If you have ever received a proposal from Corona Insights regarding customer research, you may have seen this line:

“We believe that surveying customers shouldn’t lower customer satisfaction.”

We take the respondent’s experience into account, from the development of our approach through the implementation of the research (e.g., survey design, participant invites, etc.), even in our choice of incentives. We work with our clients on an overall communications plan and discuss with them whether we need to contact all customers or only a small subset, sparing the rest from another email and request. For some clients, we even program “alerts” to notify them of customers that need immediate follow-up.

As such, I’m always interested to see how other companies handle their interactions when it comes to requesting feedback. Is it a poorly thought out SurveyMonkey survey? Personalized phone call? Or something in between?

Recently, I was in the market for a new mattress and wanted to try one of newer entrants shaking up the mattress industry. I went with Tuft & Needle, and while I won’t bore you with details of the shopping experience or delivery, I found the post-purchase follow-up worth sharing (hopefully you’ll agree).

I received an email that appeared to come directly from one of the co-founders. It was a fairly stock email, but not with overdone marketing content or design, and it is easy enough to mask the email to make it appear to come from the founder. In it, it had one simple request:

“If you are interested in sharing, I would love to hear about your shopping experience. What are you looking for in a mattress and did you have trouble finding it?”

The request made clear that I could simply hit reply to answer. So I did.

I assumed that was it, or maybe I’d get another form response, but I actually got a real response. One that was clearly not stock (or at least not 100% stock – it made specific references to my response). It wasn’t the co-founder who had responded, but another employee, but still impressive in my opinion.

So, what did they do right? What can we take away from this?

  • Make a simple request
  • Make it easy to reply to
  • Include a personalized acknowledgement of the customer’s responses

Maybe you think this is something only a start-up would (or should) do, but what if more companies took the time to demonstrate such great service, whether in their research or their everyday customer service?