How to Leverage Surveys in our Internal Communications Strategy

Speaker A: Right now. So you should have heard that chime in. So again, thank you everyone for joining today's webinar session. We really appreciate your time, and we're definitely very excited to talk to you today about surveys and specifically how you can leverage surveys as a part of your internal communication strategy. And we also have a special sort of VIP sneak peek of some of the work that we're actually planning around surveys within ContactMonkey. So I'll actually be going through a prototype demonstration. some of the work that we have planned. So you'll get a little bit of a sneak peek in terms of what's coming down the pipe, specifically with surveys in Contact Monkey. So we do have a couple of folks from both the customer success team and myself from the product team that will be kind of taking you through today's webinar. So I have my lovely panelists in Chantelle and Rebecca from our customer success team that are gonna be joining me today, as well as myself from the product communications team. Chantal and Rebecca work with plenty of our customers today at Contact Monkey, and they're really excited to be sharing some surveys best practices with you today. And like I mentioned, towards the end of our presentation, I'll be going through a sneak peek demonstration of our surveys prototype. So here's a brief outline for today's session. So Chantal will be kicking us off by going through why surveys and employee feedback are valuable and why it should be a part of your internal communication strategy. So she'll also be getting into tips for getting your employees to actually participate in your surveys. That'll be Rebecca going through that section. And then followed by that, we'll have section 3 where I'll be going through a bit of a sneak peek, like I was saying, in terms of what we have planned for our surveys functionality in ContactMonkey. And then lastly, we'll have a bit of a Q&A session. And we'll also go through some helpful resources that you can access after today's session concludes. First things first, we actually wanted to kick it off with a poll question. So you should see a poll go live in a moment here. So give me just one moment. You should see that now. So we just wanted to ask, have you ever used ContactMonkey's existing surveys functionality? So I start to— starting to see some of the live results filter through, which is great. We got a nice spread of people that use it all the time, which is wonderful. Sometimes, and you have a couple of folks that say that they've wanted to use it, and also a couple of folks that are saying that we didn't know that we had a surveys functionality, which is wonderful. So we're gonna be going through surveys in a bit more detail today, specifically those enhancements. But good to see a nice mix of folks that have used it quite a bit, which is awesome. So hopefully you're gonna see some of those enhancements that we have planned and get excited about that. But we also have a good mix of folks, like I was saying, that have used it sometimes, but also have expressed interest in using it. So I'll pass it off to you, Chantelle, to kick us off here. So yeah.

Speaker B: Thanks, Tony. All right. So yeah, I'm excited to take you through why surveys and employee feedback are so valuable. So looking at, you know, why would we conduct surveys in the first place? And for some, it might be very obvious. For others, you might be wondering, you know, is it really that big of a— does it really make that big of an impact? So employee feedback really is the backbone of any good employee engagement strategy. It's a great way to evaluate your current methods and make informed decisions to improve your future efforts. Employ— collecting employee feedback tells you exactly what issues your organization needs to address. It can also generate innovative ideas to improve business operations and foster a culture of continuous improvement. And of course, giving employees the opportunity to share their thoughts and opinions can increase engagement, which we all know leads to higher productivity. It drives organizational growth and improves employee retention rates. And there are quite a few different types of surveys that you can conduct. I'm sure you're familiar with a few of them, but we figured it was a great opportunity to go through some of your options here in case you're looking for some inspiration, or if you're not sure where to get started. So Yeah, a few common survey types are listed here, but this is by no means an exhaustive list. Surveys can focus on engagement, satisfaction, performance, development, attitude. You can do 360 feedback surveys, organizational culture-oriented surveys, and there's so many more options for you. Each type serves a different purpose and provides unique insights for continuous improvement. And we have really great resources on our website if you're looking for some information to help you get started. If you're looking for some examples or templates for your emails, we'll be sure to go through those later in the presentation.

Speaker A: Perfect. So now on to the second section of today's session. We're actually gonna be going through tips for getting employees to actually participate in your surveys. We know for some internal communications professionals, it can be difficult sometimes to actually get employees to answer your survey questions or even participate in the first place. So we wanted to go through some sort of tips and tricks for how you can actually get your employees to respond more frequently to your surveys. And we're gonna be kicking it off again with another poll question that I'll put live in a moment here. So give me just 1 second. So you should see that poll live now. So we just wanted to ask what your, you know, general average survey response rate is for surveys that you do typically launch. So again, kind of similar to the last one, we're seeing a nice spread. We're seeing a good chunk of folks answer between 51 to 80% for survey response rates, which is actually quite great. And also a good chunk of folks answer between 0 to 20, which is still fine. But we'll definitely go through, and Rebecca will go through some, you know, added tips and tricks for how you can actually get more of your employees to respond to your surveys. So thank you for answering that poll. Appreciate it. And with that, Rebecca, I'll kick it off to you.

Speaker C: Perfect. Thanks, Tony. Hi, everyone. Looks like we had some dispersed answers around the board, which is great. There's always room for improvement. And in this section, like Tony mentioned, I'm going to really be focusing on some tips and tricks on how to get your employees to actually participate in the surveys that you're sending out. As we know, engagement levels are so important. So with this slide, I'm firstly going to talk about how you can be positioning your survey questions. So rather than just focusing on what you are asking your employees in surveys, it's also so important to consider the methodology that you're using to pose these questions. So this slide here is going to talk about the how you position your surveys to your employees. And our first point is to keep your questions simple and brief. You're going to want to think of your survey questions in the same way that you might think about an effective email subject line. So keeping your questions short, no more than 50 characters if you can, and ensuring that you state the question simply and clearly. So short and sweet is always best. And you want to be respectful of your employees' time. So providing your employees with adequate time to respond to the feedback surveys or the questions. You also wanna make it really easy for the employees to provide their feedback. So something like embedding a pulse survey into your employee newsletter with ContactMonkey is really effective. Being polite, you wanna avoid demanding feedback from your employees. They're going to be much more inclined to answer your questions thoughtfully if they're asked rather than forced to respond. And also providing adequate context. So just ensuring that the employees understand what you're asking them. This doesn't necessarily mean making your questions longer or more complicated. We really just suggest placing your survey questions alongside relevant information so that it makes sense. So let's just say you might wanna collect employee feedback about an upcoming event that you have. It would make sense to use your event invitations as a space for employees to provide their input and their suggestions. And you can do that through ContactMonkey's event management feature as well. And then the timing of when you're sending your surveys out is also extremely important. So firstly, just sending your surveys to employees at regular intervals. So your employees are human, they're creatures of habit like anyone else, and creating a consistent and a recurring opportunity for people to share their feedback is really, really important for those responses and those engagement rates. So consistent surveys help employees get into the habit of responding, and this is why continuous employee feedback is often a lot more effective than those one-off survey questions. And a great example of this that I like to use is including a similar survey question in your weekly newsletters or your monthly newsletters. That way employees are just conditioned to expect a survey question every week or every month, and they'll be a lot more likely to respond if it follows a certain cadence like this. Collecting feedback before and after the relevant events or the announcement. So if you're looking to gather feedback about an event, maybe a team event or a company event, a topic or an announcement that was made, be sure to time your employee feedback methods in close proximity to whatever you'd like your employees to comment on. This just ensures that opinions are fresh in people's minds. It's going to be a lot more relevant, and you'll just see a higher response rate. And then finally, using the surveys for employees who are joining your organization or leaving your organization. New employees can offer a fresh perspective on your business, and then your tenured employees can use their experience to provide a lot of meaningful feedback before they're leaving their organization. So with that, I'm going to pass it back to our product expert Tony here. He's going to give you a sneak peek of our new reusable surveys feature that we're so excited about. So I will pass it back to you, Tony. Thank you.

Speaker A: Wonderful. Thank you so much, Rebecca and Chantelle, for that. So off the back of what Rebecca was just talking about with this new functionality I'm gonna be showing you today, again, it's just a prototype for today. It really is going to be, you know, coinciding with what exactly what Rebecca was talking about in that you'll actually be able to easily and continuously survey your employees with this new reusable surveys functionality. And it should be a whole lot easier to use this functionality when compared to our current Pulse or one-time surveys functionality. If we have any customers that have joined today's webinar that are using our Pulse and one-time surveys functionality, so you hopefully see how that process will be a whole lot easier. So for the moment here, I've exited out of the presentation and we'll come back to that in a moment. And you should be seeing a prototype on your screen right now. And again, I just wanted to caveat before I get into talking about how this actually works and how it's going to look within Contact Monkey when this is going to go live. That again, this is just a prototype. It will look pretty well similar to this when it actually is launched and live within Contact Monkey on your accounts. But there may be some things that may look a little different when it comes time to going live. So just please keep that in mind that again, this is just a prototype and it may look slightly different when it actually goes live for you within Contact Monkey. So as I was saying, and as we've kind of talked about a couple of times in today's presentation, ContactMonkey does today have existing surveys functionality. We usually refer to them as pulse or one-time surveys. And for those folks that are familiar with this functionality already in ContactMonkey, how this essentially works is that you would launch ContactMonkey's email builder, you would create your email template in the email builder, and then insert a one-time or a pulse survey at that point in time. within the email builder. And then from there, your employees could respond anonymously to that one-time or pulse survey after the email has been sent out, and you would then collect your responses or anonymous comments and review that on an email-by-email basis. However, now through some customer interviews and extensive research that we've done, we really wanted to develop an easier way for folks to use their— use surveys in their emails on a continuous basis. And also gain access to really valuable insights and analytics on surveys that have been included in emails over time. And what this has resulted in is us working on a feature that we like to call reusable surveys. So it's really all in the name, and all this is going to allow for you to do is click into a new tab in ContactMonkey that's called Surveys, and you'll be able to create new surveys here within this Surveys tab that you can then use on a repeated basis going forward in your emails, rather than just using the one-off or pulse surveys on your emails that you may use today. When I've clicked into the Surveys tab like I've done here in this prototype, you will then be faced with this button here that says New Survey. And when I click into this, it launches this slide panel here on the right-hand side where you can select from one of 6 survey types that you would like to create here. In this Surveys tab. For those folks that are already familiar with our Pulse or one-time surveys, yes/no, rating, emojis, and ENPS, this should look pretty familiar to you, and these are already available with our Pulse and one-time surveys. But we're also pleased to announce that with reusable surveys, you'll actually have access to 2 new survey types with poll and text surveys. So how these work, it's pretty similar if you've used like a Google survey. Or any other surveying tool with poll surveys where you can ask your question here. You can easily allow for comments and then put in your poll options here and allow for your employees to answer, you know, multiple answers here with multiple choice being ticked on, or they can only select one poll option as well. So it's pretty straightforward how that option works. And text only is you're just asking a question and then you're leaving a button labeled then there and the email builder for them to click and answer that question with the text-only surveys. With these 2 new survey types here in poll and text, these are only available with our reusable surveys capabilities. But everything else related to pulse or one-time surveys is remaining as is in ContactMonkey. Nothing is changing with pulse or one-time surveys, and you will only have availability for yes/no, rating, emojis, and eNPS. As Rebecca and Chantal were mentioning, there are so many different survey types that you can include in your email communications. A really good example that comes to mind for us at Contact Monkey actually is that we have a monthly town hall that we conduct internally here at Contact Monkey. And a really great idea as an internal communicator is off the back of that town hall, sending out an email where you would ask your employees to rate, you know, how they felt that town hall went. So you can actually use a rating survey here as an example where you ask the question, you know, how did you feel about, you know, this month's town hall as an example, and then allow people to include a rating between 1 to, you know, 5 stars and also allow comments on the survey as well where folks can add in that they really like the content in this month's town hall or they really liked, you know, marketing's segment in the town hall as an example. So the sky's the limit in terms of different survey types you can include in your emails. But just wanted to give you some food for thought around, you know, an example of a survey that you can include in your emails on a repeated or a monthly basis. I'll show you in a moment as well what this looks like when it's actually included in an email and what some of the analytics look like off the back of these surveys being included in an email. But first, I just wanted to show you how this actually interacts with the email builder. So again, for folks that are familiar with our existing Pulse or one-time surveys functionality, How this would work is they would click into the email builder and select the surveys option and be able to embed, you know, one of these survey types in the email builder as a pulse or a one-time survey. But now with the reusable surveys functionality, they'll have this new tab here that says choose existing survey that will show them a list of surveys that were created separately in the surveys tab for them to now pull into their email in the email builder. Now, you may be thinking to yourself, why would I do this versus, you know, just using the pulse or one-time survey on the fly every single time I wanna create my email here in the email builder? And that's definitely a good question and something that we for sure thought about. The reason being, and I'll show you the analytics in a moment, that's one of the reasons for sure. But the other reason is that you wanna have consistency in the surveys that you're sending out. As Rebecca mentioned, your internal employees are no different from you and I. We're all creatures of habit, and we do wanna see that consistency with both email communications and also with surveys that are embedded in your email. Now, you can do this with Pulse and one-time surveys where you're embedding the exact same survey. It looks the exact same. You're asking the same questions. But there is a margin or a room for error with that with Pulse or one-time surveys, as you have to match exactly what you put in your last email. And to do that, you have to click into your last email. and see exactly what was included in terms of a pulse or a one-time survey. But with an existing or reusable survey, all you have to do is just pull in that survey that you built one time and include it into your email. And you can kind of leave, you know, feeling comfortable knowing that it's the exact same question that you're asking. It's the exact same format. Everything is the exact same and looks the exact same from a branding and standardization perspective. So from an employee perspective, they're gonna feel much more comfortable, and that's gonna become that that habitual routine for them that they're gonna be answering that same looking survey in your email comms that maybe you send out on a monthly or biweekly basis, as an example. Now, once you've actually included one of these reusable surveys in at least one email, you'll then actually see a list of surveys that you've created here again back on the Surveys tab. So you'll see that we have a whole host of surveys here that we've created. that are either published or in draft, or even surveys that we don't want to use anymore that have been archived. I won't really touch too much on the status of those surveys. It is, for the most part, pretty self-explanatory, and we will have some supporting documents to share with you when the time comes for this to be released to customers. But I actually just wanted to click into one of these surveys that has been published, and all this means is that it's been included in at least one email Like I showed you in the previous step. So once I click into this, we can now very easily see all of the emails that this specific survey has been embedded in. Now, to me, this is a very powerful tool to use at your disposal as an internal communicator, as you'll now be able to again easily see all of this, all of the emails that a survey has been included in, and all of the corresponding analytics with those surveys across multiple emails and across time. So for your first couple of surveys that you use, this will still be valuable as you'll still get these analytics off the back of the surveys. But where this will really come in value and in handy is once you have, you know, a good kind of stable of surveys built up here that you've sent across multiple emails over time, you'll be able to get sort of those comparisons and trends like we're seeing here. So going back to the example that I went through before, let's say you're sending out a survey on a monthly basis off the back of a town hall that you've conducted. Maybe, you know, it's closer to the end of the year in November or December, and you're seeing that the number of comments that you're getting off the back of that survey is dipping, you know, quite low or lower than usual. Perhaps the average score, if it was a rating survey, is also dipping, you know, lower than usual in recent months. This could be a cue for you as an internal communicator to not only review some of the comments that you're getting off the back of the survey, But to also review, you know, with your community HR team as an example, why are the average scores dipping to a level that we're not happy with or comfortable with? Why are some of the comments or sentiment in the comments a bit negative than usual perhaps? So it's a good cue for you again as an internal communicator to do a bit of investigation and to determine if there might be a broader issue here at play for why sentiment is going down or why the number of comments is going down. And again, you can actually review the number of comments by clicking here and then seeing all of the comments here that your employees left. Again, these are all anonymous. You can even filter by specific ratings and also do a keyword search if you wanted to as well. So it's very, very helpful just to easily review this information. Same thing goes for average score. You can see the spread in terms of who left a 5-star rating versus the 1-star rating very easily. So it's very easy for you to see these analytics again over time for surveys that were included across multiple emails. Same thing goes to once you've actually sent out that email, you'll also have access to what we call sent email analytics as it relates to surveys. So this should look pretty familiar to folks that have sent out a couple of email campaigns through ContactMonkey. But if I click into this email campaign up here, you'll also now have a dedicated surveys tab here right next to where it says click maps. Where it's going to show you all of the surveys that were included in your email specifically. In this email, we've included a lot of surveys just for the purposes of this example. But this will also include both reusable surveys that were included in the email. And as we can see here, it's still gonna include those one-time or pulse surveys that we're seeing here. And a lot of these tiles and analytics that we see here, like comment rate or average score, if I click into this, Just gonna show me again that list of comments and ratings. And same thing goes for average scores. It's gonna show me the spread here that we've seen in scores. And if I go back to more answers, it'll just show me all of the emails that the survey has been embedded in. So in conclusion, we think that the reusable surveys functionality is going to be a whole lot easier for you to actually get started with, to start including surveys on a more regular basis. in your emails. And we know through our own customer interviews and just talking with you folks that use surveys on a very frequent basis that it is very valuable, as Chantelle was saying earlier, to include those surveys in your emails and to regularly survey your employees, as it does make them feel like they're part of almost something bigger at your organization. And it also makes them feel like they're valued and that their feedback is actually heard. And from an internal communicator perspective as well, we're making it a whole lot easier for you to see You know, your response rate, your comment rates, your number of comments, your average score across multiple emails as compared to our current pulse or one-time surveys functionality. We're very excited for this, and I'll talk about broad sort of general release timelines in a moment. But again, very, very excited to have this feature released and to hopefully, you know, have you folks give us some feedback on it and start using it relatively soon. So I'm gonna hop back here into the presentation. I'm gonna go back into the slideshow here. So just quickly wanted to talk about broad release timelines here. So we're targeting currently mid-July for the initial release of our reusable surveys functionality and feature here to our customers. Followed by that in early Q3, we're gonna have further enhancements to coincide with that initial Reusable Surveys release. Now, some of the functionality that I just covered in the prototype will not be included with that initial release here in mid-July. We will specify exactly when the time comes what will not be included as part of the initial release. But just know that later on in early Q3, that's when you're going to start to see some of that more enhanced functionality released. And then later on in Q3, this is when for customers of ContactMonkey that currently leverage either a custom landing page or a custom URL. This is when you will have access to the reusable surveys functionality. Again, for customers that leverage either a custom URL or custom landing page, you will not have access initially here in mid-July to the reusable surveys feature. We will provide you with communications and reasoning for why that is after today's presentation if you're curious, but just wanted to be clear that your access to this feature will come a bit later on in Q3, and we'll have more concrete dates and timelines as we receive them. And we will communicate that to you both over email and likely directly within ContactMonkey in the application. So very quickly now, I wanted to talk about some of the resources here that will be available at your disposal, both in general, broadly speaking, with surveys and covering some of the topics that Rebecca and Chantelle went through today, but also specific to the reusable surveys functionality that I just showed you in our prototype. So of course, as hopefully most of you know, we have a wonderful help center here at ContactMonkey with some very helpful resources as it pertains to not only surveys as a whole, but everything else on our application. So to coincide with that mid-July reusable surveys release, we will have a help center article that talks both about how to leverage reusable surveys, best practices, But also still how to leverage our one-time or pulse surveys functionality. It's also going to include a video walkthrough of me going through the prototype as I just went through, and again, talking through some best practices. And generally, there's gonna be that Help Center article available to you as well. We also have that lovely blog on our website. I know Chantelle plugged this a bit earlier, but there are so many resources available on our website, not even just specific to surveys, but across our entire application. But this specific one that I've linked to here in the presentation covers a lot of the topics that Chantelle and Rebecca went through today, like why collect employee feedback in the first place, you know, types of employee feedback to collect, how and when to ask for employee feedback that Rebecca covered, and also how to gather employee feedback in ContactMonkey with that surveys functionality that we went through today. So please do feel free to go through this on your own time. Of course, if you have any questions, Whether it be about, you know, general surveys functionality or general surveys best practices, please do feel free to reach out to your customer success manager. They are your best point of contact for any questions related to that. But please do feel free to leverage us as a resource as we know a lot about ContactMonkey functionality, but we also know a lot about best practices when it comes to surveys and also everything else related to internal communications specific to ContactMonkey. So just some key takeaways from, from today's webinar is number one, just to recognize the value of surveys and really invest the necessary time and resources into this. You know, while it is easy to create a survey in ContactMonkey, it does take some time and thought initially to sort of plan out what it is you really wanna do with the survey and what your objectives or goals are. Because as I mentioned, the example I gave of surveying your employees off the back of a town hall, that's totally valid and you can do that. Or even like Rebecca was saying, you have an event coming up, doing a survey to coincide with that event. But it's really kind of planning out like, what is the reason here we want to do a survey in the first place? And is there room for us to regularly survey our employees to include in our emails that we send out on a regular basis? The second point here is just determining what type of feedback you would like to collect from your survey. So as Chantelle mentioned, It does vary the feedback that you are collecting. If it's just kind of like anecdotal comment-based feedback, that's totally fine. If you're specific, you know, looking out for like ratings on your surveys and you wanna see ratings hit a certain benchmark or a certain level, that also is gonna, you know, vary based on what you're looking for out of your surveys. So just working as a team to determine what kind of feedback you wanna collect from your surveys, I think, is also a valuable first step here. Like Rebecca was covering, just positioning and timing your surveys appropriately. Timing is really important, and how you ask your questions is also really important, like Rebecca was saying. So please do follow some of those best practices that Rebecca was talking about earlier on in today's presentation. And lastly, of course, is just taking advantage of our reusable surveys functionality just to enhance your employee experience. We found through our own research and also just through talking with customers that Not only with reusable surveys, but just surveys as a whole. It does ultimately lead to improved levels of employee retention. Just because, again, like I was saying before, it leads to employees feeling like there's something— they're part of something bigger at your organization, that their feedback actually matters, that it's being heard. And it definitely is worth your while to start including surveys on a more frequent basis in your email communications. And hopefully you'll have an easier time doing this with our reusable surveys functionality. And you'll also have access to a lot of those key analytics that I was going through earlier today. With that, that kind of concludes our webinar presentation for today. I did see a couple of questions that were going in the Q&A there. I think my colleagues might have answered that already, though. Let me see. I see Jillian's enthusiastic, which is great. Chantelle, go ahead.

Speaker B: No, I was just gonna say we had a couple of questions just about exporting survey data and comments and what that looks like. So I wasn't sure I know we went through that in the demo, but I don't know if you wanna elaborate on that at all, Tony. I'll, I'll leave that to you.

Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. So thank you so much, Rachel, for those questions. So the survey export is actually one of the things that will not be included as part of that initial surveys release in mid-July. But once we have a clearer idea of exactly what's going to be included in that surveys export, we can definitely communicate that to our customer success team. who in turn can communicate that to, to the customers, of course. So we'll let you know definitely once we have a clearer idea what exactly is going to be included in that export. But we're definitely open to your feedback once you do see it for the first time. So please do let us know if that kind of meets your expectations when the time comes. But we will certainly let you know of a clearer timeline for release of that export functionality specifically as it relates to the surveys feature. But to answer your second question, it will be in a CSV Excel format. It won't be in some weird format that you've never heard of before. It's gonna be in a format that you can actually manipulate yourself outside of ContactMonkey. Okay. And it's okay if some of the folks are a bit shy for today. Please feel free again to reach out to your CSM after today's call if you do think of any questions. We are here as your resource, and I know the CSMs are really excited about this feature as well. And they'll be able to answer all of your questions as it relates to, again, surveys as a whole, but also specifically reusable surveys. All right. So I think we're pretty well good then. So that's really it for today's presentation. If anyone again has any questions, you know where to reach out to your CSM. So please feel free to do that. But before we wrap up, I just wanted to thank everyone for their time. We really, really appreciate it, and we appreciate everyone's enthusiasm in the chat as well. That's obviously, of course, welcome. And you will receive more communications as we get closer to the release date for this reusable surveys functionality. But we really just wanted to give you a sort of VIP behind-the-scenes sneak peek today before it actually does get released to our customers. So appreciate you joining us today. And the recording will be shared later on today as well. Thank you so much.

Speaker B: Thanks, everyone.

Speaker C: Take care.