telling you how you're doing. You know, so now you've just upset me with this, with this request. But they learned someone must have said something or their feedback must have been poor or they looked at that abandonment rate and saw how many people clicked out of it, said okay, that was bad idea, let's fix that. And now the approach of the tact that they take. Ironically you said email, but after I log in I have the engagement. About an hour later I get an email or a text alert that says hey, you were just online. And I think they've even come up with a savvy name for like their online. It's like Sarah the digital teller or something, you know, but they said, you know, you just had an engagement with Sarah the digital teller. And but they've learned, they listened. So sometimes what you're listening to is not necessarily what is being said, but what's not being said or a data point abandonment rate or you know, so sometimes listening or hearing what your clients are telling you what your accounts are telling you is absence of signal, you know, and that's a metric in itself. And I think that's where really good companies back up. And, okay, is this working? Is this healthy? Don't do it just because you can.

Yes.

You know, do it. Right.

Yeah, I think that's. Absence of signal is another really good point too. I think most companies don't look at that. I think they leave it be because they're either too afraid to look under the rug type of deal or. But yeah, we pay a ton of attention to absence of signal and account experience and customer gauge. Honestly, we have account vitals, which is almost like a journey mapping type product. And it will be very clear where there's absence of signal. And that's a pretty good key for our CSMs and our account team and our management team to kind of like, all right, that's. That's interesting. Let's maybe reach out and see what's going on. And it can be a very powerful indicator for sure. So, yeah, thanks for bringing that up. All right, so last one. You ready for this?

I don't know.

Okay. Set response rate targets. So this one is. And we all hate targets. I think we all have them in our life almost every day. But I think at the end of the day, nobody really likes a target because it puts pressure on you. Right. And it makes you perform, which is why they still exist, because they work. But set response rate targets, I think that's a very easy one to implement. So we want to increase our response rate from 40 to 50% in the next quarter. But it also can galvanize your organization around something like that, right? If you set a target and say, hey, this is where you need to be in three months. What are you gonna do about it this week? What are you gonna do about it this month? It also gives your management, middle management, that talking point, right? Like, all right, so you need to get your account specifically up to this level. And the reason why we led with this one last is because I think this is one of those things that now that, you know, all the other things we talked about, the last thing you should do is set a response rate target, because then they can use all those previous tips we just said to get the response rates up. And if you set that target, that's your job as a management team, is to set that target, keep the pace with what you guys want to hit, and then rely on your team to understand what the previous tips we talked about were to get that response rate up so what are your thoughts on that one, Carrie?

Well, you know, it's funny. We. We throw metrics around so much, and I think we're. We're moving into age. When we talk about account experience, it's no longer looking at one single metric. You know, you can't just say, MPS is a high and we're doing well. So it's removing that vacuum mentality on that one metric. And the one metric I would tell you that you can look at and really measure your engagement with your accounts, where you can really say, this really does tell a story. Standing alone is response rate. If your accounts are willing to not only give you feedback, but willing to give you feedback frequently or regularly, that means you have an engaged base. Forget what the score is, forget what they're saying, but it's like a relationship. And I know we've used this analogy and we throw around. Let me go back to the love analogy a little bit. But when a couple is healthy, they are talking, they are sharing communication. You know, if I come home or I've had a busy week and I turn to my wife and I ask her a question and she doesn't respond at all, I know I'm in trouble, right? If it's silence, right? Or I sent a text and I don't see the three little dots, I'm in trouble. I just know it. And it's the same thing with our accounts. I think when you. When you put that question out there and you don't hear anything, there's probably something wrong. And it goes beyond them being upset. Being upset is okay. If I see the three dots and the three dots are blinking for five minutes, I'm like, oh, God, I'm getting it. But at least she's talking to me. Yeah, it's that silence that kills you. So I do think that response rate and setting a target on it is probably one of the most powerful when I've been. Because, again, I was on the other side of this. I was the customer, and I did come the customer gauge with a need. And what customer gauge was willing to give me and what they were able to give me was the ability to measure this quickly and to see it and to put it alongside of other metrics and know what that health of that relationship is like. And that was an eye opener. We completely flipped. Let's not look at mps, and this is going to scare people. We said, let's even take revenue off the table for a minute here. Let's just focus on where do we start? Let's Focus on response rate. And let's see, can we get. Can we grow that number? Can we get more people to give us feedback?

That's right.

About our relationship and then about transactional touch points. And that was the metric that became the holy grail of metrics for us at one point, at the beginning, and then we started to layer the other metrics on there because I think what happens is you start to get this mentality from management and Frontline like, oh, no, no, no, don't send them a survey because we know it's going to be low. Or, oh, we know that particular country gives low scores, so maybe we don't survey as many of them. You know, we call this gaming the system. It could be almost an indirect. It might even be intentional, but you're still gaming it. You're not getting true feedback. And I think this is so vital to what we do is if you just focused on response rate and made that your leading metric, then you could start layering these other metrics on. But, yeah, that silence, that no response. You should be afraid of that. That's probably your worst statistic in your wheelhouse.

I think you just came up with a new industry, the net marriage score, maybe something like that. But no, it's a really good point, man. I think engagement is really where it's at, and that's at the end of the day. Again, back to that original intro. I was like, engaged customers are what we're here for. Like engaging your customer base, getting feedback from them, using that feedback to better your business. And if you're not getting that, what are we doing this for? Like, that's really where we're at is that's the whole point of this thing, is to engage with your customer base. So if you can't do that at a, you know, a good level, if you're getting a 5% response rate, you got problems, man. You gotta, you gotta tear down and really do a tour of those account bases to make sure that, you know, why are you not responding to these things? Like, what's going on? Well, how can we change things? How can we help? I think that's, that's a really good indicator, is like, lack of engagement is a scary thing. You never want to be in that position. So if you, if you are listening to this and you are there, there's definitely things you can do again, reach out to your accounts by phone, by email, by text, whatever it takes. Take a boat, doesn't matter. Like, that's a signal to you to start that conversation. As soon as you can.

Yeah, I think. I think when you're talking about actions, I think you hit it on the head. If you're going to look at one thing right now about improving your campaign, your response rate, looking at that as an engagement measurement, really empower your management teams, your frontline teams, who's owning that account, to really go after that. No. Signal that silence and figure out why it's there. Because only one of two things is going to come from either you're going to re engage, you're going to find out why they're quiet, you're going to add value to that relationship, or you're going to realize it's not a healthy relationship at all and you don't need to have it. I know it's the scariest thing to tell people, but there are times where sometimes you look at your customer base and go, we're spending a lot of resources, a lot of energy, a lot of time on a group that maybe we shouldn't be investing our time in this group. This is not helping us grow.

Yeah. And that's again, maybe a whole separate episode, but there is such a thing as good churn, um, which we should maybe talk about here coming up. But it's a really good point, Carrie, and a really good way to wrap up. Um, hopefully this is helpful, guys. We really wanted to do a deep dive and response rate because that's where we really get that foundation right. That's where it all starts. You get that engagement up, good things tend to happen in your program. I want to thank my co host here, Carrie T. Self, for joining me today, as always. And thanks for listening to the B2B Experience podcast. Thank you to our sponsors, Customer Gauge, and we'll see you next time.