Beyond the Connection: A Member Survey Helps Wes-Tex Build a Marketing Plan Around What Members Love  

There’s nothing worse than a bad connection.

The team at Wes-Tex Telephone Cooperative, a telco servicing about 3,000 members and customers across West Texas, knows this well. So, before they worked on a strategic communications plan, they started with a member and customer survey.

“Having never authored a survey, I appreciated the guidance Pioneer provided in deciding which questions were relevant to our needs and the best way to organize them,” Wes-Tex Chief Financial Officer Ann Quaid says.

The telco worked with Pioneer and Pulse Research to develop a 14-question online survey. The goals were clear:

• Set a Net Promoter Score benchmark. 
• Identify positive experiences and where to improve. 
• Learn what customers say about Wes-Tex. 
• Counter perceptions with reality through strategic storytelling. 

Wes-Tex promoted the survey through multiple channels, including the Bits and Bytes member magazine, email and social media, with a chance for participants to win one of 20 $25 gift cards and the grand prize, a $500 gift card.

A few responses came in from new members, and a lot of responses came from longtime members, but the largest group of respondents, 26.6%, were Wes-Tex members for three to five years. People raved about member support, great staff, internet speed and value. At the same time, price was a top concern, followed by internet reliability and proactive communication.

“The survey was a great way to gain insight into our members’ top service priorities, areas in which we can improve and knowing where we are succeeding as a company,” Ann says.

The data pointed to one clear direction—lead with relationships, not just bandwidth.

When the Robots Tried to Vote

In the first 24 hours, more than 2,000 responses flooded in, generated not by members but by an AI agent. The bot was sophisticated. It varied how long it took to “finish” each survey and even wrote plausible open-ended comments to blend in. This kind of attack targets exactly this type of project, an incentivized survey promoted on Facebook, where a public link and a prize make it tempting.

Pulse Research spotted the pattern, filtered out every fraudulent response and preserved a clean dataset of genuine member feedback. Without that screening, the findings would have been useless and misleading.

“This is something every utility running a survey should be aware of, and there are simple precautions,” Pulse Research President Brian Knapp says. “Build in screening questions to weed out bad actors, and—lesson learned—when promoting on social media, leave the incentive out of the post so a prize does not tempt bots in the first place.”

Why We Trust Results

How many responses does it take to trust the results? Fewer than most people assume. A valid sample is not about sheer volume. It’s about gathering enough responses from a cross-section of your membership to keep the margin of error low.

A few hundred surveys are typically enough to land around a +/-5% margin at 95% confidence, the standard professional researchers use. For Wes-Tex, 374 completed responses offer a solid, statistically sound base. A thousand or more responses were not required.

The impressive 90% completion rate matters just as much. It means members who started finished, so the data is not skewed toward only the most motivated. Promoting across multiple channels, email, print, bill stuffers and social, keeps the sample representative of the community, reaching members of different ages and habits.

Reach, representativeness and completion together make a few hundred answers reliable.

What Members Love

Wes-Tex earned a Net Promoter Score of 65, far above the ISP industry average, which sits around 31. Nearly 3 out of 4 members are promoters.

The highest-rated experiences were the human ones: technician professionalism, 9.4 out of 10, and installation, 9.3. Members repeatedly praised local, friendly support, often calling out technicians by name.

Where Wes-Tex Can Grow

The soft spots the survey turned up—occasional outages, some price sensitivity and speed complaints—are the ordinary, fixable issues every broadband provider faces.

“The survey highlighted a few different opportunities for Wes-Tex to better serve its members,” says Pioneer Account Manager Sara Gentry, who supported Wes-Tex throughout the process. “Members said they wanted to save money and wanted faster speeds. We also found out many members weren’t aware of Wes-Tex’s high-speed Gig service or may have outdated hardware in their homes. We hope by helping members understand their options for speed and swapping out outdated modems, it will lead to fewer speed-related frustrations, increased member satisfaction and maybe upgrades in their service tiers.”

Many members don’t realize they co-own the cooperative, even though 79% say the co-op model matters to them.

“The value is already there,” Brian says. “Members just need to be told it’s theirs. Closing that gap is a low-cost message, not a hard sell, and it turns satisfied subscribers into owners who advocate.”

For prospects, the co-op story is a reason to choose Wes-Tex that no national competitor can match.

“I’d own a piece of this company, I’d get a vote, my bill stays in town,” one member shared.

Social posts, local ads and word of mouth from current members can all carry the message, while bill inserts and annual meeting pushes reinforce it with current members.

“Anyone can sell bandwidth. Only Wes-Tex offers membership. That’s the pitch new members can’t get anywhere else,” Brian says.

To help Wes-Tex turn the findings into action, Pioneer and Pulse Research paired the findings with advice on how to turn the feedback into a solid story strategy for reliable member connections.

Want to know what your consumers think? We can help.