How to keep your customer data clean

It’s important to maintain your customer database. Here’s how to use SMS to collect and update your customer information.

SMS surveys are a great way to:

• Update personal information e.g. name, address or contact detail changes.
• Update employment status.
• Update current requirements for a service/product.
• Clarify a customer’s requirements (e.g. if they bought one product/service, would they also be in the market for other products/services that may complement?).
• Find out how often a customer wants to hear from you.
• Find out how a customer wants to hear from you (e.g. SMS, email, phone etc).
• Understand how happy a customer is with the products and services they receive from you.
• Remove customers who no longer want to hear from you from your database.

SMS is a great channel via which you can send surveys that allow customers to provide any updates/changes to their details. Here are some tips on how you can lay out your survey.

1. Intro message

Before sending customers the survey, send them a message first to inform them that they’re about to receive a survey. We conducted a data cleansing exercise, during which we tested the value that introduction messages had. Half of the surveys were sent without an intro message and half with. 

We saw a 15.92% response rate from the customers who were sent the intro message compared to 8.62% who weren’t. This suggests that intro messages do make a difference.

We also tested how surveys sent via SMS performed compared to their email counterparts. Email saw a 2.91% response rate, suggesting that SMS might just be the superior channel when it comes to sending customer surveys and feedback forms.

2. Questions

There are various types of questions you can ask when it comes to collecting and updating customer data:

• Questions with no predefined answers (AKA free-type answers).
• Questions with predefined answers.
• Net Promoter Score questions.
• Yes and no questions.

Predefined answers

Let’s say you’re a recruitment agency. You could ask a question like “When we last spoke, you were looking for roles in marketing. Is this still the case? Text YES or NO to update your preferences.”

You could also give customers the opportunity to opt out of future communications. For example, “Text STOP to unsubscribe from our mailing list.”

Your predefined answers in this scenario are YES, NO, and STOP. Based on your survey recipient’s response, you can trigger the next question. This is a great way to personalize surveys to individual recipients, ensuring they receive questions that are relevant. 

What if the recipient responds with an answer that doesn’t match one of your predefined options? You can set up an auto-reply that asks people to respond with one of the following options (YES, NO, or STOP). 

Non-predefined answers

Also known as free type answers, this option lets recipients reply with whatever they’d like. This is perfect if you need more detailed responses from your survey recipients. Think along the lines of changes in address or contact information, or if you want people to elaborate on their previous response. 

Using the recruitment example we mentioned earlier, let’s say you asked this: “When we last spoke, you were looking for roles in marketing. Is this still the case? Text YES or NO to update your preferences.”

The recipient responds with YES. You could then ask: “You were looking for roles relating to marketing manager. Is this still the case? Reply with YES or the roles you’re now looking for.”

And the recipient can respond with either YES or the name of a role. 

3. Signing off

Once you’ve gathered all of the information you need, it’s time to thank your recipient for their time. You can even include your contact details as part of your sign off – this gives your recipient the chance to clarify or amend any responses.

4. Data analysis

Download your survey responses as a spreadsheet and use this to either manually update your customer database, or – and we recommend this option – import the data.

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One key advantage that an SMS survey has over a regular survey? You can create your survey with 3-4 questions, upload your customer data to the Esendex survey dashboard and let the platform do the work for you. 

There’s no need to reply to the messages either. The survey can automatically send the next question once it’s detected that it’s received a valid response to the first question. If the response is invalid (e.g. one of the answers doesn’t match the list of predefined responses), you can set up an auto-reply that reminds the recipient to reply with one of the following predefined responses.

The information that you gather (i.e. the responses) will be available to view in the survey dashboard. You can export this as a spreadsheet and update your customer database.

“We’ve got better visibility of what people using our services think of us now, and we’re also able to provide better services as a result.”

BELINDA LAMACHER – CRM MARKETING MANAGER, HELPING HANDS

Read the success story

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