Feedback: can it help rebrand a business?

LiveChat is a customer service software company that was pretty confident about their product. But when they started having doubts about their brand, they decided to dig deeper. Here’s their story.

One unhappy customer. That's all it takes to turn people away from your business. On the other hand, satisfied customers are more than happy to spread the word. Plus, happy customers become repeat customers.

But the truth is, benefits like improving churn and increasing revenue aren’t possible without knowing what your customers think of your brand. And how do you find this out?

We faced this question a couple of months ago during LiveChat’s rebranding project. We knew what customers thought about our product, but what we really needed to know was what they thought about our brand.

In this post, we’ll share how to gain honest customer feedback. We’ll also show you how we created a branding survey for our customers, why we chose certain questions, some of our mistakes (yeah we had some), and of course—the lessons we learned.

Step one: use your NPS score

First the good news. We already knew what our customers thought about our product. For a long time, we’d been sending out a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey—the easiest way to gauge customer satisfaction and loyalty with a single question:

“How likely are you to recommend this business/product to a friend or colleague?”

Just one question, but it’s is the most powerful phrase in the world of customer feedback.

It’s answered on a simple 0-10 scale, where ‘0’ is “I wouldn’t recommend your business” and ‘10’ is “I would recommend your business.” How could it be any easier?

NPS also asks a second question: “Why did you give this score?” This is your opportunity to get to know what’s really going on in your customers’ heads.

Step two: segment your customers

The most important question in our rebranding project was whether our customers felt emotionally connected to our brand. We discussed different ways to do this, and we decided to send a survey to our most satisfied customers—people who were highly familiar with our product and communication style.

We chose a small group of people who had given us a 9 or 10 on the NPS survey and who’d been using our application for over three months. Here’s why:

• They know us. People who’ve been using our app for at least three months already know our product, talk with our Support Heroes, and are familiar with our knowledge base, blog, and podcast.
• They like us. People who gave us a higher NPS score already like our product, so this is the first group we wanted to ask whether they also feel emotionally connected with us.

Step three: create your survey

Before we created the survey for our customers, we wanted to make sure that our entire company was on the same page. So we sent a survey to the whole LiveChat team to get their take on our product and brand.

There were three things we wanted to find out:

• What do they think about the LiveChat app, and where do they see it going?
• How do they see us as a team?
• How do they think we’re seen by our customers?

Of course there were differences in the details, but overall the whole team was pretty aligned. We saw ourselves as of a bunch of talented, ambitious, and passionate people—all with an interest in tech and always looking for an excuse to laugh.

Now it was time to find out if our customers see us in the same way!

And that starts with the tool. We knew we needed something that was intuitive to use, had an option to upload photos to express our brand, and provided a great mobile experience.

We also wanted to create question groups around three main topics:

1. Brand. What do customers think about the LiveChat brand?
2. Communications. How do customers like to get in touch?
3. Personas. Who are these people anyway?

Go ahead, click ‘start’ to have a look for yourself:

Our branding survey results

So what did we find out?

First off, most customers do feel emotionally attached to our brand. Nice. But there’s still room for improvement, so we gave our Marketing Department a friendly nudge to keep working on this.

Another good sign? Customers believe our application helps them to grow their business—and that was the best thing we would ever want to hear!

And we let out a big sigh of relief when we heard that our customers really value informal communication—humor over stiffly formal talk, nice graphics over stock photos. You can imagine how important this was for me as a content writer who loves writing useful and also amusing and personal stuff. Our customers like it too? Heck yeah!

Survey mistakes to avoid

Our survey was a success, but there were also some mistakes. Here’s a few things we won’t be doing again.

Mistake #1: too many questions

We tried to pack in a lot of info in one go. There were just too many topics and too many questions—the survey was supposed to take around 7-8 minutes, which to us seemed like a lot. The first rule of survey creation is to respect your respondent’s time.

Mistake #2: rewarding respondents

We offered Amazon gift card for filling out the survey.

But how many people quickly clicked through the survey just to get the gift card? How reliable are these responses? You’ll never know. And guess what? We came across a couple of names that completed the survey three times to get three coupons—busted.

Mistake #3: lack of personalization

Start with friendly intro: “Hey, we’d love to know how our brand makes you feel. You game?” Or whatever suits your style. Every survey should feel like a real conversation.

For example, start by asking the respondent for their name, and then use their name in future questions. Things like “You’re doing great Benny! Just two more questions.”

Mistake #4: repetitive questions

Asking the same type of question over and over is a great way to put your respondents to sleep—or worse—to send them clicking straight out of your survey.

So mix it up with different question types. For example, use a picture choice question to break up the text. Say something like “How does LiveChat make you feel?” and then have a picture of a unhappy person, a neutral looking person, and a happy person.

Tying it all together

Customer feedback is one of the best tools for growing your brand. You have to know who your customers are, what they expect from your brand, and what you can do to make them happy.

Sure, there are lots of things you can learn thanks to Google Analytics—demographics, click habits, even conversion rates. The problem is, this knowledge won’t let you know why your customers choose you over your competitors, whether they feel emotionally connected with your brand, or their greatest pain points along their customer journey.

And this is exactly the type of info you can get from a survey.

We knew we needed this kind of feedback during our rebranding process. And the results are helping us to make our offer more human, more emotionally appealing, and even more consistent—on every page you visit.

Will it be worth our efforts? Time will tell. But the insights we’ve gained from our experience went way beyond expectations.

If you’ve never sent a survey to your customers or you’re wondering if it’s the right time to send it, my advice is: just do it! It will help you to connect with your customers on a completely different level, build more meaningful relationships, and most importantly—grow your business.