Who is MacKenzie?

We’re a boutique customer insights firm dedicated to serving the unique needs of our partner brands. As a second-generation family business with over 35 years of industry experience, we offer big business capabilities with the personal touch of a small business. If you’re looking for an authentic partnership with a skilled team who truly cares about your success, you’ve come to the right place!

What does MacKenzie do?

From holistic customer insights strategies to ground-level tactical support, we provide brands with the data-driven clarity, wisdom, and knowledge needed to thrive. But while customer feedback and survey research play important roles, those are only part of what we offer.

Our skilled analytics team can maximize the impact of your existing customer insights and increase the ROI of past projects. Through market mapping and competitive assessments, we help you position your brand for long-term success in an ever-changing world. By leveraging our certified Strategic Foresight methods, we can guide your team in futures planning and forward-thinking brand development sessions. Wherever you want to go, we have a plan to get you there.

What is the MacKenzie process?

We know that every business is unique. While your goals and objectives may be similar to other brands, there are a variety of internal and external factors that deserve specialized attention. That’s why we customize every project based on your present circumstances, timeline, and available resources.

First, we seek to clarify and understand in detail what you hope to accomplish. Then, we use that understanding to develop a goal-oriented action plan. With open communication and transparency throughout the project, we do the heavy lifting while maintaining a collaborative, team-first mindset. The only way we succeed is when you succeed. So, a partnership with MacKenzie doesn’t stop at the project completion date. We’re in it for the long haul and make ourselves available as needed to ensure you achieve your desired outcomes.

What can I expect from a partnership with MacKenzie?

Your success is our bottom line. So, you can expect a personalized experience, a heartfelt commitment to excellence, and a lasting relationship with no expiration date. Each project has its own dedicated team providing the attention, focus, and daily effort your project deserves.

You can expect a collaborative partnership built on trust, integrity, and mutual respect. We know you have many options when looking for a project partner, so being chosen is an honor, an opportunity, and a responsibility we don’t take lightly. Above all, you can expect to be treated as a person, not just a client. A pleasure, not an obligation. You can expect to become part of our team, and we hope to become part of yours.

What is a customer insights strategy and why is it important?

Your customers want to feel heard, understood, and appreciated. They want to know their voices truly matter and to see their feedback make a difference. They want to join the brand development effort and be included in decision making processes. A customer insights strategy addresses each of those points, and more. It goes beyond simply conducting a feedback survey by authentically connecting with the individuals behind the purchases.

A well-rounded customer insights strategy includes customer journey mapping, persona development, and two-way communication. It seeks next-level details about customer wants, needs, thoughts, feelings, and expectations. Taking a strategic approach helps ensure all these pieces fit together in ways that produce actionable, goal-oriented insights.

At MacKenzie, we have the skills and experience needed to develop and execute a holistic customer insights strategy built around your unique goals and objectives. Whether starting from scratch or looking to strengthen an existing strategy, we want to help maximize the impact of your efforts!

Can't we just handle customer feedback on our own?

Of course! There are plenty of really great tools and platforms that enable you to gather and analyze customer feedback on your own. But it’s important to consider whether you’re getting maximum impact and value from those investments. A half-joking comparison is to say you can cut your own hair, but is that the best approach? (Full disclosure… we’ve tried it and it’s not recommended.)

The two key areas to think about are survey development and results analytics. Both are made easy by online tools, so it’s certainly an attractive option. However, yielding actionable insights starts with asking the right questions in the right way, which depends on your specific goals and objectives. Even a slight mis-phrasing or off-topic response option can be problematic down the road. This level of nuanced survey development needs a human touch to ensure the questions and project goals are directly aligned. Then, there’s results analytics and reporting. Truly actionable insights are found within the compelling stories data can tell. But the high-level statistics, charts, and graphs are the story’s language, which still need to be translated.

At the end of the day, we love seeing customer insights becoming standard elements of business decision making. Whether or not self-service tools are the right choice depends on a variety of factors. However, partnering with an outside customer insights partner like MacKenzie will always add value and increase a project’s success likelihood.

What's a good survey response rate?

If you've ever Google searched this question, you likely know there's a lot of "industry standard" discrepancy. Depending on the source, we've seen benchmarks from as low as 6% to as high as 33%. Needless to say, a range that wide isn't very helpful.

The challenge with this response rate question is that there are a lot of factors to consider. Rather than looking to a standard benchmark, remember that your situation is unique and can't be compared apples-to-apples with another brand's feedback survey. For example, audience engagement levels will play a big role in your response rates. Start by asking yourself, "When is the last time we conducted a survey?" If it has been a while, you shouldn't be surprised to see a low response rate because that particular communication channel has been inactive. Brands that consistently ask for feedback yield higher response rates because their audience is engaged and active.

At the end of the day, we truly believe that every single voice matters. Each individual deserves to be heard, and customers want to play a role in how their favorite brands operate. So, while a 33% response rate is great, even that 6% will provide incredibly valuable insight. It comes down to a matter of consistent engagement and making customer feedback an ongoing priority. The key to strong response rates is building a customer insights strategy rather than conducting one-off annual surveys.

What is the best survey incentive to increase response rates?

You may be thinking about offering gift cards or discounts to increase survey response rates, but we recommend taking a different approach – follow up with respondents.

Customers want to have their voices heard and they want to be part of the brand development process. So, it’s not always a matter of compensation for their time and effort. Many times, customers don’t fill out surveys because they don’t believe their feedback matters. They aren’t convinced brands truly care and they’re unsure of whether their responses are even considered when decisions are made. By making closed-loop feedback part of your research strategy, you address and alleviate those concerns.

After your customer insights project is complete, follow up with your customers. Share a few high-level findings and let them know how the feedback will be used. When customers know their feedback matters and is making a difference, they are more likely to participate in the next survey they receive. You’ll also have more confidence in the survey results because there won’t be respondents who only cared about the monetary reward.

What's the difference between customer feedback and customer insights?

At a high level, customer feedback is the data, and customer insights are the actionable findings.

We gather customer feedback to make informed decisions and guide brand development. But the data and statistics alone aren’t enough to achieve those goals. Feedback is like raw materials that still need to be processed and pieced together to have real-world application.

Insights are found by assessing and interpreting customer feedback in ways that unveil hidden truths and tell compelling stories. They paint a more detailed picture about customer wants, needs, preferences, and expectations. Customer insights are the destination and customer feedback is the starting point.


Got a question that isn’t on our list?

Submit your question below and we'll get back to you with an answer shortly. We'll also update our FAQs page because others might be wondering the same thing as you!

Brent WilliamsFAQs