Your Goals Have Changed. Why Haven’t Your Survey Questions?
All credit unions have business goals that they want to achieve, whether it is improving a specific product’s effectiveness, offering more services to members, or growing their membership. But when it comes time to consider their member survey strategy, many credit unions fail to take their ultimate business goals into account. By failing to align your survey strategy with your business goals, you could be missing out on getting the survey data you need to help your credit union grow. Avoid making this costly error by taking these key steps:
Considering Your Goals
The first step to crafting an excellent survey strategy is to consider the specific goals of your credit union. Without this step, it will be much more difficult to get the actionable data you are seeking from your surveys. Most credit unions will have general goals such as improving member experience and making your services more efficient.
However, your credit union may have specific goals that you will want to focus on. Are you rolling out a new service and want to make sure it has a successful introduction? Is your credit union hoping to improve employee engagement and/or retention? Or perhaps, your credit union is trying to find the best ways to be mobile-friendly. Determining your exact goals will help you extract the feedback from surveys that allows you to better focus your efforts on your objectives.
Creating a Smart Survey Strategy
Once have clearly identified the specific goals and deadlines, it’s time to make sure that your survey strategy will produce data that can assist you in measuring your progress. There are three important steps to creating a smart survey strategy that will help you meet your business goals:
Asking the right questions: If you ask confusing questions, you will get confusing answers. Make sure that your questions are single-topic (i.e. only ask about one thing), easy to understand (avoid big words) and that you have a good balance of both qualitative (describe, explain, etc.) and quantitative (yes/no, numeric scoring or ranking) questions.
“With shorter turnaround times between interaction and survey, you’ll see a huge improvement in response rates.”
Sending out surveys at pivotal points: When and how you send out your surveys matters. In this day and age, email and smartphones are used far more often than postal mail. To reach a wider audience, you should be sending out real-time surveys for higher quality feedback. With short turnaround times between interaction and survey, you’ll also improve response rates.
Analyze the numbers, but don’t overlook the comments: Analyzing your survey data isn’t easy, and crunching numbers can make it all seem so impersonal. But member comments will give you a great indication of *why* the numbers are the way they are. If the numbers are your “scoreboard”, then think of the comments as your “playbook”.
It is important to keep in mind that a member survey is another touch point. Do it wrong, and your credit union’s reputation could be damaged. If performed correctly, however, you can significantly improve your credit union’s reputation. Quick, painless surveys that capture important information with a minimum of intrusion can be a huge help to your initiatives while also giving your members the correct impression: you value their opinion, as well as their time.
