Online surveys and Customer Journey:
Lucia and Agustina are colleagues and friends. They arrived on Thursday at the city’s trendiest restaurant with a great desire to get to know the Peruvian food place that their friends told them so much about. They made an online reservation for 9 p.m. and were very pleased with the idea of arriving there and not having to wait 40 minutes to be assigned a table.
At the restaurant’s entrance, Yanareith, the receptionist, checked their reservation and accompanied them to their table. Their first impression of the place was positive.
They waited 20 minutes sitting down until Mauricio, the waiter, introduced himself and handed them the menu. Even though they didn’t tell him, the hunger and tiredness made the wait very unpleasant, which they did not like very much.
The menu was very well presented and in line with what they were expecting. They ordered the ceviche specials and, although they found the prices of the dishes “excessively expensive”, they were already there, so they enjoyed the food.
Once the dinner was over, Lucia and Agustina ordered a dessert that took 35 minutes to arrive. They told Mauricio about this and he apologized. While they were enjoying the tasting of mini-cakes, a man approached their table. It was Nacho, the manager of the place, who apologized again and offered them two complimentary coffees and a 20% discount for the next time they want to visit the restaurant.
The friends left the place at 11:30 p.m. with mixed feelings, but in general, a good experience of the place. Lucia, who is very active on social media, left a review of the place on Trip Advisor.
“Mapping” the journey
Since their decision to dine at the restaurant until Lucia left the review, the friends interacted with the brand about 15 times. Each time, the experience was different (positive, negative or neutral). This journey, which represents the total sum of the clients’ sensations during their interactions with the company and the brand, documents the entire experience of what is known as “Customer Journey”.
This “customer journey” establishes an inventory of the points of contact with which the client comes across throughout his experience. Research to discover the journey can include various inputs, from quantitative ones to emotional and qualitative information. These will enable us to develop conclusions and make recommendations.
Beginning the journey
Online surveys emerge as a powerful tool to find out the opinion of the friends at each of their points of contact with the Peruvian restaurant.
These stages are points of contact with the client, basically every time a client comes in contact with your brand. Below are some of the solutions that online survey platforms can offer you when mapping your brand’s Customer Journey.
Walk through the touch points with questions
One of the easiest ways to understand the customer’s journey is to use an online survey to find out the client’s opinion chronologically throughout that journey.
For example, if you owned the restaurant that Lucia and Agustina went to, you could ask them about their booking experience, the content of the menu, the waiters’ attention, the price, etc. Finally, you could ask their opinion about their overall experience and whether they would recommend it to a friend.
We recommend you use a scale from 1 to 10 in all of the quantitative questions, which will allow you to better parameterize the results when analyzing them.
Analyze the results of open-ended questions
If you want to map the Customer Journey with the help of an online form, it is advisable to allow users to add information freely. This input will allow you to have a qualitative and emotional complement to the customer’s experience.
However, processing open-ended questions is not easy. A very powerful resource for it are the word clouds, which visually represent the most repeated terms in all of the questions. We recommend that the platform you pick to create your online survey has the option to automatically create word clouds.
It is also important to mix qualitative questions with quantitative questions. This way, the “journey” through the online survey platform will be less monotonous and more enjoyable.
Use images
Images are a very useful tool for mapping the customer journey. Increasingly, users are identifying themselves more and responding better to personal information in online surveys when the options are accompanied by explanatory images.
For example, if you plan to ask them about the menu and the food, what better than to appeal to their sensorial memory and accompany the questions with a picture of the house specialty ceviche dish? Or a good picture of the ambiance of the place?
Online forms have features for uploading your own pictures or searching in online image banks. This will help to customize the question and thus make it more engaging and rewarding.
Online surveys emerge as a powerful tool to find out the opinion of the customers at each of their points of contact with the brand.
With SurveyKiwi you will be able to create high-impact online surveys. This tool will allow you to achieve the goal of better knowing the customer’s journey of your business.
Visit our website to learn more about us and create your first survey.