RightNow Brief: HOW TO IMPROVE SURVEY PARTICIPATION

BY LEVERAGING BEST PRACTICES

The Top 7’s of Customer Feedback Best Practices

Created by RightNow Engage Center of Excellence

Susie Boyer, Engage Center of Excellence, Product
Manager of Sales, Marketing, and Feedback
Mark Strong, Engage Center of Excellence, Senior
Trainer, Professional Services

©2008 RightNow Technologies. All rights reserved. RightNow and RightNow logo are trademarks of www.rightnow.com
RightNow Technologies Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. 8011
RightNow Brief: The Top 7’s of Customer Feedback Best Practices

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Executive Summary .......... 1

Top 7 Best Practices for Question Creation .......... 2

Top 7 Best Practices for Survey Construction and Execution .......... 6

Top 7 Best Practices for Feedback Analytics .......... 12

Customer Success Story: J&P Cycles .......... 18

About the Authors .......... 20

About RightNow .......... 20

Appendix A: Sample CSAT Surveys .......... 21

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 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
In order to provide an excellent customer experience, companies must listen to the voices
of their customers. RightNow clients occasionally ask how they can increase the response
rate of their feedback surveys. Response rates are defined as “the number of completed
surveys divided by the number of participants invited to take the survey.” This RightNow
brief provides best practices intended to help increase survey response rates. Although this
was written specifically with RightNow Feedback in mind, these best practices are relevant
regardless of which enterprise feedback tool you are using.

This brief is divided into three areas: best practices for question creation, survey
construction and execution, and feedback analytics. Special sections are included for CSAT
(Customer Satisfaction) - Closed Incident Surveys best practices and the key feedback
reports. J&P Cycles also shares their success story of how they are listening and taking
action in response to the voice of their customers, using RightNow Feedback.

......

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 THE TOP 7 BEST PRACTICES FOR QUESTION CREATION
A key element for gathering feedback is how you ask your questions. Words mean different
things to different people so the intent is to write questions that will be interpreted in the
same way by each recipient. Before you start creating questions, make sure you clearly
define the goals and target audience of the survey. After you define these, follow these top
seven best practices for creating questions:

1. Relevant
The first step in creating any survey is deciding what you are trying to learn. The goals of
the survey will determine who you will survey and what you will ask them. If your goals are
not clear, your results will not be either. Always remember who your audience is and write
your questions for them. Do not create a question where the answers are not relevant to the
audience. The more relevant the question, the more likely the recipient will respond.

2. Short and Sweet

Keep your questions short and clear. Respondents are less likely to answer if the question is
too long or they do not understand how they should answer. Keep question sentences and
answer choices short and concise. A good question only asks for one bit of information and
should be only one dimension. Do not use a question that has another question embedded
within it. If you see the word “and” or “or” in your question, there is a good chance that
your question may be inconclusive. For example, if a customer services department asks,
“Were you satisfied with your wait time and the knowledge of the agent that helped you?”,
how will you know that the answer “no” means the respondent was unhappy with the wait
time or was it that the agent was not knowledgeable?

If the list of answer categories is long and unfamiliar, it is difficult for respondents to
evaluate all of them. One way to keep questions short and sweet is to utilize a matrix style
question—grouping questions that utilize the same answer choices together often makes
it easier for the respondent to answer the question. See the below image for a sample of a
matrix style question, and notice that it is really five questions all in one.

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 3. Straightforward
This seems like a straightforward concept, but is a common mistake with surveys. Make
sure your questions are straightforward by avoiding bias, leading, or hypothetical questions
or difficult concepts. Present your questions neutrally and ensure your question does not
imply a desired answer. The wording of a question is extremely important. We are striving
for objectivity in our surveys and, therefore, must be careful not to lead the respondent
into giving the answer we would like to receive. Leading questions are usually easily
spotted because they use negative phrases such as “Wouldn’t you like…?” Or “Don’t you
agree that….?” Also avoid double negatives as respondents can easily be confused trying to
decipher the meaning of a question that uses two negative words.

Start with questions that are meaningful but not threatening. For example, when
conducting a survey to find out how current customers feel about your company’s
return policy, start by asking whether the respondent has ever returned an item that they
purchased. The question is straightforward and the answer options are limited to either yes
or no. It’s easy to understand, easy to answer, visually simple, and doesn’t require a lot of
work on the respondent’s part.

Also avoid creating questions that are hard to recall. If you ask “How many times in the
last month…” versus “How many times in the last year…”, you will get a more accurate
response from the “within the last month” question—as respondents are more likely to
recall events within the past month but the response becomes increasingly unreliable the
further back you go.

4. Use Everyday Language

Use simple words that aren’t vague. Design questions so that you get a precise answer. If
users misinterpret your writing, their answers will be misleading. Avoid jargon, company
acronyms, or obscure terms. Do not use uncommon words or compound sentences.
Abbreviations are okay if you are absolutely certain that every single respondent will
understand their meanings. If there is any doubt at all, do not use the abbreviation. Asking
a question about AGI may be okay if all the respondents are accountants, but it would not
be a good question for the general public.

Confusing questions will only lead to confused participants, which will lead to unreliable
answers or even the participant closing the survey because they do not understand the
questions. Survey recipients may have a variety of backgrounds; therefore, use simple
language and relax your grammatical standards slightly. For example, “who” may be okay to
use in many instances although “whom” may be grammatically correct.

Review your questions to be sure that they could not be misinterpreted—especially if any
respondents may not be native speakers of the language the survey is written in. Many
words have different meanings to different people and some concepts like “time” and
“distance” are subjective. Complex wording or structure may be confusing making your
results less precise.

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 5. Careful Answer Selections
How many times have you taken a survey and your answer is “none of the above”, “other”,
or “don’t know” and these are not options? Keep answer selections to a minimum while
still accommodating all possible answers. Asking a question that doesn’t accommodate all
possible responses can confuse and frustrate the respondent. A good question leaves no
ambiguity in the mind of the respondent. As an example of this, a question asks, “What
brand of computer do you own?” and the only answer choices available are “A. Dell” or “B.
Apple”. There are several issues with this. What if the respondent doesn’t own a computer?
What if he owns a different brand of computer? What if he owns both a Dell and an Apple?

Also make sure that the answers are all mutually exclusive and do not overlap. If you have
a question asking the participant to select an age range, and your answer choices are 16-25,
25-40, 40-60, and 60 and Over—what answer would a 25, 40, or 60 year old select? They
match more than one answer. The correct way to write the answer choices for this would be
16-25, 26-40, 41-60, and Over 60.

Oftentimes, users are biased towards the first answers they encounter in a survey question.
They may choose the first answer due to the fact that it applies to them even though there
may be another option that is more appropriate. One can guard against this certain bias
which may lead to false results by randomizing the choices in a survey ensuring that choices
are seen in various orders for different survey takers. In RightNow, if “Randomize Choices”
is checked, then the answer choices will be displayed to respondents in a random order. If
the check box is not selected, the choices are displayed in the order in which they are listed
in the choice list.

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 6. Clearly Defined Labels
If you aren’t clear about the labels for the answer choices, then the question is worthless
and can be thrown away. A common mistake we see is a question asking to rank level of
satisfaction on a scale from 1 to 5 but no clarification whether 1 is very satisfied or if 5 is
very satisfied. If it is not clearly stated, some respondents may respond with 1’s and others
with 5’s but you will not know what the customer meant if you do not clearly specify it.
No matter what type of question you ask, make sure it is clear what the answer choices
labels mean.

Before you create your questions, decide what kind of rating labels you will want to use. For
example, for “level of satisfaction”, use a 5-point scale with responses ranging from “very
satisfied” to “very dissatisfied”; or you may want to use the Likert Scale (which is the most
widely used scale in survey research ) to measure “level of agreement”, where the response
range from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”.

An example of the typical five-level Likert scale answers choices.

Often, it doesn’t matter which labels you choose as long as they are clear to the recipients
and you are using them consistently. Changing rating scales mid-survey may be very
confusing to respondents and result in unreliable results or even decreased response rates as
respondents may close the survey without finishing if they get confused.

There is debate within the industry on whether using an even or odd number point scale
is better. With a 5-point scale, there is typically a neutral answer, while a 4-point scale
may force the respondent to choose either positively or negatively. Studies show more
recipients are comfortable with a neutral option than being forced to choose (which may
make recipients just drop off if they do not have a strong opinion either way). Therefore, a
5-point scale is generally better than a 4-point scale. With a 10-point scale, there are enough
choices that both the 5 and 6 choices are close enough to neutral to make the 10-point scale
acceptable.

7. Watch Open-Ended Questions

We often hear executives comment that the most valuable feedback they receive in surveys is
in the free text comments section. While this information is difficult to quantify it provides
deep insights into the customer experience. Include no more than three to five open-ended
questions, though one is usually enough. Although they can elicit some important insight,
they also require a lot of respondent time and effort. Don’t use them unless you plan to

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 review them. Never make open-ended answers mandatory as some respondents may rather
close the survey than be forced to respond. Having open-ended responses adds color to your
survey results and lets the respondent express their feedback in their own natural language
and tone. Here are a few examples of open-ended questions:
·· “Any additional comments about your experience:”
·· “Please tell us any suggestions for improvement that you may have:”
·· “What products of services were you looking for that were not found on our website?”
·· “What did you like/dislike about your recent customer experience?”

Additionally, free text customer comments can be very effective internally within an
organization to support initiatives that you are trying to move forward. As an example, if
you are trying to get resourcing to improve your automated phone system, insert compelling
customer comments received from free text questions into internal communications or
presentations to support your goal such as: “See what our customers are saying about this:
‘Great support once I finally got to an agent after being stuck in your phone system’ or ’I
never got help as I couldn’t figure out how to get to a live agent.’”

THE TOP 7 BEST PRACTICES FOR SURVEY CONSTRUCTION AND

EXECUTION
Just as critical as having well-written questions are how you put those questions together
in the survey and roll it out. In order to get a higher response rate, the survey must
be constructed and executed wisely. By following these top seven best practices, your
participants will be more likely to respond.

1. Be Well-Timed
Sending your survey in a timely manner adds relevance and enhances accuracy. People
are more likely to remember the quality of any interaction shortly after that interaction
occurred; therefore, sending surveys within 24 hours keeps that interaction fresh and will
increase chances of getting a response.

Consider when people are most likely to receive and read the invitation and when they will
have time to respond to it. Getting to know your specific survey audience and when their
down time and busy periods are may take time, but by using testing and reviewing results
you may see a trend. Typically, Fridays are when people are getting ready for the weekend
and Mondays are when they are recovering from the weekend. Likewise, if you send your
email invite overnight or early in the morning, you may run the risk of being lumped into
the amount of spam that may be generated late at night. Studies have shown that best time
to email is mid-week in the afternoon, although every audience is different and may require
some testing to see what time is best for your organization.

2. Get to the Point

Keep your surveys short and do not seek insight on multiple topics. Studies have found
that only 3–12 survey questions should be used to ensure that customers do not abandon
the survey mid-way. If more information is required or survey scores are low, an additional
detailed survey may be sent as a follow-up. It is also a best practice to state the number of
questions in the survey and the estimated time for completion upfront to increase customer
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 response rate (e.g. “Please help us by taking this short 3 question survey”). The primary
reasons participants drop off of a survey is when it is too long or not relevant.

As a general rule, think about exactly the kind of information every single question in the
survey will provide you. If you have a question that you are not sure about, drop it. Do not
ask questions just because you think the information may come in handy at some point.
If you already have some information about the customer (e.g. name, age, gender), do not
make them enter this information again. Just pre-populate these form fields and let the
participant verify the information. Within RightNow Feedback, just add a HTML content
area that utilizes form fields to verify the information (see When To Use A Merge Field, Form
Field, or a Survey Question below).

Also make sure to put the questions in a logical order. One question may influence how the
participant judges the next question. Start the survey with questions that are likely to sound
interesting and attract the respondent’s attention. Save questions that might be difficult
or sensitive for later. It is a good idea to ask general questions upfront and more specific
questions later. For example, you should avoid asking a series of questions about a particular
product without first asking if they own that product (unless you already know they own
that product). Group similar questions together and use different pages and branching to
designate different sections of the survey.

Not only should you make sure the survey is short, but also consider your invitation
message to participate in the survey. The invitation message should be concise and
straightforward. Include in the invitation the purpose of the survey, give a reason to
participate, inform of anonymity and confidentiality, if that matters, and how the results
may be used. Make sure to have an enticing and clear subject line for the message as well.

WHEN TO USE A MERGE FIELD, FORM

FIELD, OR A SURVEY QUESTION
Merge fields are used to personalize the invitation
message or the survey by merging in a field that
exists in the database. Examples include First
Name, Last Name, or Incident #. Form fields are
used to capture or verify contact data from the
contacts table. Merge fields and form fields are
added to surveys within RightNow by selecting
“Add HTML Content”. Note that unlike form
fields, survey questions are used to capture
information for analysis that will be stored in the
survey question tables and not directly on the
contact record.

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 3. Keep It Personal
The target audience will be more likely to respond if you keep the survey relevant.
Personalizing surveys based on products, categories, or dispositions enhances customer
experience and increases response rate. Using segmentation to target surveys based on
demographics will help to keep the survey more meaningful and will provide better insights
into your customers.

Use branching functionality to make sure you ask questions that are relevant. For example,
if you ask on page 1 of a survey, “What products do you use?”; then on page two only show
the questions relevant to that product. Another example would be to ask general questions
about satisfaction and if the participant says they were very dissatisfied, you can take them
to another page of questions to dig deeper into the issue. You can even create an incident
to follow up on the issue and then direct them to a Thank You page. As part of RightNow
CX, the customer experience suite, you can easily leverage a single customer repository for
segmentation and powerful workflow to follow up and take action. This is a sample flow
within RightNow for that scenario:

Also, make sure to personalize the survey invitation by using dynamic content. Within
RightNow Feedback, three main areas of dynamic content include:

·· Merge fields -merge contact fields into the text of the content, such as name, address,
phone number.
·· Merge reports -merge in any information that is available via a RightNow Analytics
report into a table, list or single value, even one-to-many relationships, such as
recently closed incidents or product registered.
·· Conditional sections -a section of content to display only if the contact meets
certain criteria, such as gold or platinum members.

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 4. Take Action
Close the loop. Not only do the participants want to be heard, they want to know what you
have done with their feedback. Therefore, we recommend that the results of every survey be
fed into a process to take actionable results. For example, if the total survey score is less than
x, create an incident and follow up with the customer by phone.

According to a Gartner report, while 95% of companies collect feedback, only 10% actually
deploy and use the feedback. Even fewer (less than 5%) tell their customers what they have
done with that feedback. Being one of these companies that tells their customers what they
are doing with the feedback can be a good way to differentiate from your competition.

Customers are also much more likely to take the survey next time if they know you actually
did something with the information they gave the first time. One option is to trigger an
end-of-survey email thanking the customer for providing feedback and letting the customer
know what actions will be taken due to the feedback. You may also redirect customers to
your support site or knowledge base to promote self-service.

Within RightNow, there are many actions that can be automated based on the customer
response or profile. By using RightNow’s decisioning in advanced survey mode, you can
branch the survey to take distinct actions based on the responses or characteristics of the
contact that is taking the survey. You can send a notification to a manager, redirect to your
customer support site, create an incident, opportunity or lead, add to a contact list, set a
field on the contact record, send a follow-up email or survey, or even execute an external
event for a custom action.

5. Motivate
In the movie, “Office Space”, the character, Peter Gibbons says, “It’s not that I’m lazy, it’s
that I just don’t care.” This can be true of your customers. The majority of the time, you
need to give your customers a reason to care to give you the feedback. Customers want to
know “what’s in it for me” if they take the time to provide the feedback.

Research shows that offering participants free, low-valued merchandise, coupons, or

even cash incentives to take the survey, is not as effective at increasing response rates or
building long-term relationships as offering more significant reasons such as acting on their
feedback and communicating that the action taken. Coupons, gifts, and raffles may be
nice and provide more reasons to have additional touchpoints with the customer, but just
letting customers know that someone is actually acting on their feedback might be the best
incentive of all. Cash is not recommended and can be difficult to distribute. Customers
want to improve their experience for the next time, especially if they were not satisfied.

Requesting participation in advance for a later survey, during personal contact with the
customer, is also recommended. Encouraging agents to mention the survey will at least give
the participants a heads-up that the invitation message is coming and the participant may
be more likely to watch for it and respond.

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 6. Limit Frequency
Over-surveying will reduce response rates and willingness to participate in the future.
Ideally, you will want to survey your customers often enough to get the information needed
but not so often as to upset the customer. For customer satisfaction surveys, it will depend
on the frequency of the interactions with the customers. If you haven’t had any interaction
within the past year, a survey may not be welcome. If you surveyed your customer yesterday,
sending another survey today may annoy your customer. Within RightNow Feedback, using
the “Limit frequency of communication” and “Limit recency of communication” features
can help ensure you are not over-communicating.

7. Optimize & Test

Proofing the survey is extremely important. Send a proof of the survey to a small group of
people. After they complete the survey, brainstorm with them to see if there were any issues.
Make sure they evaluate for the quality of the questions, the length or the time to complete
the survey, and the entire flow of the survey and invitation message.

Learn from past results. Someone (George Santayana, loosely quoted) once said, “Those
who fail to learn from their mistakes are destined to repeat them.” That is true with your
surveys, too. If a survey question gave you no valuable insight, then you shouldn’t ask
that question again. If you learn you get better response rates on Tuesdays than you do on
Fridays, then you should stop sending on Fridays. Make sure to use analytics to learn from
your results.

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 CSAT/CLOSED INCIDENT SURVEYS ADDITIONAL BEST PRACTICES
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys can provide information about a customer’s
satisfaction with a company, a particular product or service, or with a recent
support issue. Often closed incident surveys are used for CSAT with a support
issue. Our customers often ask about best practices particular to customer
satisfaction and closed incident surveys via the phone, email, and chat channels.
The good news is all the same basic principles apply (especially timing, relevancy,
personalization, and length) and here are a few extra suggestions:

·· Do not ask about another topic EXCEPT for the issue that was submitted.
·· Send the survey within 8-24 hours of the incident closing. Give enough time
to make sure the issue is truly resolved but recent enough that the customer
is more likely to remember the quality of interaction which will increase the
chances of getting a response.
·· The invitation message to participate in the survey should reference the issue in
question. Include the reference number and the subject of the issue.
·· Your service team and your marketing team may not be the same people. Be
sure you have collaboration and understanding of how the rules will trigger
surveys.
·· Be sure your agents are trained to review previous survey information before
dealing with a new incident.
·· Consider designing agent workspaces to accept phone surveys by proxy.
Capturing information in the moment can provide excellent results although
depending on the type of questions, the participant might be more honest
responding through the web instead of directly to an agent.
·· Incorporate survey results in the agent desktop so agents can understand their
own performance.
See Appendix A for a sample customer satisfaction survey template.

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 THE TOP 7 BEST PRACTICES FOR FEEDBACK ANALYTICS
Understanding the information you want to gather from your surveys is critical to designing
them correctly. Establishing your measurements for success and for follow-up actions will
allow you to efficiently report on those successes. The following best practices are more
specific to RightNow CX than the previous best practices, although they may be useful to
think about no matter what tool you are using.

1. SCORE!
A great way to quickly evaluate survey results is to add score values to the responses. The
score value is used to assign a relative weight to each choice and allows for easy calculations
which can be used to trigger rules or actions based on the contact’s answers. Within
RightNow Feedback, scoring is built in. Put in a score when setting up choice question
types rather than trying to do manual calculations after the fact.

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 2. Chart It
One of the easiest ways to look at survey results is with a chart. A line graph is great for
showing trends or specific data values, a pie graph is best for seeing how something is
divided among different groups and a bar graph makes for easy comparisons. Use many
of the out-of-the-box reports that display results in a chart, or create custom reports with
charts using RightNow’s easy-to-use Chart Wizard.

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 3. Tell a Story
Ensure your results tell a story. Ask yourself the following questions when reviewing your
data before sharing your results in a formal report: What is the key learning objective? What
insight are you looking for? What will you recommend? How do you tell the story? When
requesting management approval to take action, present them with data in a way that makes
your point. Present all the data but highlight key points and then state action steps and the
expected results.

One way to make sure your story is correct is by verifying that you do not have responses
skewing your data. Duplicates, responses where the participant misunderstood the question,
and outliers may be better off being removed from the results. Using RightNow Feedback’s
survey response exclusion feature allows you to capture all results but only report on the
results that are valuable to help ensure data accuracy.

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 4. Organize and Archive
Think about report filters when setting up your questions and survey folder hierarchies. This
helps make searching/filtering more intuitive later when running reports. Before creating
reports, understand the level of data being used; is it being analyzed at an individual
customer level, or is the data being used at an aggregate level (e.g. by account, by call center,
by region)? Survey scores can be viewed by contact, by demographic (age, location, etc.),
by type of incident, or by agent. When you have folders set up properly it’s easier to find
question or survey names in the search pop up when running a report.

Another key point is to create folders for archived questions or surveys. Do not delete
previously used questions or surveys. When you do this you will lose historical data. It’s
best to move unused questions/surveys to an archived folder to preserve your collected
data. Also, keep in mind that if you significantly change a survey or question you have now
possibly skewed the responses previously submitted.

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 5. Analyze Free Text Responses
Free text can provide some of the most valuable insight into a customer’s satisfaction
and key areas of concerns. However, they can be more difficult to analyze than multiple
choice questions that can be counted and included in graphs. There is no point in
asking free text questions if you do not review the responses. Use a tool that will provide
an easy method to spot trends in text responses and use keywords to rate the response as
positive or negative.

RightNow Feedback incorporates RightNow’s SmartSense ability with our topic

monitoring tool to easily analyze unstructured text responses. Text responses are
automatically grouped based on similar content and analyzed for themes. Topic
monitoring allows you to view the distribution of responses across themes and drill
down into themes, sub-themes, or to read individual responses. Themes are accessed
through the survey results tab and the topic monitoring report in analytics. The Topic
Monitoring Wizard is best suited when there is a lot of data to decipher, as it becomes
more useful in identifying themes and keywords as the amount of free text responses
increases. RightNow’s SmartSense technology uses words and phrases to determine
whether the theme is positive or negative allowing reviewers to easily sort the responses
and prioritize.

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 6. Trend it
The ability to see a trend in the responses received can help a business plan for the future.
With the majority of surveys, especially customer satisfaction, it is helpful to see how
ratings change over time (day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter,
or even year-to-year). In order to effectively track trends, ensure the questions and rating
scales remain consistent over time. Within RightNow Analytics, use reports like “Question
Response Trend” to identify improvement or decline trends in areas of interest such as
customer satisfaction.

7. Automate
Remove manual steps by scheduling reports to be automatically
sent to management weekly or monthly. You can choose to send
the report when an exception has been met in order to quickly
escalate when satisfaction levels dip below an acceptable level.
RightNow Analytics makes it easy to schedule reports to send out
automatically, removing the need to spend time in the system
running reports.

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 KEY RIGHTNOW FEEDBACK REPORTS
RightNow Feedback Analytic Report
Survey Summary Dashboard (3 reports in
one dashboard: Broadcast Survey Summary,
Transactional Survey Summary, and Website
Link Survey Summary)
Invitation Message Delivery Analysis
Invitation Message Response Analysis
Survey Score Trend
Question Response Trend
Topic Monitoring
Survey Page Drop-Off Rate
Key Metric
·· Broadcast: Sent vs.
Opened vs. Completed
·· Transactional: Sent vs.
Opened vs. Started vs.
Completed
·· Website Link: Started vs.
Completed
Number sent and delivered
Total opened
Total Responses for a survey
over time
Total responses for a survey
question over time
Common words used in
text responses
# of times a page of the
survey was submitted
Secondary Metric Why useful?
Pinpoint your most effective
and least effective surveys.
Bounces of various types If the invitation mailings are
not reaching their audience,
this report helps you
identify the problem.
Total clicks This report helps you see
how much interest is being
generated by your invitation
mailings.
Average score for a survey View if number of responses
over time and scores for a survey are
changing over time.
Average score for a survey View if number of responses
question over time and scores for a survey
question are changing over
time.
Details of each response Quickly gather information
about the text responses
without needing to read
each individual response.
% of survey takers who For multi-page surveys,
abandoned the survey at identify which pages may
each page cause a survey taker to
abandon the survey.

CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORY

J&P CYCLES CLOSES THE LOOP WITH ALL OF THEIR

CUSTOMERS
J&P Cycles, established in 1979, is the largest provider of motorcycle
aftermarket parts and accessories in the world. They are a multi-
channel marketer through catalog, retail, web, and events. They offer
the best service in their industry with free technical support for life,
24/7 customer service, a liberal returns policy, and utilizes RightNow
Customer Portal for email support, support videos, feedback, and live
chat. 98% of their customers would refer them to friends and family.

J&P Cycles processes 100% of their customer surveys through RightNow

Feedback which includes web surveys, online general surveys, manual survey cards,

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 and chat surveys. RightNow Feedback adds value to every department by
providing automated survey reporting, participation trending, question
trending, question and comment distribution, high level overviews, and
departmental granular reports.

Closing the loop on every survey response is critical to J&P’s business.

Indirect customer follow-up happens with all of the following
departments:

·· E-Commerce (usability, functionality)

·· Purchasing / Merchandising (quality, availability)
·· DC (shipping, packaging)
·· Marketing (offer feedback, catalog fulfillment)
Example J&P Cycles report confirming orders
·· Showroom (appearance, service, selection)
arrive on time
·· Call Center (service, tech support)
·· Sales (research, parts availability, selection)
Direct customer follow-up is mandatory as 100% of surveys become an incident
and are reviewed. All surveys receive a response through either a canned or custom
email, or even a personal phone call.

J&P Cycles used exceptions to highlight survey responses that are poor (red)
or average (yellow) in order to easily see problem areas.

By utilizing RightNow Feedback, J&P Cycles is seeing heaps of benefits. Being

able to organize and distribute survey feedback has led to organization process
improvements in all departments. Their customer win back rate has increased due
to quickly closing the loop with customers (an estimated five to ten customers
saved per month). They estimate $50K in annual labor reduction by having a
system to handle all feedback. Best of all, by listening to their customers, they are
seeing an increase in sales (estimated $100K in sales in just year 1 of implementing
RightNow Feedback).

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 About the Authors
Susie Boyer, Engage Center of Excellence, Product Manager of Sales, Marketing, and
Feedback, RightNow Technologies

With RightNow since 2004, Susie started off in Professional Services consulting with many
customers implementing the early versions of RightNow Sales, Marketing, and Feedback.
In 2007, she switched into a Product Manager role in order to have direct influence over
product direction. Susie has contributed to creating several best practices resources based
on her interactions with customers. She received her Bachelors of Science at Georgia
Institute of Technology and her MBA at Georgia State University, both in Atlanta, Georgia.
When not in the office, Susie can often be found skiing, playing tennis, hiking, or climbing
a state’s highest point.

Mark Strong, Engage Center of Excellence, Senior Trainer Professional Services,

RightNow Technologies

Introduced to RightNow as a client in 2003, Mark began his career at RightNow in 2004
as a Professional Services Consultant. In 2006, he switched into a Professional Services
Operations role in order to train new employees and implement continuing education
programs for existing employees. In 2007, he moved into a field training role to help
launch RightNow 8 for employees and customers. Since 2008, Mark has been working in
Education Services providing training to customers onsite and remotely. Mark is considered
an expert by his peers and clients for his in-depth knowledge of the full RightNow CX
suite including RightNow Sales, Marketing, Feedback, and Analytics. Based in New York,
when Mark is not working, he can be found in the kitchen, in the pool, or spending time
outdoors with his family.

About RightNow
RightNow (NASDAQ: RNOW) delivers the high-impact technology solutions and services
organizations need to cost-efficiently deliver a consistently superior customer experience
across their frontline service touchpoints. Approximately 1,900 corporations, government
agencies, and institutions worldwide depend on RightNow to achieve their strategic
objectives and better meet the needs of those they serve. RightNow is headquartered in
Bozeman, Montana.

For more information, please visit www.rightnow.com.

RightNow is a registered trademark of RightNow Technologies, Inc. NASDAQ is a

registered trademark of the NASDAQ Stock Market.

Contact us today to find out how we can help you create the best possible customer
experience for your customers.

Our solutions:
RightNow CX RightNow Social RightNow Engage
The Customer Experience

RightNow Web Experience RightNow Contact Center RightNow CX Cloud Platform

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 Be social with us:
RightNow.com Twitter Facebook

YouTube LinkedIn RightNow Blog

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 Appendix a
Sample CSAT Surveys

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 Sample CSAT Surveys
Customer satisfaction and customer loyalty are two different things. Customer satisfaction
is the measure of expectations being exceeded, met, or not met. Customer satisfaction
surveys typically contain questions asking the recipient, “How satisfied are you with…?”
Unfortunately, customer satisfaction typically has little to do with how loyal the customer
is. A satisfied customer will stay with you until they find a better alternative while a loyal
customer will stay with you through thick and thin. Customer loyalty asks questions like
“How likely are you to recommend…?” or “How likely are you to use or buy…?” Although
they are completely separate, both provide valuable information.

The following sample surveys focus on Customer Satisfaction and provides sample questions
as guidance only. The more specific and focused the questions, the greater the chance the
questionnaire will result in complete, honest answers and more actionable data. Therefore,
please personalize the questions you ask based on your organization’s needs.

Display this question only if the

previous question is answered
“No,” otherwise hide.

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