You'd like to learn more about your clients, directly from your clients. Because, when you learn more, you can provide improved service, increase customer satisfaction, and deliver on key business objectives.

Leverage Coconut’s custom questions capabilities. These questions can be asked of clients during the online booking process or completed by staff during engagements.

Read on for inspiration on how to approach creating custom questions and use cases from customers.

When creating custom questions, consider beginning with the end in mind. What topic would you like to know more about? What outcomes are you looking to achieve at your organization? Or what are your organization’s key performance indicators? Custom questions that can help you demonstrate these objectives or provide answers related to those topics can help propel your business forward.

If you are interested in learning more about how your clients learn about your organization, create a custom “How did you hear about us?” question as part of the online booking process. Answers from clients on this question provide direct insights into which referral channels are generating the most leads, equipping your marketing team with first-person data to inform their strategy.

Do you know how many of your mortgage clients are first-time homebuyers? Or if your clients who are interested in starting their own business have done it before? Use custom questions to learn more about your clients in advance of that first appointment. You can then leverage responses to strengthen client relationships and tie the act of creating and using custom questions during the booking experience to an increase in overall customer satisfaction.

Custom questions may also be used to help improve operational efficiency and increase staff’s ability to deliver personalized customer service. For example, a custom question of, “What is the primary reason for this loan?” can be asked when a client/member books a lending appointment. Knowing this in advance, staff can better prepare for the appointment and ensure they’re ready to discuss the client/member’s specific needs.

Perhaps you offer an initial investment consultation and a follow-up investment planning service. Your organization would like to know if specific factors contribute to clients successfully moving from consultation to follow-up. For example, are customers with specific risk tolerance levels more or less likely to proceed with a follow-up?

In this scenario, you can create a custom question for whether the client is ready to proceed to a follow-up. Then, you create an additional custom question asking what the client’s risk tolerance is (low, medium, high).

Leveraging Coconut’s Advanced Analytics, you can then navigate to the Outcomes Analytics dashboard and filter based on these questions. The responses can help your organization determine if a correlation exists between a client’s risk tolerance and whether they proceed with a follow-up appointment. With this information, you can then design programs or incentives to help encourage clients with other risk tolerance levels to also move forward with follow-ups.

For how to create custom questions, please refer to this article.