Frequently asked questions
Your questions, answered
How we run customer and employee feedback programmes, from the channels we use to how we keep your data safe and turn feedback into action.
About Smoke CI and how we work
Why is customer or employee feedback important?
Because the alternative is guessing. Your customers and your people already know what is working and what is quietly costing you; a clunky process, a broken promise, a manager who needs support. Feedback turns those hunches into evidence you can act on, before a frustrated customer leaves or a good employee resigns. Done well, it is one of the cheapest ways to protect your revenue and your reputation.
How is Smoke CI different from a survey tool?
A survey tool hands you software and leaves you to work out the rest. We work alongside you to design the right feedback programme, make sense of the results, and turn them into action. You get a partner, not just a platform.
Why should we choose Smoke CI?
Most providers hand you a tool and wish you luck. We give you a partner. We design the programme with you, run it across every channel your people use, and put a real Insights and Intelligence team behind the feedback, so you walk away with findings and actions, not just charts. We do this for some of the largest banks, insurers and telcos on the continent, and we scale from a single touchpoint to global, multi-language programmes. Our priority is helping you act on your data.
Who designs the surveys?
We do, together with you. Our team designs and refines each survey around your goals and proven best practice, so you are not left staring at a blank survey builder. As your programme grows, we keep improving it with you.
What channels can you collect feedback through?
We meet your customers in the channels they already use: WhatsApp, SMS, email, web, QR codes, USSD, IVR (post-call voice surveys), in-app, kiosk, webchat, CATI and CAPI. That breadth matters in markets where not everyone is on email or has a smartphone.
Can you integrate with our systems so surveying is automated?
Yes. We can connect to your CRM, contact centre and other systems so feedback is triggered automatically at the right moments, with no manual effort from your team.
How do you schedule surveys?
Surveys can be triggered automatically by an event, such as a purchase or a support call, or scheduled at set intervals. Either way, there are controls to make sure the same person is not over-surveyed.
How often should you get feedback?
It depends on what you are measuring, and there is a place for both regular and event-based feedback. Some feedback is best captured right after a moment, like a purchase, a support call or a reconnect, while it is fresh and specific. Other feedback works better on a fixed cadence: tracking overall loyalty or relationship health each quarter, half-year or year lets you see trends and benchmark over time. Employee feedback follows the same logic, a deeper survey on a set cycle with lighter check-ins in between. The skill is matching the rhythm to the programme objective and question, without over-surveying anyone.
How do you avoid survey fatigue?
The aim is fewer, smarter surveys, not more. We ask the right people at the right moment, keep surveys short, and avoid contacting the same person too often, so response rates stay high and your customers do not feel pestered.
Can surveys adapt based on how someone answers?
Yes. Surveys can branch, so people only see the questions relevant to them. That keeps each survey short and relevant, which lifts completion rates and gives you better quality feedback.
Is our data secure and compliant?
Yes. We take data privacy and security seriously across both customer and employee feedback. We align fully to POPIA and GDPR and we are both ISO 27001 and Cyber Essentials certified. Protecting the people who give you feedback is central to how we work.
How long does it take to get started?
It depends on the scope of your programme, but we are built to start quickly. A focused programme on one or two key touchpoints can be up and running fast, while larger multi-channel or multi-country rollouts take a little longer to design and set up properly. Either way, we aim to get you value early and grow the programme from there.
Customer experience
What is Voice of the Customer (VOC)?
Voice of the Customer is the practice of gathering what your customers think and feel about your business, then using it to improve. It pulls together feedback from surveys, calls, reviews and everyday interactions. The key is not just to collect opinions, but to act on them so you can demonstrate that you are listening to one of your most important assets, your customers.
What customer measures can you track?
We track the loyalty and satisfaction measures most teams know, Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction (CSAT) and customer effort score (CES), tied to the moments that matter in the journey. We also build in the bespoke questions you care about, and our automated sentiment analysis engines read and analyse the open-text comments customers leave, because the reasons behind a score are usually where the value is. Throughout, we keep the focus on the one or two things worth acting on, not a wall of data.
How do you help us act on feedback, not just collect it?
This is the part most tools skip. Our Insights and Intelligence team, backed by our platforms, dig into what your feedback is really telling you and turn it into clear findings and priorities. You will not just get a score on a dashboard; you will know what is driving it and what to focus on first. That includes flagging at-risk customers early, so you can step in and act before they leave.
How do you help recover unhappy customers?
When something goes wrong, we help you catch it fast and follow up while it still counts. Some teams call this service recovery; others call it escalations. By either name, handled well it turns a bad experience into a reason to stay.
Can you support customers in different countries and languages?
Yes. We run feedback programmes across multiple countries and languages, and we handle local data privacy requirements. One of Africa's largest banks uses us to listen to customers across 12 countries.
Employee experience
What is employee experience?
Employee experience is how your people feel about working for you, from their first day to their last and everything in between. It can also include what your employees think of your own products and services, since the people closest to the business often notice what customers feel but never say. Measuring all of this shows you what helps your team thrive, and what is quietly pushing good people out.
How is this different from our annual employee survey?
It is not one or the other. A well-run annual survey gives you a rich yearly benchmark, and we run those. But twelve months is a long time to wait to learn something is wrong, so we pair it with ad-hoc deep dives into specific topics, continuous listening and check-ins at moments that matter, like onboarding and exit. That way you can act while issues are still fixable. Most of our clients do a combination.
What can we measure about our employees?
Quite a lot. Engagement and loyalty through measures like eNPS, how people feel at key stages such as onboarding and exit, and the deeper drivers underneath, things like leadership, wellbeing, burnout, and even what your teams think of your products and services. You can also break results down by the groups that matter to you, such as department, location or tenure, by importing your own grouping structures, so you can see exactly where experience differs across the business. And we do not just report scores, we surface the themes and recommend actions, so you know exactly what to change and how.
Is employee feedback confidential and anonymous?
Yes, and strictly so. Employee feedback is anonymous by default, and an individual's identity is never revealed unless they give explicit permission to share who they are. To protect anonymity even when results are grouped, any group small enough to identify individuals, fewer than five people, is automatically hidden from reporting. That level of confidentiality is what makes honest feedback possible, because people are only candid when they trust the process.
How do you help managers act on the results?
Each manager gets their own dashboard, focused on their team, with a short set of priorities rather than an exhaustive to-do list, so it is obvious what to tackle first. Results go straight to the people who can act on them, so nothing stalls while feedback works its way up to the C-suite and slowly back down; it never becomes an HR project that loses momentum before anything changes. Feedback only drives change when the person who can act on it can see it, so we put it in front of them rather than burying it in a report.
Can you handle feedback across a large, global workforce?
Yes. We connect employee feedback across large and dispersed teams. One multinational IT provider uses us across more than 30,000 staff worldwide.