How a Customer Experience Consultancy Enhances Their Service Offering with SmartSurvey

This Experience Management (XM for short) consultancy helps organisations improve their customer relationships to drive business growth. As part of their service, they use SmartSurvey to gather essential feedback from customers, employees, and senior managers on behalf of their clients.

With SmartSurvey's Enterprise platform, the consultancy has transformed how they collect and analyse feedback, giving their team powerful tools that deliver deeper insights with less effort. Their approach has not only improved the quality of their client assessments but also ensures they can present compelling evidence that helps organisations make customer-focused improvements that directly impact their bottom line.

The Challenge: Finding the Right Survey Platform Partner

After undergoing leadership changes in 2017, the consultancy faced several challenges with their existing survey tools:

• Lack of flexibility to meet their specific methodological needs
• Concerns about GDPR compliance and client data security
• Limited ability to customize surveys for different client requirements
• Need for a more comprehensive solution with dashboard capabilities
• Insufficient support from their existing survey providers

The Managing Director explains:

"We weren't happy with the various tools we were using. What we were looking for was a more comprehensive, all-in-one solution which allowed us to communicate better with our clients through dashboards and automate some of the back-end processes for analysis."

Initially, the consultancy decided to build their own proprietary survey tool to gain more flexibility and ownership. However, this approach proved more complex than anticipated:

• Development was resource-intensive
• Maintaining the system required technical expertise their team lacked
• Back-end analytics capabilities were limited
• Dashboard functionality for clients was difficult to implement

"Probably not the best decision we made in terms of capabilities. GDPR was a huge issue for us as we work with clients' data, not our own data."

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The Solution: SmartSurvey Enterprise

By 2024, the consultancy made the strategic decision to migrate back to SmartSurvey as their primary survey platform, upgrading to the Enterprise plan. Three key factors influenced their decision:

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Strong Partnership Approach

1. Better relationship management
2. Responsive and helpful support team
3. Willingness to understand their unique needs

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Enhanced Technical Capabilities

1. Customizable surveys for diverse client requirements
2. Advanced address book for sophisticated segmentation
3. Robust data security features
4. Improved reporting functionality

Advanced Analytics

1. Sentiment analysis for open-ended responses
2. Text analytics for qualitative feedback
3. Ability to generate word clouds for visual insights

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The Managing Director highlights their requirements for technology partners:

"One, they've got to speak in a language that our team can understand and help improve how we operate with the technology. Two, they've got to be responsive and helpful. And three, they've got to understand that not everyone's as technical as they are."

The Right Partner Has Made All the Difference

The consultancy has experienced significant improvements since implementing SmartSurvey Enterprise:

Tools that matches their work style

• Staff can now operate the platform without management intervention
• Approximately 25% of issues are resolved internally
• Training has empowered the team to work more efficiently

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Features that save hours of work

• Our advanced address book features has enabled segmentation by:
  • Customer tenure
  • Lifetime value
  • Office location
  • Product usage
• Eliminated significant manual intervention in analyzing cohort feedback

Better Client Deliverables

• Enhanced reporting capabilities
• Sentiment and text analysis for deeper insights
• Visual representation of qualitative feedback

"The biggest success has been I'm not being called in to sort out issues. The team can work on it themselves and know they've got somebody who can help them if something happens."

User Experience and Adoption

The consultancy's team has responded positively to SmartSurvey's interface and functionality:

• Intuitive dashboard design
• User-friendly interface with good graphics
• Self-service troubleshooting for common issues

"It's excellent - good graphics, good intuitive ways to help our team understand how to use the system. It's quite an easy system to get your head around once you get into it."

The Future with SmartSurvey

Looking ahead, the consultancy is excited about leveraging more SmartSurvey features:

• AutoCategorise to enhance the analysis of open-ended responses
• Case management (Cases) which will help their team close the feedback loop with dissatisfied customers.

"AutoCategorise is very important to us for open text analysis. Putting the words people use into different categories lets us actually start detailing what's important. Having that automated will be good."

The Managing Director sees this as just the beginning of a true partnership:

"We see this as a partnership. It's not just a vendor-supplier type relationship. It's about how we can work together to help both our businesses."

In just three words, the Managing Director describes their SmartSurvey experience:

"Knowledgeable, responsive, helpful."

Why SmartSurvey?

While no single tool can meet all of the consultancy's unique methodological needs, SmartSurvey stood out for several reasons:

• Covered more capabilities than competing platforms
• Demonstrated alignment with the consultancy's future goals
• Receptive to their specific requirements
• Proactively developing features that matched their roadmap

"We're a different type of business in terms of the way we work. We have our own methodology. SmartSurvey covers more bases than any of the others tools out there to suit our needs. It showed us that they were looking at our future and the future of managing feedback for better experience."

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