IMPROVE Customer Surveys and INCREASE Survey Response Rates

In this interview, Dannah Vaughan, Director of Customer Success at Apty, shares with us her strategies in increasing survey response rates. She implemented innovative techniques that not only QUADRUPLED response rates, but also enhanced customer engagement and operational efficiency. Dive into this session to uncover the secrets behind her success!

Click here to watch the episode on YouTube

𝐇𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐋𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓𝐒

- Effective, actionable strategies for significantly increasing survey response rates.
- Utilizing improved survey feedback to drive product development and enhance customer satisfaction.
- The importance of a customer-centric culture for operational efficiency and customer success.

𝐀𝐁𝐎𝐔𝐓 𝐎𝐔𝐑 𝐆𝐔𝐄𝐒𝐓

Throughout her career, Dannah Vaughan has been leading and scaling global customer success teams, demonstrating dedication to excellence in the field. In the wake of a professional layoff, Dannah channeled her passion and expertise into founding The Rebels of SaaS Podcast, a platform aimed at advancing the SaaS industry through positive disruption. Her efforts are focused on driving growth and retaining revenue, embodying her commitment to not just navigate the future of SaaS with innovative strategies and insights.

🔗 You may connect with Dannah Vaughan via LinkedIn.

𝐔𝐒𝐄𝐅𝐔𝐋 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒

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Transcript

00:00 Having a low response rate on a customer surveys always a bummer. It takes so much work to prepare a survey, takes so much work to follow up and send the emails and making sure we're hoping that the survey comes up with some results and then getting less than 1% or 2% sometimes.
00:21 It's like, why are we even doing that, especially if we have thousands of customers? So, today I have a special guest, Dana Bohan, who is actually increased her client survey response rate from 4% to 8% in a company that has thousands of customers buckle up this is going to be awesome.
00:46 Dana Bohan, tell me a little bit about where you add from a career standpoint and what brought to customer success.
00:55 One thing that I have found, and it's interesting, because you can probably totally align with this, so many of us came to success by mistake.
01:03 It was not supposed to happen this way. I was operational leader services project management, kind of reactive support leader. I found a local, small company that needed a customer success management.
01:18 And I said, okay, This is gonna be an easy gig. It turned out to be the hardest gig I'd ever had in my life.
01:25 But crappiest part about it is I became an absolute nerd for it, honestly. I said, well, now I'm just gonna have to figure out how to do this.
01:34 I'm gonna have to connect with community. I'm gonna have to figure out like how to measure success. How to like evolutionize the concept of it.
01:44 And it was just this weird thing. my first little customer success office was a closet that had been converted. It was like this big.
01:53 That company grew. It was amazing from $5 to $25 million in revenue and I realized how powerful customer success can be.
02:02 Not just from a retention but from a growth engine stamp. Man did that not just drive kind of the theory around the way I see customer success personally.
02:10 That's kind of how I found it. It was absolutely a mistake and I've just been a junkie for it or lack of better nomenclature.
02:18 I just can't stay away. So much so now that you have a podcast of your own, it's called Rebels of Sass.
02:25 Yeah, like so many great people that are in tech, I was laid off last year. And I wanted to take some time because I knew when I was globally mentoring others and with them I need to be able to look people with integrity and I and say, hey, sometimes things happen out of your control.
02:44 you can have fantastic results in metrics, and the journey still is going to lead to not great things. And the podcast would have been on my mind for a long time as a passion project.
02:55 So I said, hey, this is a way to kind of connect the go-to-market world around big ideas that do lead to positive disruption, but also a way to give voice maybe to diversity, inclusion, some of those not so popular great big topics.
03:12 But also to connect those people that haven't had such a big voice since they were layoff in the 2023 and 2024 to kind of macro layoffs, especially in success community.
03:24 There's been a lot of SaaS investment at the macro level. I think it can sales versus success. And it'll be very interesting as we see how that plays out for some of these startups.
03:36 But for now, Well, I think giving voice and community to those people is something that I wanted to do. And so that's how rebels of science came to be and six months later, people in six countries are listening and it's not just a passion project and so yeah, it's good.
03:54 It's good. One of the stories I wanted you to share today is how when you were a customer success executive, one of the things that you notice is that it's hard to do a go-to market strategy without capturing the voice of the customer and one of the challenges that you were facing was that the response
04:15 rate for surveys were very low. Can you tell us a little bit about that time where you kind of realized that and what was the challenge that was brought up because there was lack of true feedback from the customers?
04:30 It's so odd. I figured out people do not like surveys. They suck. Case example. I have an obsession with Starbucks.
04:40 When I go there, they want me to do a survey after. I don't want to do that. I want to drink my cup of coffee with my name on it.
04:47 And I want to be enjoying that. I don't want to do the survey. It's the same way in what we're doing.
04:53 So I think what I found in this particular organization. So thanks to 60 million dollars, I asked organization global. And at the time I was VP of success for the organization.
05:05 When we needed a voice of the customer report, because obviously that conduit back into the organization was important for the whole flywheel inside of the org from across departmental lens.
05:16 Product needed it for product dev, product release, product roadmap. marketing needed to know how to market, who the white paper represents pool of folks where our sales obviously wanted to tap in from an organic crawl sale up sales stance.
05:30 So like it was pulling all of that together to figure out what the heck we were doing well, and what the hell we could do better.
05:38 So we realized that people weren't responding to these surveys. When I started talking to other people in the success community, I realized this is not just a problem inside of the ecosystem that is my work.
05:51 This is a problem for everyone that's trying to get a good vibe and a good sense of what customers have tried to say to them.
05:59 That time how many customers did you have? Do you have hundreds or thousands of customers? It was thousands because the product set was very diverse.
06:08 It was a conglomerate of M&A activities out of this like mega-ladon organization. And what was the response rate that you used to get with that time?
06:18 It was like four percent. Yeah, let me tell you, four percent is actually pretty good in comparison. Some companies have loved them, two percent, less than one percent.
06:27 What were you shooting for? So we were trying to get the happy goal is we were like, okay, we want to try to get between seven and eight percent.
06:35 And much to what you're saying, what's you see when you're doing global consulting. I'm sure you see like these crazy response rates like probably like less than 1% 2%.
06:46 Unfortunately, yeah, I assume you sold the issue. But before you share how, can you tell me at the end of your journey after you tweaked and changed things?
06:56 Don't tell us what, what was it at the end? Like when you were actually successful. Did you get to that 8%?
07:02 Actually, we got higher. Yeah, in this mad scientist customer success, Dana Brain, it was role to see kind of what happened because of this lever.
07:13 And it seems so simple. It just was just this weird thing. And it definitely calls like this thought bubble from, hey, look, this can truly tweak this in a way that can truly lead the better engagement.
07:28 What was the highest response rate you got on a survey after you made all these changes. We actually got up to around 16.78 percent.
07:37 It was very significant. I think that it was a few things. We created a tag or team essentially to think through different ways to position us for success inside of this engagement.
07:49 We did things like if you respond, then we'll enter you to win and I've had. We will enter you to win a gift card.
07:57 you know, trying to do that BF's inner kind of incentivizing within the proxy group to do what we could to try to leverage response.
08:05 Oh, the first thing that you've done is offered an incentive. How many things in total did you do? Yeah, so it was definitely like five different incentive plays.
08:15 So without deeper dive, what were the five things? One, you offered an incentive to respond to. Two was we actually went and we started calling people all the phone and just having more intimate types of conversations.
08:30 Basically looking at our champion, our economic buyers, the people that we knew we could rely on inside of the accounts.
08:36 Even though they were busy in their day, even though they didn't want to respond, they would still help us out.
08:42 We started doing that. We just picked up the phone and start talking. The next thing we did was we started talking about it in our business reviews.
08:51 We started talking about the importance for their feedback in the business reviews. And so what we wanted to do, essentially, was truly have within that conversation, which I hate hate hate surveys, and I hate hate hate power points, slides work.
09:09 So the way that I do business reviews is a little bit different, but I do have a couple of slides, the way that I coach them and create them.
09:16 And so it's definitely important to include some type of scripting or slide within your business review to make sure that you're positioning how important survey interaction is with your client, because it is so important.
09:31 I think you convinced that that was important. We gave them a win on a product roadmap, one of our yet, because in this particular customer base, like some of the customer bases I've found, they were very sensitive to chattering amongst each other.
09:46 And so we gave them a feature on the product roadmap that they wanted, that was a systemic problem. It solved a problem for them and for us, but we were able to go back and revisit it in a conversation with the client partner and say, hey, this feedback led to this.
10:05 You got what you wanted, essentially, because you spoke up. Okay, so you closed the loop, essentially. Close the loop. So that was being for, give them something.
10:14 And in this case, it was product roadmap. And then lastly, I think play with your survey tools. I think the biggest most important thing with survey tooling is in-app options rock, because they do have a higher probability for responsiveness than the actual sort of ex post-facto to transaction kind of
10:40 surveys. like I'll use c**** market medallia as illustrative example. Great tool because it's an inexpensive way to deploy. But in this particular example, one thing we found quite interesting way is that an in-app tool was truly the way to win.
10:56 And I'm a pindo fan, so that's my shameless plug for that. But survey mechanism is a way to win here.
11:04 Okay, so I'm writing down in-app survey is the winner, especially when you have a lot of customers. I was kind of surprised when you said, oh, we highlighted it in a QBR.
11:15 If you have thousands of customers, you don't have QBR with everyone. So, do you find the same increase in response rate?
11:24 And we're talking about, in your case, going from 4% to 16, 17%, so X4 response rate. How do you do that with a strategic customers.
11:42 Couple of ways here, what we did was in the high-touch customer, so the ones that had the highest ARR and the most potential white space, what we did was those were the actual customer microcosm that was had that those that's the segment we were having conversations with anyway for the enterprise business
12:02 reviews. And of course, same thing for that mid-market, near segment. For the smaller clients that we were using to touch digitally with Mark Heta, email blasting, customer success portal created with Salesforce community.
12:17 What we did was, of course, within that more automated digital business review, which sometimes we created in Vimeos, sometimes created inside of, yeah, I love video business reviews and it's just a a latest scale.
12:34 I get excited about digital scaling success. In this example, what we did essentially was with that long tail, essentially of customers, if we think about it through the Pareto's curvelands, we serviced those customers and got the message to them, writing a little blurb, essentially of how we were able
12:53 to close the loop with client feedback from another client. So, kind of similar skeletons in the closet for how we're thinking around and outside of the box, so to speak, for digital success.
13:07 And we just use that as another tool inside of that, kind of digital enablement. So you basically did almost, I would say, all six steps or seeks accelerators or drivers for everybody.
13:20 You just did it in a different format. Maybe use blogs or webinars to say how did I close the loop so that they know that you're actually listening and doing something with it, you might not have closed the loop with them specifically, but they know that you're doing that, you're increasing awareness
13:40 , and so you were able to do that for everyone. You leveraged more one to many type of things. How long did it take you before you saw an expore on your response rate.
13:52 About two quarters, quite frankly. I like to move quick. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But in this case, I was happy with the efficient quick turnaround while we were still able to truly touch customers in a way that was truly useful.
14:09 And we got very lucky because the particular product thing that we were trying to solve and the close-the-loop space was actually something that was fairly easy and it wasn't this huge ramp time for the prod team to actually truly produce.
14:24 So it was a very cool mix of across departmental collaboration to truly make this happen, which was driven from the tiger team, the spin up of that tiger team, everyone rolling together on the bus to be able to achieve the desire outcome.
14:40 Those of you who are listening and you're hearing the beautiful Dana saying tiger team and you're like, what tiger? Basically it's a thanks tank team.
14:49 It's a team of people that huddled together from across different departments that thank through a problem. They solve for something.
15:00 They aren't just going on the MSE Magnificate to the Tiger Bar, which is very decorated in cheesy, tiger, or stuff.
15:08 Because that would be more fun, but it's not. This is truly solving for a business problem. is also a great way to develop junior leaders and people that want to have thought leadership.
15:18 Anyway, it's a cool motivator to just to kind of get wheels turning around the organization and for things not to be mundane.
15:25 If you're newbies in general to fast to business or your business is starting to grow and you want to get all these type of initiatives run a lot faster.
15:36 By the way, Dana doing this in two quarters is rendable like to get these kind of results. And you want to learn more about Tiger teams and how to do that and we actually at CSM Practice teach that in our coaching program.
15:49 It's actually designed for scaleups and startups that want to start embracing these mature business practices for their post sales. And so we have a coaching program that's designed for directors level and above.
16:03 Just want to be with people like Dana and learn what they're doing and uncovering strategies and we have a whole customer hub that has everything you need to know and how to do tiger teams and how to do surveys better.
16:16 So I wanted to ask you a lot of times what we do is we also look at what questions we ask to whom, oftentimes what I find is that there might be too many open-ended questions.
16:30 A 4% is pretty good. I would say if you're 2% on lower, you probably have either too many questions or too many open-ended questions.
16:37 Given that you had four percent, which is not that horrible, did you even have that, and did you end up changing the questions or the number of questions or the number of open-ended questions?
16:48 We did reduce the account, the actual physical count of questions, then the other thing that you mentioned, which is incredible, is the piece around getting away from the open-ended questions.
17:01 because again, what are people hate worse than surveys that customers absolutely hate open-ended questions? It's not a personal thing against an open-ended question.
17:12 Executives are busy. Clots are busy. We all are busy finding ways to drive efficiencies like this key concepts. Getting those open-ended questions are I think that's solid.
17:24 Also sometimes like to diverge the survey because you mentioned, Well, we send this client survey because we want to feed products, we want to feed information to marketing, we want to feed information to customer success and we want to make it actionable.
17:37 And that's how we get to 50 questions that are deep and sometimes they're not helpful to increase retention, upsell and adoption.
17:46 So, did you also end up splitting the types of surveys and the frequency of each? Obviously, you'll need to coordinate everything so you don't inundate them.
17:56 But there's some questions about the product. You would only potentially send to the end users, like there's different questions you was sent and executive.
18:04 So you did you hand up segmenting, sort of like the survey strategy by persona, by needs for your own company?
18:13 What we did in this example was we actually did to core, we had a transactional type of survey, and then we had more that was gaged around, kind of that overarching customer sentiment, the non transactional one.
18:25 So one that was geared more towards support experience, project management, onboarding to give us a measure of adoption and time to value all those great things.
18:34 And then one that was truly driven at, I hate NPS, but I also think it's important. And I love listening and reading content about all the great things that are out there around new and different ways to HVOC or a voice of customer around maybe excluding NPS, but in this court example we did that.
18:53 Now something we did not do is breaking out by persona. And so John, John, that's going to be coming in my next plan.
19:03 I will be definitely integrating the different persona sort of segmentation around the surveys. I love that idea. How did you get all these ideas?
19:13 Do have like a cast or a book that you recommend or a blogs, what prompted you to try all these things.
19:20 So I love looking at and creating ideas from truly taking care of personal emotion and kind of health. I think that those things are important and they do feed in to your ability to truly articulate and create inside of your business as an executive.
19:41 So one of the things that I use kind of as a go to God for life is how you will measure your life by Clayton Christians in and all.
19:49 I'm also a big fan of Renee Brown, just how she pivots around vulnerability and how that can truly guide you in a positive way.
19:58 I think being vulnerable and being truthful with yourself and with your people is just a very important way to be able to navigate towards success, something that helps from an idea perspective.
20:10 Obviously, I love CSN practice and I love listening to the show. If you're not taking advantage of the resources that this show and the CSN practice community as a whole brings the end run.
20:24 And then the other place that I like to get ideas is Jean Young's office hours. You know, just a super awesome human love.
20:33 She did so many things with connecting people during layoff to opportunity community. So also a great connector in the community.
20:41 Here's my shameless plug for ripples of SAS. We do it big and we do it different and that's okay on the podcast.
20:48 That's another place. Podcast didn't exist back when this example happened. But I had the community working and creating these types of things.
20:56 So I think that it's just a culmination of all of that. But all of that connected with some great people.
21:02 I'm great and I totally, wholeheartedly, also with you on the community. Communities are important part, especially so you're going through changes.
21:12 You can't be in your head. You can't just rely on the people within your own organization, because they just like you have the same perspective sometimes.
21:20 And if they don't, then you need to know how to deal with it. Sometimes it's important to have an outside community that can set your thoughts straight and give you some examples.
21:30 And take away of the guessing and I'm proud to say that CSM practice offer that kind of community for executives have a like a safe environment where they can share what's going on in their world and get solid advice from people that are actually in the trenches and most likely in the same boat as them
21:47 or just came out of that situation and can share from their expertise and experience. So it's important to be vulnerable so that you can get the right coaching and get the right advice so you can get out of situations sometimes.
21:59 Yeah, very true. I mean, being willing to say, I need help. I need consultation. I need to work with people as leaders.
22:09 We like to think, hey, not that we know everything, but hey, we can figure this out. But as leaders grow in their career, it becomes quite clear that the best solutions to problems can't exist from just them, or one person, And so just picking up the phone or having a conversation, I think is something
22:30 that we need to do more of so that we can be our best selves and solve problems the very best they can be solved for our client.
22:37 Absolutely. Hey, Dana, what's next for you in the next two to three years? What do you want for yourself? I have decided I truly miss the formal serving of team.
22:46 I am having conversations now, kind of looking for the next formal team to serve inside of tech. Once I decide what's best from next landing place, from a job perspective, then I'm probably going to continue on the road to positive disruption in SaaS, what we can do bigger and better and different to
23:08 drive revenue and retention in this very interesting economy that we're finding ourselves in. Super excited about all of that. Yeah, I'm going to take it one day at a time, raise my beautiful children.
23:19 By the way, Dan, I think any company that's going to work with you is going to be tremendous slay lucky you're absolutely a problem solver you don't show away from any kind of challenge you're so vivacious so it's like so fun to work with you and with that it's a wrap and I'll see all y'all on our next
23:40 podcast episode.