Fizzback gathers and interprets thousands of messages each day from consumers across a broad number of industries including retail, telecommunications & media, transport and financial services. Patterns in consumer behaviour are forming constantly: what’s being fed back, how, where and when it’s being expressed and through which channel. In September, the Customer Engagement Report explored the effect of gender on the customer experience. This time, the factors examined are time and channel.
Channel Variations
Fizzback endeavours to make it as easy as possible for consumers to express their views about any aspect of their real-world brand experiences using their own, natural language. To give true consumer choice, Fizzback has opened five communication channels: SMS, email, voicemail, comment cards and the web.
In real-world, bricks and mortar retail, all five channels are put to use across the Fizzback client base. It’s up to consumers to decide which channel they prefer. To date, the channel preference distribution is as follows:
SMS has so far proved to be a clear winner in the consumer’s eyes. This is hardly surprising considering the incredible adoption of SMS for everyday communications – according to the Mobile Data Association, around 1.5 Billion SMS texts are sent every week in the UK alone! The short-form nature of the channel allows people to express themselves succinctly, ensuring that they get their point across quickly and accurately. But more than that, SMS is used as a dialogue tool. Fizzback’s experience of SMS as a feedback channel is consistent with this, with the vast majority of feedback focused around one or two clear aspects of the customer’s experience, and completion rates for polls of three separate questions being in excess of 80%.
Satisfaction also varies by channel. As a result of the ease of use, Fizzback gathers a balanced sentiment from consumers. In a number of clients, the proportion of compliments and helpful suggestions exceeds 50% of all feedback submitted. The variation from the average satisfaction level is as follows:
Clearly, the average satisfaction level submitted through SMS is far ahead of all other channels, with email a distant second. Fizzback has found time and again that the easier it is to provide feedback, the more chance that people will provide the positive comments and suggestions that they would not otherwise have been minded to give. Positive experiences happen all the time, but the feelings they evoke have a shorter half-life to very negative experiences. Therefore the key is to capture experiences as they happen, not days, weeks or even months after the event. Positive comments help companies to reinforce areas that they are succeeding in, passing these best practices across the organisation, and are a great way to motivate and reward staff. The quick, convenient nature of SMS text is perfect for capturing positives, most of which are reported live from the scene of the experience. Other channels can tend to be more onerous, and in the case of the web, are usually detached from the real-world experience itself, skewing the sentiment towards the negative.
Temporal Variations
Experiences with a brand can happen at almost any time during the day, especially with the advent of 24-hour supermarkets and 24/7 call centres. Similarly, the Fizzback service is always on, ready to capture, interpret and enable companies to act upon the voice of the customer. As one might expect, the majority of feedback is submitted during waking hours, with a peak between 3 and 4pm, per the distribution below:
Sentiment also varies by time of day, and is distributed in the following way:
Given that the vast majority of feedback is given at the point of experience, this chart accurately reflects sentiment at a given point in time, as opposed to batch surveys that could ask questions about an experience that took place weeks ago. This information is critical to organisations that are determined to drive consistently positive experiences, drilling into the root causes of dissatisfaction in any given period.
This data also corresponds with a recent study by Csikszentmihalyi and Hunter entitled ‘Happiness in Everyday Life: The Uses of Experience Sampling’ which suggests that people are on average happier in the afternoon, as their mood is ameliorated once they find it is nearing the end of the day.
In the same study, relative happiness by day of the week was measured, and somewhat unsurprisingly, Monday fared the worst, with Saturday a clear winner!
In summary, making it easy for consumers to tell you how they feel during (not after) their experience with the brand yields large volumes of high quality feedback. This approach taps into a previously ‘silent majority’ of consumers, ensuring an accurate representation of sentiment and giving brands the opportunity to begin a constructive dialogue with a large portion of their customer base.
To learn more about these and other findings, please click here.
Quick links:
September Customer Engagement Report: Battle of the sexes
June Customer Engagement Report: Impact on KPIs
