How a recruitment agency uses survey data to power an award-worthy customer experience

The team at u&u, an Australia-based recruitment agency, recognized the industry's growing need for a more positive candidate and client experience. This motivated their mission to positively influence the lives of the people they work with.

But before they could live up to their customer-centric mission, u&u needed to get a pulse on the experiences of the organizations and candidates they partner with—a task that proved difficult without the tools in place to collect, understand, and share customer feedback with the appropriate members of their agency.

This all changed once the team found SurveyMonkey CX.  

As a first step to improving their clients’ and candidates’ experiences, u&u mapped the journey for each group across 40 touchpoints. Then, using SurveyMonkey CX, u&u triggers surveys to go out to the candidates and organizations who reach a key stage in the engagement.  

Anyone in the agency can access the responses by logging into SurveyMonkey CX. But to ensure that Recruitment Consultants (industry specialists who partner with candidates and clients to help them find the best roles and employees, respectively) don’t miss any responses they might find relevant, the team also uses SurveyMonkey CX’s Reports feature to automatically update the appropriate consultant via email when new responses come in.

Nicola Flannery, a Customer Success Manager (who’s tasked with ensuring that clients see value throughout the engagement) at u&u, describes how SurveyMonkey CX’s real-time data collection and agency-wide access to the results benefit her team:

Nicola also told us that the volume of feedback they collect has markedly improved: Their average response rate has nearly doubled, from 21% to 36%.

Her team attributes their improved response rate to SurveyMonkey CX’s ability to embed the NPS® question into the email, and to asking SurveyMonkey CX’s built-in key driver questions—which their audience finds thought-provoking and engaging to answer.  

u&u knows full well that reviewing and understanding customer feedback is only half the battle. The other half? Taking action on it.

The team delegates one member of its staff to review the feedback daily via SurveyMonkey CX’s Conversations feature. Within the app, the staff member contacts Detractors to tell them that u&u values their feedback and that, unless there are any objections, their Customer Success Manager will follow up to better understand their concerns.

Meanwhile, the staff member asks Promoters for permission to use their responses publicly. If the respondents agree, the Recruitment Consultants will go in, grab the quotes they like, and promote them publicly—for instance on social media. This social proof allows u&u and its consultants to attract more qualified candidates, which increases demand for their services from clients.

u&u is already excelling in its mission of providing a world-class client and candidate experience.

This might be most evident in the quality of their candidate placement. Upon initial placement, candidates have an impressive average NPS of +91, and 6 months later, this score rises to +93.

Nicola explains what this improvement means to her team:

The candidate and client experience has also improved on a more holistic level, with the average NPS for both groups reaching an all-time high of +62.  

u&u’s increasingly happy candidates and clients give their consultants little reason to jump ship. And based on our research—which found that organizations who care about their customer experience are more likely to have higher employee satisfaction and retention—the consultants’ happiness and longevity at u&u will only improve.

Note: u&u’s low attrition is all the more impressive when you consider that their average consultant has 13 years of experience—making them highly coveted in their industry.

In recognition of u&u’s major strides toward customer satisfaction, SEEK, one of Australia’s most popular employment marketplace sites, nominated u&u for the “Excellence in Candidate Engagement” award during their most recent Annual Recruitment Awards.

According to Nicola, SurveyMonkey CX has “enabled us to adopt a customer-first mentality across the agency.” Clearly, that’s had a significant impact on their organization, those they work with, and their industry.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.