When starting out with AskNicely, the first question you need to ask yourself is, "Do I want to send Touch Base surveys or Follow Up surveys?" These two types are surveys are two fundamentally different approaches to gathering of feedback from your customers:
Touch Base Surveys
Touch Base Surveys are the "Relational" model of sending surveys. In this model, we are sending a simple survey on a recurring basis to your entire customer base to periodically collect feedback.
This approach is our recommended approach when starting with AskNicely for several reasons:
- This is the industry-standard approach to gathering feedback if you are interested in long-term benchmarking.
- This broad and general way to survey casts a very large net - our happiest customers start with this approach, then narrow their focus with more strategic, tactical surveys once they know what they are trying to solve.
- This is absolutely the simplest way to get up and running with AskNicely - import your contacts from your Data Source, set up your Survey Template, build a Send Scheduler, then start sending - boom, done!
Ultimately, the type of survey you create depends on what you are trying to achieve with your Customer Experience Program, but in our experience, this is a great way to get a feel for the tool and learn by doing with AskNicely.
Follow Up Surveys
Follow Up surveys are exactly what they sound like: they are surveys that "follow up" after a specific event. Other names people use to describe this approach are "Event-Based" surveys or "Transactional" surveys, but we prefer the term "Follow Up" for its simplicity.
Examples of an "event" that might trigger a survey being sent:
- The closure of a Support Ticket in a system like Zendesk or Intercom
- After a purchase in a platform like Shopify
- After a one-time event, like surveying the attendees of a learning seminar.
- "Lifecycle" interludes, where surveys are sent at specific points in your customer journey.
Follow Up Surveys are quite a bit trickier to engineer. We need a field with data that shows a specific event happened to trigger the surveys, like a "customer_status" field changing from "onboarding" to "renewal", or a "customer_start_date" field to mark off 3 months / 6 months / 12 months lifecycle surveys; we also need a field that tells AskNicely what Survey Template should be sent.
Once set up, these event-based surveys can provide a great deal of value in pinpointing exactly what needs improvement with a specific event. But to echo the sentiment from the "Touch Base" section above, we don't recommend investing a great deal of time into engineering this until you know what you are trying to solve or what insight you are trying to gain with your Follow Up Surveys.
Let us know your thoughts below!