Hot survey vs. cold survey: what uses? what differences?

Hot survey: aiming for continuous operational improvement

The principle of the hot survey is toquestion customers almost systematically following their interaction with the company: reception on the premises, purchase of a product, call to customer service, etc. This survey is sent out in the minutes, or even hours, following the customer's experience, and is analyzed by means of a few questions.

The hot survey has multiple benefits.

Dealing with dissatisfied customers

Detecting and dealing with dissatisfied customers quickly can significantly reduce the number of complaints. It's also a way of avoiding churn, the flight of customers following dissatisfaction, because it's possible to respond quickly.

A Tour Operator working with SatisFactory calculated that calling back a dissatisfied customer within 5 days of their response to the satisfaction survey halved the likelihood of a complaint. If you know how much it costs to handle a complaint, then you can calculate how much such an operation can save you.

An insurance company using our solutions also identified that simply calling back a dissatisfied customer to apologize when the problem was indeed the company's fault (without any commercial gesture) reduced the churn rate by 15%.

Operational control

By providing information to operational staff on an almost continuous basis, on-the-spot surveys can be integrated into their recurring rituals and meetings.

It's very common for our users to hold weekly or monthly customer satisfaction meetings with their teams. It's an opportunity to focus actions on the customer experience in a highly responsive way.

Our Feedback solution highlights points of vigilance or weak signals (thanks to semantics), alerting the store manager, for example, that his customer satisfaction linked to reception is falling abnormally.

Aiming for continuous improvement

Hot surveys also enable you to aim for constant improvement in your results by setting short-term objectives. The sheer volume of responses makes it possible to compare store to store, site to site, and truly understand the strengths and weaknesses of each; taking seasonality out of the equation. It is also possible to compare equivalent periods from one year to the next.

Customer satisfaction thus becomes an issue in the hands of operational staff, who are, as Fred Reichheld proves in "The decisive question", the only ones who can truly improve customer satisfaction over the long term.

This bottom-up approach is the cornerstone of SatisFactory's Feedback Management programs.

Cold surveys: rethinking your offer, competitive positioning or strategy

The principle of the cold survey is toquestion a group of customers once a year or once every six months.

The cold survey allows us to take a step back and ask customers not about their last interaction with the company, but about all the interactions they have had over a period of time, the last 12 months for example.

Study the overall experience

The cold survey can be very comprehensive, more detailed and include more questions. Themes covered in a cold survey can be :

• Corporate image
• Competitive positioning
• The product offering as a whole
• Company values
• ...

It is possible to delve into more strategic topics with customers to analyze the customer relationship over the long term.

A representative study

Cold surveys are not carried out on all customers, but on a representative sample based on social demographic criteria.

In this case, as is often the case, it makes sense to set up a quota system and adjust the results to maintain their representativeness.

A basis for strategic decisions

Indeed, the results gathered can and should influence corporate strategy. In fact, they are often one of the main tools used to make medium- and long-term strategic decisions.

Once the answers have been cross-referenced with the respondents' socio-demographic data, the results can be interpreted with great finesse.

Conclusion: Different and complementary

Hot surveys and cold surveys complement each other, because they don 't have the same fields of application. They are literally two very different approaches.

Due to their temporal nature, on-the-spot surveys are aimed more at operational staff, with a view to improving the services provided. They enable a bottom-up approach to be implemented, so that decisions can be taken on the basis of field observations. This approach enables direct action to be taken on processes or the treatment of dissatisfied customers, making it easy to determine an ROI.

Cold surveys focus on broader, strategic considerations, and are more of a study for head offices and management. They enable strategic decisions to be passed on to operational staff in a top-down spirit, so as to provide a common vision for the whole company.

 

To find out more about how our Feedback solution can help you set up a customer care system based on on-the-spot surveys, please contact us.