Customer satisfaction survey and when to send

[♥14steve14]

I am thinking of doing a simple 5 or 6 question survey, to find out what customers thought of my website, the navigation and the whole checkout process when buying products. Its not too in depth, just a few silly questions to see what people say. No questions will relate to the service they received.

 

Now I have been thinking about when to mention the survey to customers. Would it be best placed in the order confirmation email, or the order status update email once we have posted the goods. It would be nice to send it even later, but I think that with EU regulations on sending unsolicited emails, I could potentially get into problems.

 

What, if anything do others do?

[burt]

The checkout_success page each order ?  

I've not seen many people use this page for interesting things...

 

My opinion;

Wait too long and people forget what was good and what was not so good.

Or they won't want to login, or they just put your request email straight into the spam box.

[greasemonkey]

@@burt great idea for 28 days.... if you are still looking for ideas....

[linchuk]

Should definitely be sent a little bit later. Not earlier than three days after the purchase or so.

You can also do this automatically with special add-on to you e-commerce system as mentioned here:

news.examinare.com/2015/09/28/offer-free-connection-of-customer-surveys-for-your-e-commerce/

[♥14steve14]

@@linchuk

But am I allowed to send out unsolicited emails after a sale. I think not. I want feedback not a lot of complaints.

[Dan Cole]

@@14steve14

 

Steve you guys seem to have some tough rules....over here (Canada) as I understand it, email communications are allowed if you have a customer relationship so I think we'd be okay.  I like the survey idea and would think about a week after a shipment is sent would be a great time for a follow up survey depending on the nature of the questions you're asking. 

 

Dan

[♥14steve14]

@@Dan Cole We have a whole group of unelected idiots running Europe and they have nothing better to do than to come up with unenforceable and unworkable legislation that only makes sense to them.

 

Whilst I do think that stopping people sending unsolicited emails is a good thing, its a bit of a job trying to decide what is solicited and what isn't. I can send emails if its regarding the purchase of items and is part of the sale, but nothing else unless I have the customers permission. 

 

I think I will mention it in the order update email buy adding a text link, and will also put something on the checkout sucess page, maybe an image as a link or something. Hopefully it will give them two chances to see about a survey and some may do something.

 

Thanks for all the suggestions.

[Bob Terveuren]

Hi Steve

 

I think there's a deliberate blurring between marketing/unsolicited/spam emails and follow up/customer service type ones that's been encouraged by various consumer rights groups so that we all now believe that any unsolicited communication is bad/illegal/you can sue the store et cetera.

 

The former are subject to control (see PECR) and would cover the sort of thing you send out using the OsC newsletter function - the key phrase with PECR is 'direct marketing' so if you are not trying to market something else to a customer then a follow-up email would be OK in the UK.

The ICO page here has a specific section on 'What is direct marketing?' that lays it out quite clearly.
(If you wanted to really be sure you were not upsetting a customer then you could check their 'newsletter' setting and base an email on that).

 

Two OsC options - bung something in checkout_success or else in checkout_process. Checkout_success may be easier if you have a payment module that skips checkout_process - also if you put the new php code towards the foot of the page (maybe even in the footer) and it borks then the customer may not get a white screen?

Third option - code up a Cron job that would run outside of OsC to interrogate the orders table and act on the data found there accordingly.

 

 

Timing things? If your delivery is electronic then 0-2 days or so, if you're posting stuff out and the survey is only about the website performance I'd sent it pretty quickly - probably immediately otherwise the customer may be sat there after 5 days with no goods (say a courier problem) and then your survey turns up asking what they thought - not going to get too many polite responses.

 

If you have a lot of orders and/or want things a bit automated have a look at linking mailChimp to your OsC so that you can utilise their surveys (they'll also link to Survey Monkey) - MC allows you a great deal of flexibility in setting up mailing lists and once you get the hang of coding up a template they can look pretty smart. I think there's a couple of add-ons that let you link the OsC customers table to MailChimp (I've only ever hand coded to it) but it is well worth setting up a dummy store/mailing list first to get the hang of things.

[MrPhil]

I would think that if you framed the survey as a follow-up, you would stay out of legal trouble. How about something like, "We posted your package for order XXXXXX 5 days ago. You should have received your goods by now -- if not, please contact us so we can find out what happened. Your complete satisfaction is our goal. If you would like to provide any feedback on how things went, feel free to take this brief survey."