SMS for Surveys and Feedback

Email surveys are often ignored, and in-person questionnaires, while effective, generally don’t lead to enough responses to glean anything useful.

Thankfully, SMS exchange can be used for surveys and feedback, and have a higher response rate than any other method of soliciting feedback.

Text messages allow your organization to communicate with clients, customers, and employees in a way that solicits quick, honest, feedback on specific questions and inquiries.

• The benefits of using SMS to solicit feedback and conduct surveys include:
• Gaining real feedback from customers, clients and employees.
• Engaging with customers as they are considering an item, product, or service.
• Learning what products and services are important to your clients and customers.
• Understanding employee concerns and ideas.
• Gathering actionable intelligence about how your brand is perceived.

Product preference. Asking customers which of two or more products they prefer.
Event time or location.  Scheduling quick meetings with employees can be complicated. With SMS exchange, you can get employee feedback quickly.
Support satisfaction.  Following up with clients after they have received service is easy to do with text messaging.
Prize giveaways and contests. A great way to increase brand awareness and customer loyalty is to use text-messaging surveys to give away prizes. Asking for a specific reply as part of a contest means your audience is not just receiving your message but responding to it as well.
Follow Up Appointments. Using a text message survey can be about connecting with a single individual one-on-one. Setting follow-up service appointments via text message can be a great way to increase return visits.
Gathering demographic data. SMS surveys can’t be long, but that doesn’t mean they can’t be thorough. Gathering key demographic information about customers and clients can go a long way in determining your company’s action plan.
Soliciting feedback about a product.  Creative SMS exchange surveys can include links to web pages featuring news, products, songs, or videos. Asking for a moment of the contact’s time to review the item and let you know their thoughts is a great way to make customers, clients, and employees feel like their opinion is valued.
Getting in-meeting feedback. SMS is a great way to poll employees during a meeting or conference call about a critical issue facing an organization. Gathering opinions and displaying the results on real time charts or graphs increases employee attention during the meeting and provides valuable feedback to management.

How are other companies and brands using SMS to promote events?

With limited shelf space in their small boutique, every product choice had a big impact on the bottom line. Choose the wrong product line and items might sit for weeks or months without being purchased. Even worse, those items take up valuable space that would be better suited for a fast-selling product. Thanks to SMS text messaging surveys, the store’s owners were able to gather opinions on items they were considering before adding them to inventory. Here’s how they did it.

Customers who visited the store in the past were asked for their mobile numbers and the store built up a subscriber list of a few hundred shoppers. Each time a new brand or item was under consideration by the store’s Head Buyer, the company leveraged SMS technology to connect with previous customers. A simple survey was sent out via text message with a link to the product on a popular eCommerce site. The message was simple: is this a product you would like to see in our store? Not only did the replies indicate if the customers liked the product, but linking to an eCommerce site showed them the price-point as well. Customers that supported of the choice were explicitly stating that they liked the product…and implicitly approving of the price. When the results were not overwhelming, the Head Buyer chose not to bring the product into the store. Only when the survey results were overwhelmingly in favor of the item would the store stock it.

The practical application of this data meant the store was full of products that appealed to their current customers and the customers they hope to attract in the future.