Every Customer Touchpoint Is a Branding Opportunity, Even IVR Surveys

Major brands make a big investment in deploying CX and VoC IVR surveys that reach hundreds of millions of consumers every year. Have you ever stopped to consider the impact those IVR surveys can have on your brand? Sure, following up with customers and prospects shows you care about their opinion, but what does that interaction do for your brand?

We are seeing a new trend among CX practitioners – using the content and design of IVR surveys to enhance and support corporate branding. Today’s consumers expect an experience that reinforces brand association at every touchpoint. In fact, brand loyalty and affiliation often is a primary motivator for survey participation. Surveys are part of the brand experience and should be designed to support the brand as well as data gathering.

When you consider that the cost of a branding campaign can run to tens of millions of dollars, using the CX survey experience to reinforce brand awareness offers an attractive opportunity to support branding initiatives. For example, a typical CX survey may require 3-5 minutes to complete, and many brands will interview millions of consumers a year. This means uninterrupted opportunities to engage the consumer during a survey equal to 3-4 million impressions with a brand experience equal to approximately 4M minutes per million interviews. Wow, what is that worth in pure brand advertising placement?

However, to be successful, CX professionals and marketing need to work together. The survey needs to yield insight as well as delivering a brand message, and too much focus on branding will defeat the purpose of data gathering.

To promote survey participation, the brand message has to be delivered in a manner that is innovative and catches the participants’ attention. Pinpoint believes that each mode of CX survey offers a unique opportunity to create a brand touchpoint using images, voice, and brand language embedded in the survey that promote brand interest as well as gathering customer data.  We believe IVR voice surveys offer a unique ability to leverage voice to enhance the brand experience.  (Contact PinPoint for samples of branding IVR surveys)

PinPoint has developed a best practice for designing surveys to maximize brand experience. Some of these best practices include:

1.      Leveraging an executive or thought leader as the voice of the business to promote brand recognition and emphasize the importance of listening to the consumer.
2.      Incorporating branding terms and language that build brand association.
3.      Designing the survey to focus on the journey touchpoints.
4.      Creating questions that elicit a more constructive dialog with the consumer.
5.      Utilizing language that motivates the consumer to provide qualitative data that drives ideation exportation.

Customers reach different “moments of truth” in the CX journey, and innovative survey design coupled with best-of-breed survey modes, like IVR voice surveys, can be deployed at strategic touchpoints to both reinforce and assess recent experience with the brand.

CX surveys offer an untapped opportunity to enhance the brand relationship, and CX practitioners need to view CX surveys as an extension of brand marketing.  Contact us for a free consulting meeting to discuss how to get more value from customer experience research.