Customer Satisfaction Surveys - Make More Money By Learning What Delights Your Customers

Customer satisfaction surveys are becoming increasing popular in both the Business to Business (B2B) and Business to Consumer (B2C) environments, but why spend time and money conducting them? What is the benefit to you and your business, and how should they be undertaken?

First, and most importantly, your customers are the people giving money to your business, and receiving their feedback is the main route to understanding whether your product or service is giving them exactly what they want or need, and how they rate you against your competitors. This knowledge is critical to knowing what to do to generate new or repeat business. Often a business owner or manager is too close to their products or service that it can be difficult for them to see which parts should or could be improved first.

Gaining a more accurate view of what your customers think can help you with the prioritization process. For example, adding more features to a product or service may not be the main concern of your customers, they may want something more fundamental fixed first, and it may not simply that they want to pay less. Knowing this can help avoid unnecessary expenditure on non-related items and give you an edge on your competitors.

 Ultimately the right way to conduct a customer survey depends on the type of your business and your relationship to your customers. However there are five basic ways that you can consider:

• Face to Face
• By Telephone
• By Mail
• By Email
• Online, using an automated survey tool.
• Focus groups - using external survey companies.

Before conducting a survey using any of these techniques, the golden rule is to ensure that you have permission from your customer. With a face to face discussion, this is immediate, but with all other techniques ensure you have checked beforehand. For business to business surveys this can simply cause annoyance if unwanted, but for Business to Consumer, some parts of the world have laws which prevent companies from making unwanted contact by telephone or mail if the consumer has not requested it. Make sure you check!

Each type of survey offers advantages and disadvantages. Face to face and telephone discussion can provide a rapid way of identifying specific issues, and can allow more in-depth investigation of any concerns. Mail/Email/Online surveys can obtain results from many people quickly, but the "tick the box" nature means that information can be inaccurate, and with large surveys may require statistical analysis to get the best from them. Even when additional opportunities are provided for input, they are often ignored.

 For businesses, it is usually best to survey customers once a year. More than that is unlikely to get a response and may irritate customers. It's also a good way to initiate contact with customers that have not given repeat business recently to understand if there are any issues preventing them from doing so.

For consumer surveys there are two choices. One is at the time of a product or service being provided, or close to it, and this is best way of getting more accurate and immediate feedback.

General consumner surveys at a later date, or unrelated to a purchase can be useful in getting consumers general views on your products/services, but the data can be a little less useful, with a lot more "unsure/don't know/can't remember responses". Even combined with an incentive some data may not be useful.

The best way to encourage customers to participate in any form of survey is to incentivize them, and ultimately the most successful way to do that is to give them something. The most common ways are:

• Discounts on future products/services
• A "freebie" of some kind, such as small low cost useful gift.
• Vouchers - not necessarily for your product/service
• Cash

Interestingly, the amount of cash required can be often be far less then that required for other options, however a discount is a good way to gain extra business.

The information that you gain from a customer survey can be some of more useful data you have, and combined with understanding what your competitors are doing can provide valuable insight into the mind of your customers. So use the data.

If your business is large, and the amount of the information is huge, it needs to be broken down by statistical analysis and turned into graphs. Pictures are usually the best way to view and understand the the data. For each question where multiple choices have been given, rank the answers to determine the most common responses.

Where more free-form, detailed, or specific information is provided, it is useful to understand the particular complaint or praise that is given, as it can help rapidly focus on specific areas. However remember to respect anonimity if it has been promised. Breaking this rule means that customers are unlikely to be willing to provide data in future, and particularly in a consumer survey it may have legal ramifications.

Once the data has been analysed, and is in a easily viewable form, it can be be used to provide guidance on which areas of the business requires improvement, and where investment will give the biggest return.

Whatever your approach to analysis, ensure that you do something with the results. The best case is that your customers say everything is perfect and that nothing can be improved. This is however unlikely.

 Finally, even if your have provided some kind of incentive for completion of your survey, thank your customers for providing the information, either at the time of completion, or afterwards if their permission permits. It provides further customer contact, and should reinforce to them that you are concerned with making them happy.

Remember, making your customer happy will help make you more money.