How can I improve my response rates?

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Chris:
Hello, everyone. I'm Chris Higgins and welcome to the CX leader Quick Tips Minicast, where Walker experts take a few moments to give you helpful advice on how to improve your XM programs. Joining me on this episode of the minicast is my friend Drew Hall. He's a vice president and team lead for Walker's client services. Drew, thanks for being on the show.

Drew:
It's my pleasure. Thanks for having me, Chris.

Chris:
So, Drew, what is your quick tip for our listeners?

Drew:
Yeah, today I'm going to talk about response rates and how to improve your response rate to drive the best data sets you can for your program. I'd say it all starts with a healthy maximized response rates to ensure you're getting the right responses from the right folks. My quick tip is this: curate your list. Make sure the folks you're reaching out to are active customers that interact with you. And it's not just a flat export from a CRM system. We all know response rates are calculated by the number of people that respond divided by the number of people you sent the invitation to. And one of the fastest ways to make that number go down is to have a very large denominator more people getting emails or SMS or WhatsApp or whichever method you're using, sending to more people than you need to is the number one mistake we see that is an easy way to improve the score. It's an easy fix. One other thing I would say in terms of how to curate that list is you can start by sending pre notes. Let your customers know you're going to be sending them a request for feedback. That's an easy way to verify the folks in the list have active and working emails, and it's a way to increase the numerator of that response rate, the number of people that respond, letting them know you're going to send an invitation and request their feedback, puts it on their radar, lets them know it's coming. And when that invitation ultimately does show up, research shows folks that receive pre notes are much more likely to respond than someone receiving an invitation out of the blue.

Chris:
What are some of the best ways people can curate those lists? How do I know which people to remove from the list and who to keep?

Drew:
That's a really great question and I appreciate the curiosity. There's a couple ways to do it. I would say the most impactful is to take the list and reference that with account teams, customer success managers, anyone who might represent a region or a product line they would have the best information on. Maybe there's a recent order we can use. Maybe there's a recent customer service interaction you can bump that list up against. In B2B environments where the lists are usually smaller, but there are multiple people inside an account, they'll help you identify the right person in that account or a handful of people to reach out to. So the easiest way to curate that list is to do it with human interaction, to talk to other people in the organization, to find secondary systems or fields or flags inside your CRM system that might indicate this is a person who's purchased in the last 12 months or three months who's had some other type of interaction. That would be my suggestion there.

Chris:
And I imagine a curated list with more active customers also gives you a better quality response.

Drew:
That's exactly right. Not, you know, response rates are certainly what we call an alpha KPI. It's an indication of how good your program data is going to be. Right. No one's really asking, you know, NPS or CSAT or EAS are really the basis for program decisions. But if your alpha KPI, your response rate is really low, it starts to undermine the health of the program because you're not getting a representative group of responses. That's another quick tip would be to segment your list and start thinking through how everyone in the list might not be the same. And instead you could have sub lists and sub response rates from one type of customer or another. Again, not just to show you have a better rate, but to actually drive better metrics at the program level. Right? A better understanding of the people we're asking for feedback from will give us better feedback.

Chris:
That's awesome. We've got a two for one for the Quick Tips minicast this week. Thank you, Drew, for your quick tips and appreciate your time.

Drew:
Yeah, thanks. I appreciate being here and look forward to giving you some quick tips again in the future.

Chris:
If you want to listen to more great advice, go to cxleaderpodcast.com and be sure to subscribe to the show. And if you have a question or would like to hear more on a particular topic, send us an email podcast@walkerinfo.com. Thanks for listening.

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