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What do your customers think of you and your
company? Is your service to your customers better or worse than they get from all the
other sales professionals calling on them? Do your customers think of you as
knowledgeable? Responsive? Is your company perceived as easy to do business with? Is your
firm "leading edge" or "out-of-touch"? Are your products truly
differentiated or nothing better than "me-too look-alikes"?
You may think you know what your customers think of you. But how do you really know?
Surveying your customers can provide you with wonderfully useful insights. There is a gold
mine of information that customers will tell you if you ask them, but you need to ask.
Means to the End
What form should your customer survey take? You can use just about any medium that
transmits words: postcards, faxes, e-mail, or multi-page paper surveys. Here are four
vitally important factors to think through before you send your customers any survey:
1. Make the survey absolutely no longer than it needs to be to get the important
information you really need. Long, drawn-out surveys intimidate customers. They take one
look and think, "forget it." They don’t even start to complete it. A fax
with four specific questions may yield much higher returns than a six page, 120-item
survey that gives five choices for every question.
2. Make the form of the survey inviting, easy to complete, and with no hassle. If the
survey starts to feel like work, customers will abandon it. Everyone has more important
things to do than to give you free advice on how to run your business.
3. Tell your customer why you want them to take their vital time filling-out your survey.
"We want to provide you with outstanding value and the absolutely best possible
service tailored to your needs," is far more compelling than, "Your satisfaction
is important to us."
4. Use a form of polling that you can easily work with when the responses come back. What
would happen if nearly all your customers responded? Who is going to mine the data your
customers provide you tabulating and analyzing the responses? You? Administrative or
support staff? An outside firm? Think through the mechanics before you send out your
surveys.
Size Matters
Consider surveying customers in small batches. If you are doing this on your
own, 25 surveys coming back to you in a week are much easier to handle than 2,500. Small
batches also give you the opportunity to revise your questions if you sense a problem area
that you want to get greater clarification on.
It’s All in the Timing
When should you poll your customers? That depends on what you want to learn.
Asking new customers for their feedback within a couple of weeks of their initial purchase
gives you a fresh perspective on what you need to do to keep this customer happy and
secure a lifetime of future purchases.
Surveying long-time customers for their overall satisfaction with your service can take
place most anytime, but you’ll probably find that more customers return your survey
if they receive it during a slower period in their business.
Survey Says…
A survey does not have to be a complex, sophisticated or expensive undertaking.
A survey is nothing more than a device to ask a group of your customers or prospects
specific questions so that you can gauge their judgments about your products and services.
When you survey your customers, do it to obtain specific information. You’ll
get the greatest return on your investment when you ask for very particular feedback and
information.
At the Beginning
Where to start? Ask yourself a few questions: What do I need to know to
get an edge with my customers? Where do I think my firm is vulnerable? How much do my
customers really appreciate the value-added extras their getting from my company and me?
Where might we be falling short of customer expectations?
The more specific your questions, the more specific and valuable the answers from your
customers.
Satisfied? Who Cares?
While customer satisfaction surveys are all the rage now, don’t bother
customers if they are "satisfied." Customers who aren’t satisfied are
planning to switch suppliers and you should know that already if you are managing your
accounts properly. And besides, those customers who say they are satisfied aren’t
necessarily loyal. They could happily take their business somewhere else all the while
professing satisfaction with your service.
How Do You Rate?
Want to really gauge how your customer feels about you? Use unusual rating
scales. Employ emotionally powerful words. Evoke a feeling from the gut, don’t ask
for an analysis from the head.
Example: To the question, How would you rate your representative’s responsiveness
to your requests for help?, use this scale:
___Fantastic ___Acceptable ___Disappointing ___Awful
These kind of words trigger a very different reaction than sterile words such as: Very
Satisfied, Somewhat Satisfied, Somewhat Dissatisfied, Not Satisfied. Don’t give too
many choices in your rating scales. A scale with ten or more choices doesn’t yield
meaningful data.
Instead of complex, go for simpler, easier and clearer. Give customers just four choices
two positive, two negative. This forces a customer to declare which side of the line
they’re on. Then, add a fifth that allows them to disqualify themselves from
rendering an opinion about something that they really shouldn’t: "Have No Basis
to Assess," or, "Not Applicable," or "Doesn’t Apply to My
Experience."
In Their Own Words: Open-ended Questions
Sometimes the best insights you can get from a customer survey don’t come
from the questions with the rating scales. They are the comments that customers write-in
as they reply to open-ended questions.
Such open-ended questions give your customers a chance to tell you things you might not
think to ask them, and give you a sense of what their emotional hot-buttons are, and where
you have either challenges or opportunities you might not have been aware of.
Response or Survey Overload?
Chances are you’ve seen quite a few customer satisfaction surveys. Customers
have become dissatisfied with everyone asking them if they are satisfied. So should you
forget about surveying your customers? Definitely not! Just the act of asking for your
customer’s opinion can get you some positive points on your customers’ caring
meter.
What percentage of your customers to whom you send a survey should you expect to return it
to you completely filled-out? The "response rate" can vary wildly. How many
surveys you get back can be influenced by many factors.
A response rate in the neighborhood of 33 percent (one out of three surveys you send come
back completed) or more is usually considered excellent. If you get less than a ten
percent response rate, try changing the survey or the way you sent it to customers.
Experiment. There is no perfect way to survey customers.
The Bottom Line
Customer surveys should be meaningful and useful. When they are, they leave both
customer and vendor feeling quite satisfied.
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