Greyhound integrated SurveyMonkey Enterprise with their existing instance of Salesforce in less than a day, enabling them to tie specific customer issues with customer data.
30-second summary:
Greyhound is a 100-year-old company which transports 16 million passengers each year via intercity bus routes. They recently recognized the need to overhaul their customer survey process so they could more efficiently analyze post-trip data and better manage customer complaints.
ClickZ spoke with SurveyMonkey’s Customer Advocacy Manager, Megan Donaldson, to learn more about how they worked with Greyhound to streamline their automated survey collection process and improve customer experience.
Greyhound’s post-trip survey questionnaire had 57 questions, took over an hour to complete and had a completion rate of just 18%.
The length of the survey made it difficult for Greyhound’s station managers to assess customer complaints and address them in a timely fashion. There was simply too much data and not enough time fully understand it.
The lack of responsiveness to customer issues caused Greyhound’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) to fall.
A word about NPS: Net promoter score is a customer feedback metric that was created by Bain & Company, a management consulting firm located in Boston. It uses a rating scale to measure how likely customers would be to recommend a company to a friend or colleague.
“NPS gives you a data point to help you quickly understand how customers feel about your organization,” says Donaldson. “It also allows you to react to any negative feedback. It’s basically an easy way to set internal and external performance benchmarks that can be compared against competitors in like industries. “
Greyhound chose SurveyMonkey Enterprise when they were ready to revise their customer feedback process because, among other things, it integrated seamlessly with their existing instance of Salesforce.
SurveyMonkey/Salesforce Integration—Image Source: SurveyMonkey
Greyhound chose SurveyMonkey Enterprise because of its seamless integration with Salesforce, a tool they were already using to assist with customer relationship management.
“SurveyMonkey Enterprise is similar to the consumer version, but with an enterprise-grade platform which integrates with one hundred top SaaS platforms,” explains Donaldson. “The integrations help put customer survey data where people are already doing the work.”
SurveyMonkey’s Enterprise platform comes with everything that an organization would expect of any SaaS platform: data encryption, access controls, security features, and compliance with data regulations such as HIPAA and GDPR.
The integration with Greyhound’s instance of Salesforce took less than a day to implement since SurveyMonkey is already heavily embedded within the Salesforce ecosystem. There is no coding or specialist required. This ease of implementation was a factor in Greyhound’s decision to use the tool.
Greyhound was also able to bring their survey data into another integration with a tool called Thematic that helps with open-ended text responses. SurveyMonkey’s approach to GDPR compliance was another key selling point for Greyhound.
Says Donaldson, “We are a company that’s committed to GDPR compliance and that was very important to Greyhound as well.”
Once SurveyMonkey is implemented, enterprise customers have access to a customer support manager, phone support, an online help center and customer support.
Greyhound was able to see how valuable survey metrics were after running a churn survey through SurveyMonkey. This helped them understand why customers who took a bus once, but didn’t return, weren’t coming back and why.
“Greyhound was able to shed some light on a variety of service issues such as on-time performance, ticket pricing, and terminal conditions,” explains Donaldson. “They gained an understanding of why folks weren’t coming back. When they dug deeper, they identified when an on-time performance increase of rides could be tied back to a specific amount of additional revenue.”
SurveyMonkey Enterprise provides dashboards that enable users to review results quickly. In Greyhound’s case, their station managers had access to a customized dashboard which was created through their integration with Thematic.
Example of Net Promotor Score (NPS) Dashboard—Source: SurveyMonkey
The above image is an example of a generic dashboard within SurveyMonkey, though dashboards can be customized depending on the integration.
Additionally, enterprise users can customize survey landing pages with their own brand elements, which helps improve overall survey response rates.
Says Donaldson, “Greyhound knew that a customer had completed a trip within 24-hours and they were able to send them a personalized email asking for feedback. That was part of the reason that survey response rate jumped from 18% to 94%. Greyhound was capturing people’s responses by pushing a survey via email through their Salesforce journey.”
Shortened surveys and intuitive dashboards reduced the time for station managers to review comments from three hours to three minutes, leading to quicker resolutions to customer complaints and issues.
“The whole point of having the Salesforce integration is to serve insights in a timely manner to the decision-makers in an organization,” says Donaldson. “They can act on the feedback quickly. This is what ultimately helped Greyhound improve their NPS Score by nearly 15 points.”
Surveys are obviously only useful if people complete them. That’s why SurveyMonkey advises clients to keep surveys short and to the point. As a rule of thumb, they recommend sticking to ten questions or less. This ensures that you get enough information that’s valuable without overwhelming customers with too many questions.
