Jason Grier, EVP and Chief Customer Officer at Reputation looks at the future of customer feedback surveys and how customer emotion is better captured on social media than by traditional survey forms.

For decades, traditional surveys have been a direct line of feedback from consumer to business, providing insight into a variety of areas from customer service and messaging to facilities maintenance and more. But social media has introduced a more intimate, more accurate and faster way for businesses to connect with customers and capture their feedback. Social media listening posts are also more available: Reddit, Facebook and Twitter are widely used among both organizations and customers to interact, with more niche platforms also available. Even video is emerging on the customer-feedback scene. So, it begs the question: Do traditional surveys have a place in a modern world dominated by social media?

Social media and the state of customer feedback

In case anyone needs reminding, social media is a force in all aspects of our world, affecting how, when, where and with whom we communicate; how we learn and stay informed; and how we conduct business. It’s also changed the role of the customer from passive to very influential, which has been both a boon and a beast for many businesses (a boon because it provides great insight to better inform the brand of the customer experience; a beast because if the feedback is ignored, it could affect the brand’s reputation). The number of user-friendly listening posts has also increased and continues to expand, providing more platforms from which people can interact with others and let their voices be heard.

This ability to communicate to broad audiences via social media also presents new ways to give feedback on all aspects of a brand or its product, satisfying customers’ expectations for rapid and real-time responses to their queries and complaints. Brands that leverage social media platforms to gain insight into customer sentiment can take fast action on this feedback, thereby mitigating potential issues with other customers. In addition, fast responses make the customer feel valued, creating stronger relationships and fostering brand loyalty.

Traditional surveys take on a diminished role

In contrast, traditional survey methods — while still relevant as and used more as a research device — seem archaic and clunky. Brands still sending out long surveys via email or regular mail hope against hope that the recipient will not only take the time to open the survey, but also that they will spend 15 to 20 minutes filling it out. Simply put, today’s fast-paced, instant-gratification world no longer has the patience for traditional surveys.

Traditional surveys also can’t capture the real-time emotional side of customer sentiment, which has an increasingly larger stake in the world of customer feedback. It is this emotion that drives customers to talk about their experience, and it’s what comes through on social media. For example, a customer has just had a really negative experience at a restaurant and pulls out his smartphone to relay this experience over Twitter. The listening post is ready to receive the customer’s Tweet, the emotion in the Tweet is palpable, and the feedback is broadcast across the Internet. By the time a traditional survey comes in the mail or email asking for this customer’s feedback, the customer’s emotion is harder to communicate. More importantly, the restaurant in this scenario has lost the opportunity to rapidly respond to and remediate the issue and show the world that it’s committed to ensuring the best possible customer experience.

Organizations small and large talk about wanting to recognize lifetime customer value. But if they aren’t listening to what their customers have to say through all the available listening posts — that is, if they’re only focused on traditional surveys — they’ll never recognize lifetime customer value or understand customer sentiment. This realization means that the future of traditional surveys isn’t too bright. In fact, while they’ll still be used for research purposes, traditional surveys will continue to diminish in terms of their dominance in the world of customer feedback.

About the Author

Jason Grier leads Reputation‘s customer loyalty and growth initiatives as executive vice president and chief customer officer. Jason is a former senior vice president of Global Support Operations and chief customer officer at McAfee, where he spent more than 10 years.

While at McAfee, Jason built a reputation as an industry leader in customer support and operations. His teams were honored with a number of awards, including the Intel Quality Award, a prestigious honor for outstanding quality and personification of Intel’s values and the highest team honor given at Intel. His teams also won two TSIA Star Awards, two Service & Support Professionals Association Awards, and a Stevie Award for innovation in action.

Before his time at McAfee Jason held executive-level positions at Sutherland Global Services and Covad Communications. Jason holds a bachelor’s degree from North Carolina State University and an MBA from Pfeiffer University.

Monitoring the Voice of the Customer (VoC) should be one of the ongoing projects in any service program. One way to achieve this is to perform a customer feedback survey.

A Bain & Company study found a huge gap between the perception of executives—80 percent of whom think they are doing an excellent job of serving customers—and the perceptions of customers themselves. Only 8 percent of customers agree. Because of this, according to Bain, the average company loses more than half its customers every four years.

An important way to ensure customer service excellence is to measure satisfaction regularly for all customers in the distribution channel. Do not be satisfied with a single measure or survey instrument, though. Coordination and cross-checking among many survey formats is necessary.

The chief roadblock to success in customer surveys is the natural human inclination to do easy surveys. So, force yourself to move beyond obvious measurements to use difficult-to-articulate, controversial variables that determine long-term customer satisfaction and business growth. The distance that customers must walk to reach a service counter, the prevailing temperature level, decor and similar things all impact long-term customer attitude.

Conduct formal surveys of customers every 60 to 90 days. Less than 90-day frequency is risky. Customer preferences often change even faster than that.
Do informal surveys monthly, at least telephone surveys, for instance, or samples of customers as they are buying. Domino’s Pizza surveys every week.
A major annual image survey should be the backbone of the customer survey program. It should be done by a third party.

Other formal customer survey programs consist of:

1. Customer focus groups. Informal focus groups of a few customers should be convened not only in marketing but in manufacturing, distribution, and accounting departments, too.

2. “Debriefings” of key accounts. Employ “open-end” discussions.
Just asking customers what they are satisfied with and what they are dissatisfied with usually yields valuable information. Annual or semi-annual debriefings should include formal survey questions and open-ended discussions with all levels and functions.

3. Customer attitude surveys with random samples of customers. Puget Sound Power & Light Co. analyzes media coverage and listens to customer feedback from field personnel. In analyzing the media, the company looks for awards to the company and other civic recognition as means of assessing whether the community thinks the company is doing a good job.

“Creative” methods of obtaining information on customer opinion and attitude:

1. Visit your best customers when your customers are businesses. No better way exists for obtaining insight into customer needs and means of satisfying them than observing the work that goes on.

2. Prepare summaries of customer complaints. Collect data from all channels, phone, email, chat etc.

3. Post key customer satisfaction standards in every part of the
organization. Update them. Change them. Act on them.

Follow up on lost customers or lost sales. Find out exactly why you lost the
customers or the sales. More often than you might think you’ll find that an
“intangible” such as emotional reaction to service or incompatibility with an
employee was involved. Systematic “lost sale” follow-up programs are a must. Once you know why you lost a sale, action needed to prevent further losses for the same reasons usually becomes clear.

Every business that is serious about maintaining a high level of service must put in place a system that will sound alarm bells if and when service declines for any reason. By implementing a Voice of the Customer (VoC) program and performing customer feedback surveys you will be able to stay up to date with your customers’ opinions and attitudes— and in their values, needs and wants.

This article is adapted from “Achieving Excellence Through Customer Service” by John Tschohl.

About the Author

John Tschohl is a customer service strategist and is the founder and president of the Service Quality Institute. John has been described by USA Today, Time, and Entrepreneur as a ‘customer service guru’ and has written several highly acclaimed customer service books.

Customer analytics and big data are all the trend, but you shouldn’t lose sight of the fact customer surveys are a tried and tested method to understand how your business is doing and what your customers want from you.

Conducting a customer survey isn’t difficult and by using a little creativity together with a great survey maker tool you’ll soon be unearthing some valuable customer insights.

Here are my top 10 tips for creating a successful customer survey.

1. Start with a tempting invite

Keep your survey invitation short and to the point. Explain the purpose of the survey and why your customer has been selected. Give an estimate of how long it will take to complete and if you really want to increase your responses, include a small reward. Don’t forget to include a link to the survey and give your customer the option of opting out if they prefer.

2. Make it timely

Forget once a year surveys, you need to plug into how your customers are feeling during or immediately after their interaction with you. For the best customer feedback try aligning your surveys with important milestones along the customer journey.

3. Use a reliable survey tool

Choose a data collection tool that makes asking questions easy and works on all devices. Typeform.com provides attractive forms that can be matched to your company style, which can boost completion rates and keep respondents engaged.

4. Keep it short

To catch your customers attention and to keep them focused make your survey as short as possible. If your survey is too long, you’ll be in danger of boring your customers and getting too many ‘don’t know’ responses. You should try and limit your survey to 10 questions or less.

5. Ask specific questions

Avoid asking questions about ideas or broad concepts. Stick to the facts by asking questions such as: “were you served within five minutes of ordering your coffee?”

6. Make your survey accessible

For your customer data to make sense, you need as many participants as possible. Publicise your survey in as many places as possible such as on your website, social media accounts, emails, off-line marketing materials and even by word-of-mouth.

7. Don’t ask loaded questions

Believe it or not, we sometimes (consciously or unconsciously) lead our customers to the answers we want to hear. Avoid asking questions such as: “were you satisfied with the service you received today?” and replace with: “On a scale of 1 to 5 how satisfied were you with the service you received today?” The scale you use is up to you, just remember to stick with the same scale throughout the survey.

8. Avoid unfamiliar language

Avoid technical terms and keep the words you use simple and jargon free. Make sure your questions are unambiguous and easy to understand and use an informal style of writing if possible.

9. Survey non-customers

Don’t just invite your current customers to participate in your surveys. For example, you can gather useful information by asking for feedback when shoppers abandon your online cart or leave your store without buying anything.

10. Comply with legislation

Information privacy laws and data protection laws vary from country to country. Always make yourself aware of any local legislation with which you need to comply when conducting your survey.

Creating a customer survey will reveal how your customers view you and the service you provide. Positive or negative, this feedback will open your eyes to the wants and needs of your customers, enabling you to adjust, improve and innovate!

There is a place I get my car worked on. They do a great job. The repair center’s employees are friendly and knowledgeable. The car always comes back cleaner than when it goes in for service. This is the way business should be done.

The head of the service department mentioned I would be getting a survey emailed to me and asked if I would take a few minutes to complete it. Sure enough, a day later the email survey showed up in my inbox. I will always remember the first survey. With that great experience, I was happy to show them a little love and give them positive feedback about how well they took care of me.

So, I started the survey. There were some pretty good questions on that first page. And, more on the second page. By the time I got to the third page of the survey, I was experiencing Survey Fatigue. I was tired with this survey. I was already almost six or seven minutes into it, and it looked like I wasn’t even halfway to the end. This wasn’t a survey. It was a major homework assignment!

About a year later, it was time to go back for another oil change and routine maintenance. Once again, they provided stellar customer service. And, then a day later came that dreaded customer service survey – the same survey!

I would have thought that maybe it might be different for a repeat customer. I told my friends about the ridiculously long survey and joked that it took longer to fill out the darn survey than to get the oil changed. By the way, I didn’t fill the survey out – and haven’t since the first one I filled out years ago.

So what can companies do to get more responses to customer surveys? Here are two of my favorite ways to do so:

First, don’t wait two weeks – or even two days – to send a survey. Consider getting the survey to customers within 24 hours while the experience is still fresh on their minds. Maybe even get it to them within just minutes. When I take an Uber, as soon as the ride is over I receive an email asking me to rate the driver and leave a tip, if appropriate. I respond every time.

Second, don’t make the survey too long. You don’t want to frustrate the customer with Survey Fatigue. Consider short surveys that take one or two minutes to complete. A short NPS (Net Promotor Score) survey question with one or two follow-up questions that take a minute or so to complete will boost response numbers.

If you want answers to more questions, create different surveys and rotate them as you send them to customers. Shorter is better. That same Uber survey just mentioned asks me to click on one through five stars, click on a few boxes, and if interested, I can leave a comment. Without the comment, the survey takes 15 seconds or less.

So, the next time you want customer feedback in the form of a survey, send it quickly and make it short. Then, watch for an increase in the number of customers who respond.

About the Author

Shep Hyken is the Chief Amazement Officer of Shepard Presentations. As a professional speaker and best-selling author, Shep helps companies develop loyal relationships with their customers and employees.

Do you really think customers want to fill out a customer satisfaction survey? How many times have you rifled through a survey just to get the freebie that comes with it? Well, guess what? Most people are probably doing the same thing and all the information they thought was so important is now invalid. A complete waste of time and money.

In the U.S., every organization is following-the-leader with customer satisfaction surveys. The latest fad is to initiate surveys with your customers with every transaction 100% percent of the time. Very few customers fill out the survey and if they do, it depends on what the freebie is at the end.

In many firms like Delta airlines every single time I call I get asked to take a survey. And, they don’t just ask once. Approximately 40% of my time is wasted, on the phone listening to their survey request and having to repeat “no” to their surveys at least twice if not more.

Customer satisfaction surveys are everywhere; in fact, we tend to be bombarded with e-mail or online survey offers from companies who want to know our opinions about their products, services, etc. Have you ever called up your credit card company or bank and were asked to stay on the line after your call is complete in order to take a customer satisfaction survey? How many times do you actually stay on the line to take that survey? If you’re like the vast majority of people, you hang up as soon as the call is complete and get on with your life.

Firms in the U.S. like to copy everyone else. Remember when it was a cool thing to save money and outsource your call center to India? This was one of the most stupid business decisions companies made that is unless they had too many customers or wanted to reduce their customer base or the value of their business. When Michael Dell retired the first time, he put a financial person in as CEO. The first thing he did was dramatically reduce the customer experience and outsource to India. The $1,000 I invested in Dell in May 2003 is now worth $474. I think firms are going to the same destructive approach as outsourcing.

It is difficult to find any business in the U.S. that is not surveying its customers. I think we have Human Resource people selling top management on it because everyone else is doing this.

Amazon the customer service leader in the U.S. and the world, which grew 26% to $107 billion in revenue last year is not dumb enough to follow the trend. As Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon said, “If you want more of something reduce the friction. If you want less of something increase the friction.”

Years ago many firms used customer comment cards. They stopped using them because customers knew the firms did not read them or do anything about the feedback. Around 1981 Target had customer comment cards where the results were really bad. They solved the problem by just changing the questions on the comment cards. When I was in college a D grade meant you did not pass. Most US firms are happy with a C or D grade. If the survey results are not exactly good they just change the survey.

If you want to survey your customers survey one out of five or one out of 10. It will be more meaningful. The process being used today is increasing the friction with customers, increasing transaction times, upsetting customers and damaging your brand, your image, and your sales.

I suspect firms like JD Powers are driving this crazy focus on customer satisfaction surveys and Net Promoter Scores. Spend some of your money developing your leadership team and workforce to deliver superior customer service. It will be money better spent. Do not follow this trend because at some point in 2016 your customers will get so fed up they will defect. In the words of Jeff Bezos, “Reduce friction don’t increase it”.

About the Author

John Tschohl is a customer service strategist and is the founder and president of the Service Quality Institute. John has been described by USA Today, Time, and Entrepreneur as a ‘customer service guru’ and has written several highly acclaimed customer service books.

What you need is a customer experience strategy with a focus on the customer journey, for proper segmentation and ultimately relevant feedback. When this is in place correctly it is the first step to turning insights into action.

The Four Phases

There are four phases that companies go through in order to reach a mature stage of digital customer experience management. In phase 1 the focus is primarily on web statistics and numbers, phase 2 has a focus on periodic quantitative and qualitative research and phase 3, which is the point that continuous feedback is collected real-time via onsite feedback forms. Phase 4 is all about turning insight into action to reach a mature stage of digital customer experience management.

Capturing Feedback

Capturing customer feedback can be done through periodic questionnaires, as happens in phase two of this model, or as in phase 3, continuously through a “one size fits all” feedback form on the website. In the latter case, there is usable feedback within, but that is not always related to what the visitor is doing at that time. Why ask what a visitor is doing on your website when you can see it happening?

A professional approach means looking at the goals of the customer, user or visitor, depending on the online journey being made​​ and then asking the right questions when it is relevant for a visitor to give feedback. For example, when you detect a visitor has a problem with ordering the product. Just like in real life, customers do not want store personnel bothering them with questions about customer service or registration when they haven’t even bought the product yet!

Align with Customer Goals

When feedback is too general it is hard to define what drives a customer. Taking action is possible, but it is not as refined as it could be. The questions to be asked in order to capture relevant feedback should therefore be linked to the goal that a customer or visitor has set themselves within your digital channel. Does the customer want to order a product, adjust his account, solve a problem or maybe get something done with a self-service tool? People use your website or mobile app to get a certain job done.

With a generic feedback form or website evaluation survey, people can leave an open comment like a suggestion and that can be valuable information. But when relevant questions are asked at the right time, not only are the visitors more willing to provide feedback, but the feedback is also much more relevant.

The more the questions are tailored to the various points in the customer journey and what someone is trying to achieve in a digital channel, the more relevant the findings are. This allows an organisation to optimize the processes and remove bottle necks within the journey. This way, organizations are continuously working on improving the digital channels and thus the overall customer experience.

Close Control

Capturing feedback continuously that is focused on what the client is doing at that time, means having closer control. If someone is stuck within an online ordering process you must be able to identify the problem directly and immediately and ask the customer what goes wrong. And that mechanism should be in place on all digital processes in such a way that a company is able to collect useful information to optimize the digital experience continuously.

Ultimately, a better customer experience is good for customers, and therefore also for companies – in both the short term and long term. The easier an online shopper can achieve his goal, the sooner something is ordered in the shop and how often they repeat their business. A better customer experience can lead to more sales in the short term. Thanks to customer feedback the bottle necks within the digital customer journey can be removed and customers reach the end of the journey more often. Make sure that the huge budgets that are spent on shiny advertising campaigns are not useless because customers switch to your competitors faster than you can say “feedback”, when the product is easier to order elsewhere!

Brand Values

In this digital age, churn is an increasing problem for large corporations. In the long-term, customer loyalty is already vital will become more and more important. Customers expect the same experience online as offline. This means a customer experience that matches the brand values ​​of the organisation that they have chosen for. If your product appears to evoke low involvement from your business, (such as an insurance product for example), then offering better service than your competitor is something to excel at!

Depending on those brand values a company chooses points within the customer journey to differentiate. This also goes for customer journeys within digital channels. But there must be understanding in how you are scoring on these parts. How do visitors experience the self-service tools on the website? The better the customers’ journeys are connected to the brand values, the better the customer experience and the more loyalty and in the end a healthy and profitable organisation.

About the Author

Udesh Jadnanansing is Managing Partner at Mopinion. Mopinion offers a full SaaS (Software as a Service) solution for setting up and maintaining Voice of the Customer programs according to the Closed Loop Feedback mechanism. Mopinion’s software provides real time insights from the most important touch points giving a direct view on the customer experience and where improvements can be made.

I often work with clients to create customer surveys to get valuable feedback from customers about the way they do business, ways to improve, what is working, what isn’t, etc.

One of the most frequent discussions we have is around my guidance to avoid having a neutral response available for the respondent. I like to provide the following options for quantitative options:

• Strongly Disagree
• Disagree
• Agree
• Strongly Agree

This forces customers to decide how they feel one way or the other. Think about it – if you ask someone about a movie or restaurant and they respond with “Eh, it was alright.” Do you really have any insight as to how they enjoyed it or if they would encourage you to see that movie or go to that restaurant? No, it’s vague. It gives them the comfort of being vague and neutral… which really gives you no insight to their true feelings at all.

The Good, Bad and the Ugly

When asking for feedback, you have to be courageous enough to ask for the good, the bad, and – yes – the ugly. If you are looking to only get glowing responses to lull yourself into a false sense of tranquillity, then you really are sticking your head in the sand and eventually you’ll be outpaced by your competitor that truly wants relevant feedback on how they can keep their customers coming back for more.

You’ll be much better off when you ask folks to tell you directly, no sugar coating it. You need to know what your customers like and what they don’t like. You need to know what will drive them away to your competition and what will bring them back to you. You need to find out what you are doing well and what is simply not working.

Now, here’s the thing – you must have a comment section included somewhere for folks to give comments in free form… meaning they can explain any of their reasoning for responding as they did for any of the questions, or to add any additional thoughts they feel you should know. This is actually the secret sauce… you are getting the customer to articulate exactly, in their own words, their thoughts on the way you do business.

Using customer surveys with both quantitative and qualitative (free form) responses gives you a complete picture as to the true state of the customer experience with direct customer input. Who better to tell you how your business is running than the people that are currently working with you? You’ve already marketed to them. They’ve already put their trust in you. Now is your chance to continue to earn it and reap the benefits by making improvements suggested by those that are already keeping you in business.

About the Author

Kristina Evey is improving the way companies connect with their customers and increase their profits, she is an accomplished speaker and trainer on Customer Satisfaction and Retention.

To solve customer issues, customer support representatives (CSRs) typically have anywhere between 12 and 20 systems open on their desktops at one time.

While it’s become somewhat of an industry joke that “alt tab” is the most commonly used “application” among agents, it’s frustrating for agents to toggle between password-protected web platforms, emails, customer files, knowledgebases, and more, delaying the time to resolve customer issues, or worse – having to end the call so the agent can do more research.

The growing amounts of customer data across systems have resulted in the inability of CSRs to locate information to quickly resolve customer issues, resulting in negative impacts on customer service and satisfaction levels.

This problem is all too common among today’s contact centers, particularly in organizations whose customers have purchased complex products that require complex resolutions to complex problems. Sound familiar? Chances are it does, but you’re not alone – and we’ve got the research to prove it.

New Research Reveals Harsh Realities for Contact Centers

Coveo, in partnership with Omega Management Group, recently examined the harsh realities facing contact centers, given the proliferation of customer information and the systems used to resolve customer issues.

The survey results indicated that the biggest problems are caused by inefficient access to information needed to solve customer issues.

Out of companies with more than 10,000 employees, 43% report that information CSRs need to access to resolve customer issues resides in over 20 systems. 70% of respondents indicated they face significant challenges as a result of agents not being able to find customer information, citing case handling time (50%), customer satisfaction (49%), and first contact resolution (49%) as their top three challenges.

Achieving a 360-Degree View of the Customer – Via a Single Interface

These challenges are probably all too familiar. Chances are you’ve made a significant investment in customer service systems – CRM, knowledgebase, call ticketing, bug tracking, wikis, online customer communities, etc. While you might have tried moving customer data into a single repository, you realized that it’s a losing battle, as data continues to proliferate outside those systems and social channels gain popularity.

Our advice is to leave customer data where it is, and provide ubiquitous access to it via an Enterprise Search 2.0 Platform–configured specifically for your customer service operations– that sits on top of the entire customer support infrastructure. Gone are the days of having a dozen different applications open at once to resolve customer issues.

With an Enterprise Search 2.0 Platform, CSRs and managers gain immediate, efficient, single-screen access to critical customer, product and issue-resolution information, regardless of what system it resides in. No more toggling between multiple applications. No ripping and replacing current systems. No moving data into a single repository or “system of record.”

This approach enables dynamic dashboards that give CSRs and managers 360 views of customer information correlated from disparate systems. Dashboards, configured by role, display account information, related customer cases, related sales opportunities, customer posts from social media channels, and other information located across the knowledge ecosystem, even dynamic business analytics for managers and executives.

Imagine how customer service managers and executives could use this immediate access to all customer information to make better, more informed decisions, and identify and understand product and customer trends, rates of satisfaction, and more, all before they become critical or costly issues.

The dramatic impact that a 360 view of customer information can have on your business is one you can’t afford to operate without.

About the Author

As the Senior Vice President of Enterprise Solutions, Ed Shepherdson oversees Coveo’s Knowledge 360 Solutions, with a strong focus on the company’s Knowledge 360 Solutions for Customer Service. Mr. Shepherdson brings 30 years of experience in the technology industry to his role.

I’ve never had fun answering a customer service survey form until today. They gave me this bigger than bond-size folio style form at the fast food chain, Jollibee.

It looked so interesting visually that instead of my usual reaction (oh-it’s-one-of-those-boring-question-n-answer-survey-forms-again); I read it right away and started answering. Survey forms don’t always have to look so drab, right?

Well, this one was fun.

It was colorful and had cartoon type characters in it. The text was big; I didn’t have to squint my eyes reading the questions.

Choices were pictures instead of words. So for the question “Where have you been just before you came to this fast food chain?” You have to tick the circle below the picture of a house, a school, an office, a church, etc. for your answer. If your answer wasn’t any of the choices, you write your answer on a blank space provided for it.

I found the thread of questions fun, even if I felt like I was being stalked a little. I think Jollibee’s customers wouldn’t mind spending their precious minutes to fill them out.

So after that experience, I think survey forms should be customer-friendly.

How can they be so? Here are my three suggestions:

1) Make them visually appealing like they are print ads themselves – colorful, creative, and unique. The shape doesn’t always have to be square.

2) Make them easy on the eyes with big, readable text, and a smooth lay-out. Use one that won’t strain the eyes.

3) Phrase the questions in such a way that they sound fun. Ask non-stressful questions with hints of humor so answering them is exciting – and in the end make customers feel happy their answers will help the business or company’s product improve.

Customers should feel that spending their precious time filling-out survey forms is worthwhile and at the same time fun!

About the Author

Geraldine Verzo is a freelance writer who is always on the look out for great customer service!

Knowing what your customers think and feel is one of the most important aspects of providing customer service excellence.

A customer survey is a systematic and objective process of gathering, recording, and analyzing data to help make better marketing decisions.

However, the responses you receive will not make the decisions for you. Survey data represents an opportunity for review and analysis to help point you in the direction of new responses and solutions to meet customer needs. Surveys can help you:

• Define your market more effectively and make your marketing dollars go further
• Learn more about your existing and potential customers
• Learn how your customers perceive your products, your offers and your customer service
• Position or re-position your product in the marketplace
• Identify the specific product benefits you should be promoting.

While surveys can determine the answers to who, what, when, where and how questions, they will not tell you why an event occurred.

While conducting surveys can be quite complex, a good survey does not have to be overly complicated. All you need is common sense, a clear idea of the information you want to gather and a basic understanding of how to communication effectively with your target audience.

Preparing the survey is the hardest part. Still, it’s something that nearly any businessperson can do – and do effectively – if he or she is aware of a few simple points:

Make the copy simple and easy to understand. Remember, in most situations, you will not have a representative present to explain ambiguous points. Your copy must be easy to read and easy to understand.

Use closed-ended questions. Avoid open-ended questions. Such questions as: “What do you think about XYZ…” are open-ended and can produce a wide variety of responses that can be difficult to categorize and quantify. Instead, pose your question like this: “How would you rate XYZ…?” Then give a series of brief, descriptive phrases or a numerical scale so that customers can simply check their choice.

Don’t ask leading questions. “You’d like to purchase XYZ for less than $, wouldn’t you?” is a leading question and inappropriate for a survey. Leading questions imply the answers you’d like to receive.

Don’t make the questionnaire look too complicated or time-consuming. Your customers are busy people. If they have to tackle a 100-question survey they’re not likely to respond. A short, simple survey that is easy to read is more likely to receive a positive response.

Make your questionnaire look important. If customers feel that they will be performing a worthwhile service by taking the time to answer your
questions, they will be more likely to respond.

Use premiums. Premiums have been found to greatly increase survey response. The two most commonly used are money and ballpoint pens. When

using money as a premium, however, it’s important to point out to those who receive your survey that you don’t intend the money to represent the worth of their time.

Offer survey participants a copy of the results. Such offers have also been proven to increase response. People are inherently curious; when they’ve invested their time in a survey, they naturally are interested in seeing how their answers compare to others.

Follow up. If your responses come in slowly and are lower than you expected, consider mailing reminder postcards to those people who didn’t respond.

Here are some additional tips for developing a survey that gets a good response:

• Make it easy for the respondents to answer
• Use special-interest questions
• Avoid confidential areas
• Avoid technical jargon
• Include a brief cover letter
• Protect the confidentiality of your sources

About the Author

Linda Pophal, MA, SPHR, owner/CEO of Strategic Communications, LLC, is a marketing and communication consultant with 20+ years experience in strategic marketing. She has managed all aspects of corporate and marketing communication including employee communication, public relations, advertising, market research and brand management.