Best Practices for Chat Surveys
What is a chat survey?
Chat is becoming the preferred method of communication for many customers. It’s efficient, often comes with self-service options and usually really easy to use. It is a great opportunity to ask for feedback following a chat interaction because it’s all within a web browser or app. It also tends to have a higher response rate than other feedback channels due to the contemporaneous nature of the feedback request. Below we have included some of the best practices you can adopt to nail your chat survey.
Best practices for chat surveys
1. Consider the nature of your chat interactions
Are you using a chatbot, or do customers speak directly to your agents? You may need different surveys for different types of interactions. For example, if a chat is entirely self-service or only with the help of a chatbot, you might want to evaluate how easy it was for a customer to get the answers they needed. If a customer is speaking to an agent, you will want to know how easy the agent made the customer’s experience. While these two customer effort questions are similar, they are evaluating different types of experiences. Consider this when you ask your survey questions and evaluate the responses.
2. Location, location, location
You have a variety of options when it comes to where and how you trigger your chat survey.
You can embed the survey within the chat, have a pop-up survey appear, or redirect the customer to a new page to give feedback. Embedding the survey within the chat makes it really easy for customers to respond, so it will likely give you the highest response rate. But it can look strange and unnatural if you are asking more than a few short questions, in which case it can be better to link to a feedback form outside of the chat module. While it is also possible for the end of a chat interaction to trigger an email survey, we recommend keeping it within the realm of the chat channel for convenience.
3. Keep it short!
We give this advice for almost every kind of survey, but it holds especially true for a chat survey. Customers tend to use chat because it is efficient and convenient. Keep the survey length short, so they can answer quickly and move on with their day. Furthermore, a chat window is usually quite small, so considering the limited amount of space allowed for text, you will want to keep the questions concise and clear. If you’re linking to a survey outside of the chat window, you can make it less concise, but to reduce drop-off rates, you still need to keep it on the shorter side.
4. Easy integration
Chat surveys can be tricky to integrate as you can be using multiple providers for your chat widget, contact centre solution, chatbot, website and survey solution. It can require a lot of communication between teams to ensure that everything is aligned and the right people are receiving the information from the chat interaction. Coordinate with all the key players up front so that the integration can go as smoothly as possible, and you can start collecting customer feedback quickly.
You should also check out our Best Practices for IVR, SMS and web pop up surveys.
