Q: What would you say are the best practices for collecting detailed information about member experience? For example, if you only asked basic experience questions, when you get a negative response, you don't know why it was negative. Do you try to bridge the data gap with things like text analytics or do you reach out afterwards to get testimonials or things like that?
Answer: Ken: The answer is yes. All of them. I think part of when we talked about the approach to shortening the survey, and I'm happy to anyone who wants to look at a demonstration of what I was referring to with AskWhy. We actually include a little bit of what we call root cause tags in there. If they answer it, you know, as a promoter, detractor, or passive, they'll actually see a list a subset of categories that can come up where you can actually tag. They can tag the one thing that really stood out that at them. So if it's, why did you know to rate us so well, there's a list, and it's just one click, and they can say that was the key reason. And that's what we're looking for, that key reason.
It's always easy to say, oh, well, it's one or two. It's three or four or five things, but, you know, we can make it short and concise by saying what's the one thing that stood out, and we can do the same thing on the other spectrum with detractors and even with passives. What could we do to improve, being able to condense that instead of asking a battery of questions and then still asking the open end is pretty much where we're trying to get that focus. And I do believe open ends provide a lot of rich information. I think the NPS question is the 'What.' And then you can do the 'Why' top reason in more detail so that they have that opportunity to continue the conversation.
I think too many surveys nowadays look more like a one-sided conversation. We're going to ask you 50 questions, but we don't want you to respond with why you feel that way. We just want you to give a rating for all these things, so I think the other part, as I'm a huge advocate of having both transactional surveys which can happen. After each and every transaction, but very short very concise and a relationship survey, particularly if you're if you're talking where there's a lot of transactions over a time period over the year over the relationship you. I really don't like those transactional questions that start asking you, everything from your demographics to your spend to sometimes you know what other brands you use that kind of thing, all within the context of a transactional survey. Sometimes those transactional surveys are longer than the actual transaction themselves.
So, you know, we should be really cognizant of the time, but I believe in a good blend of having a relationship survey where you really can get into the details, jump in.
Use a relationship survey once a year to jump in and find out how they feel about your organization, other organizations. Find out that their spend across those things that all these questions that we ask that we want to know, and I think the old hook was hey we already have them on the line. So let's just go ahead and ask it. Let's just do a relationship survey
once a year, twice a year. Really incent them to do it. It doesn't have to be a monetary incentive. But explain to them. We're doing this so we can serve you better. It could be as simple as that. But that way, you know that information that you have to collect that doesn't change often is still available to you, and then that shorter transactional survey, you can then link it. I mean, that's the promise of data analytics, and I could go on for hours about that.
Karl: Well, I agree with what you say. Here we talked about relationship surveys as being either in the annual or semiannual type in an event. And they are more probing and you want to get at the heart of things, which means it's going to be more qualitative than it is quantitative, but I'll go back to something that you said earlier, don't ask what you already know. We made this mistake, years ago, we asked customers in a survey, how long they've been a customer with us. And of course, you can imagine the answers that came back. Are you asking me that? You should be telling me that. So, you know, you have to be careful of those things and. But you know what's interesting here though is to talk about transactional surveys and using NPS because in the original concept of NPS was meant to be in a relationship survey, not a transactional survey.
But in my experience, I've used NPS as a metric in all surveys, whether they be transactional or relationship. And I think somebody asked here in the QnA about a Forbes article which I haven't read that said that the NPS questions to passive versus actual and how likely are you
to recommend would be then replaced by how often do you recommend and I've actually I actually have done that within surveys.
NPS is a high level indicators of by itself. And of course, with the NPS plus. Now you're going to get more out of it, you can extract more out of it. But, you know, I did ask in a particular survey was working with an organization. We started asking for how many times over the past year. Have you recommended blank organization to others. And it was very interesting, because the question leading question was have you recommended or advised against. So those that advised against and those that have advocated for you'd be
interested to know that the average recommendation was 10 instances of advising against and two instances of recommending. So when somebody says they will advise against when they've had a bad experience you can really pretty much expect, there's going to be more of them. They're a squeaky wheel, rhey're louder. And somebody who recommends is going to be probably on the lower side of that it was on average that with two recommendations over a period of a year.