In this day and age of social media, where unhappy customers tell the world about their bad customer experience with a click, it is imperative to quickly and efficiently handle complaints and negative responses from surveys.

When we introduced real-time alerts in 2011, we had no idea how popular it would become. Now, a lot of best practice has surfaced and one of these is how to manage, track and report the follow-up of alerts.

Let’s take a look at a structured follow-up method, using CheckMarket’s platform itself.

Get Structure

Automated alerts via e-mail and SMS work great for small volumes, but once that volume starts to grow, it can be difficult to track which alerts have been handled and by whom. What was the result of the follow-up?

One solution we see customers using, is instead of having the alert send an e-mail, it creates a ticket in their ticketing system like Zendesk. This works great if your entire organization works with tickets. There are many scenarios when this is not the best option. CM alerts offer a lot of flexibility as to who should receive an alert. We see customers differentiating based on their respondent’s company size. For instance, consumer alerts go to a call center, small business alerts go their local account manager and large enterprise alerts go to the account manager and to a director.

Use a follow-up questionnaire

Each time a respondent meets certain criteria that you specify, such as a low satisfaction or NPS^® score, an alert is sent to the relevant person or department in your organization. This alert is not just a notification but an invitation for a follow-up questionnaire.

This follow-up questionnaire automatically contains the name and contact details of the dissatisfied respondent and a complete report of their responses including a list of the items about which they are dissatisfied.

The follow-up questionnaire leads the person through the process of handling the situation. It instructs them how to contact the respondent and what to say. The person responsible for the follow-up can indicate whether they have contacted the dissatisfied person, whether and what actions were taken and what the result is or was. This follow-up questionnaire can be completed over several days. Only then is the follow-up questionnaire closed.

This is where it gets interesting, since the follow-up questionnaire runs on CheckMarket’s platform, all the reporting tools you are used to using are available. Daily or weekly push reports, reports with charts and filters, embedded dashboards for your intranet and alerts to even go further: Maybe feed the result back into your CRM or churn prediction SAS module?

An example of the metrics that can be tracked:

• The number of dissatisfied respondents
• The topics about which they were dissatisfied
• Win-back ratio
• Average follow-up time
• Most successful actions
• Churn-prediction
• Performance scoring of follow-up agents.

This is not your grandfather’s satisfaction survey. Of course, your grandfather didn’t have 20000 followers and a Klout score of 86.

Don’t conduct your satisfaction survey once a year. Run it continuously to small groups of customers. The follow-up questionnaires will help you to quickly identify issues almost in real-time. Take action and repeat. Once you have this process in place, imagining not having it, feels like driving blind.

As always, you can set this whole process up yourself using the CheckMarket platform or we will gladly help you.

Please let us know below what you think and share some of your best practice.

Related links:

• How do I send an email notification?
• Set up the “Create contact” notification
• Send a CheckMarket survey in Zendesk