Curious to hear from some of our Community experts, like @AdamK12, @MattiasM, @ThomasW_IronMountain, @VirginiaM, @Amy_Bow, @SteveBelgraver, @Chhavi_Ch, @GregChase @gingersauz, @jflowers1 and @JessicaGregory_CHNw 🫖

Cast your vote in the poll and spill the tea in the comments! 

Great question @Michael_Cooksey! I think my answer wouldn’t be listed here… I would say it depends on the company and the way that they leverage the survey data. If we are talking number of actual surveys or listening posts, than it may be any of the above depending on the organization, how they are structured and how they leverage the insights across the business. If referring to how many times to send out a survey, this also depends on how the organization takes action. You may deploy a relationship survey once a year, but deploy transactional surveys more frequently based on the business and how they action the data.

The most important element of all of this is to ensure the organization is taking action on the surveys and helps them achieve their organizational goals!

This! Absolutely this. Always remembering that collecting insights needs to be tied with action is key!

I believe CX survey depends on sale of products and should be delivered after every sale to check their satisfaction level, reactions and get the feedback. It will always help to improve service and delivery. Most importantly, organization should focus on negative and neutral feedback to improve customer satisfaction level..

I typically send around 3 CX specific surveys a year. I send out one at the end of Q2, to identify how we impacted the customer experience across Q1 and Q2, and one at the end of Q4, to identify our impact in Q3 and Q4 half. Then, at the start of Q1 of the following year, I ask customer to provide feedback on the customer experience for the whole, previous year. I think the final survey paints a great picture of their overall experience and perception of our brand, while the semi annual ones give our team opportunities to be more reactive, iterate, and pinpoint areas to improve. 

I agree with @ArunDubey! As a freelance designer, I think it is crucial for me to collect feedback after every project I do for a customer. Each of my clients has different needs and expectations for their projects. If I want to do even more work for a client in the future, it’s imperative that I create a consistent customer experience and action all of their feedback!

I would say it depends entirely on the company & there is no one-size-fits-all answer! Lots of things to consider: 

• How frequently do your customers interact with you?
• How often does the average customer make a purchase?
• How many different business units engage with the customer throughout the typical customer journey? 
• What types of questions are you asking and what is the length of each survey? 

For short, transactional surveys that measure individual interactions/touch-points, it's okay to solicit feedback at every transaction as long as it's kept to a minimum to avoid survey fatigue. For longer, in-depth surveys that evaluate the overall relationship a customer has with your company, the most common cadence is usually either quarterly or annually. 

My B2B customers typically survey their clients quarterly; while my B2C customers typically use the every other rule of thumb (if your customers interact with you monthly, you can send your survey every two months; if they interact with you weekly, send it every two weeks). 

Can’t wait to see the poll results because everyone is making really great points!  Another consideration is the need to avoid fatiguing users and getting straighteners or inaccurate data by sending too many CX surveys !!

@ArunDubey, thanks for sharing your expertise on this! I wholeheartedly agree with the point above -- people should embrace negative feedback from customers, as it is an opportunity to investigate “blind spots” and learn more about the customer’s needs, wants, and expectations

@Morgan Johansson you make excellent points! Your input about survey fatigue is an important thing for people to remember -- a very real phenomenon that should be carefully considered when planning out the CX lifecycle!

I agree that it depends on the company. I had voted on 4 though because we do a quarterly survey to gauge overall satisfaction metrics like rNPS. However, to avoid survey fatigue, I only send the survey to ¼ of our customers per quarter, and customers only have the opportunity to receive the survey once per year. 

It varies based on factors like industry, lifecycle, touchpoints, goals...etc… I think we have to tailor survey frequency to those factors and regularly assess its effectiveness to avoid survey fatigue.

This is a tricky one.

We’re a large company that covers a vast range of products, across most financial or insurance needs. As others have said this means a lot of touchpoints, brands, products etc.

There’s a lot of engagement with our VOC team’s surveys and the scores are used from top to bottom and so there is a real hunger for insight which has certainly been in use this year. But this does lead to a massive CX programme.

It depends on industry and business nature, Companies can have different kind of surveys like transactional survey going daily but making sure customer receive only one email in quarter or so. Than we can have yearly or half yearly relationship survey.

I’m a fan of surveying the client at different levels for a broad picture of the customer experience. This means Transactional Surveys for operational level cases (Incidents and Requests). Annual VoC surveys to the (most) senior contacts on the client side. Complemented by ad hoc surveys to track performance on projects and incidental engagements. But have this cadence is not enough. Front line folks need mandate to own, resolve and improve operational level issues. The VoC only works with clear accountabilities and finally on a more fundamental level the business needs to effectively close the outer loop like a real Learning Organisation (along the lines of ITIL CSI or Six Sigma or Demings PDCA take your pick but once decided stick to it!)

Such a great and always topical question! 

In my view my org is guilty of sending out too many surveys, however there is always a benefit for continued and broad range of feedback throughout the year - just a delicate balance with the customer experience itself.  I think it’s key to consider any survey as a customer touchpoint not just a measurement tool in order to give value to this experience.

In addition: rather than thinking about the MAX volume of surveys (which I already think we surpass), I come back to ‘what’s in it for the customer’, ‘how can we integrate into existing customer journey’ or ‘can we source these insights in another way before surveying’.  These are more constructive considerations in prioritising than focusing on a max/ideal number.

As others have pointed out it’s also about what actions these are driving. Can we ensure the existing listening posts are driving value/improvement before we invest time/effort in more. To many can dilute the organisations focus/ability to action.

Personally I find greater success in reducing length and improving quality of surveys; than volume of them overall.  If we must have another survey, how can we make it a positive customer experience.

Great question @Michael_Cooksey ,

This question doesn’t have a straight-forward answer, there are a lot of scenarios that we should factor -

1. Nature of business
2. Customer Journey Touchpoints  
3. User Experience
4. Survey Fatigue and Redundancy resulting in Less Response

Various other points that we can add here.

Apart from this, it is also important to know that we can collect feedback in multiple ways like relational surveys, transactional surveys, etc. this again adds to the count.

To summarize, till the time we are able to get a good sense of the customer health and are able to delight the customer after seeing a feedback survey...we are not over doing things :)  

As many have stated already, it depends on the companies need.  We generally try to keep a minimum of 6 weeks in between surveys pertaining to visits but on general project surveys the contact would be once per quarter or longer. 

This is great intel to have! Thanks so much, @ash123 !

Thanks so much, @Tonya_Fulton! Appreciate you sharing your expertise on this!

Thank you, @Swanand_Chavan_Ugam! It seems like based on your input and others, survey fatigue is an important consideration. 

This is a GREAT point, @ScottG! Thank you so much for your detailed input on this topic!

Thank you, @dxconnamnguyen! Survey fatigue is a common theme here among experts like yourself!

@SteveBelgraver you said it perfectly! Too many folks do not put enough emphasis on the accountability factor in collecting feedback. Thank you for sharing your expertise!

Thank you so much for sharing your expertise, @PeeyushBansal!