Many businesses never know why they lose customers. Though the British are getting better at complaining, most unhappy customers still tend to slip quietly over to the competition rather than be confrontational by complaining. Whatever we think about ourselves, we are no good unless our customers say we are. The best way to assess customer satisfaction is to ask your customers what they think whenever and however you can, and to then act upon their remarks.
Informal Feedback
Use all opportunities to encourage customer input. For example, next time a client phones, say, ‘By the way, we’re trying to improve our service to customers. How do you think we could make it better?’ But be aware: people often say what they think you want to hear and secondly, it is not systematic, thorough or measurable. It is best to prepare an impartial, comprehensive survey data that you can analyse effectively.
DIY Surveys
For most small businesses, cost constraints mean that they have to carry out market research surveys themselves. While not as effective as an independent survey (which can help customers feel more relaxed about giving frank answers) this can still provide invaluable feedback.
- Set your aims. First, decide exactly what you want to know. Are you looking for customer reactions to service or do you want to assess future buying intentions, for example? One of the most powerful uses of customer surveys is to generate ideas for new products, services or markets. This requires more open or leading questions.
- Design the survey. Whether written or conducted by phone, a questionnaire must have unambiguous questions, a clear flow and be easy to respond to. Think about the key areas on which you’d like feedback. Avoid overloading the survey with too many questions or choices: people will get bored and refuse to participate
- Consider each question carefully, and ask yourself: “Will the answers to these questions give me real data to guide an action plan or are they just nice to know facts?” You can include a wacky question that might generate interesting answers on which to base a press story or and ad.
- Campaign. Make it user-friendly. Though tick-boxes are easier to analyse and compare, written responses give more depth. For qualitative questions, use even numbers of tick boxes to prevent people plumping for the middle one of, say, five, leaving you not much wiser.
- Dummy run. Test a draft on several people to see if they understand the questions in the same way you did. Even slightly unclear wording could invalidate the whole answer.
How Many People Should I Ask?
You need surprisingly few responses to get a reasonably accurate measure of customers’ feelings. Polls for the General Election are often based on just 1,000 people and are usually very near the mark. If you have a handful of customers, you could ask them all. If you have thousands, 200 postal responses would give you enough to work with.
Thus if you estimate you will get a 10% response, you would need to mail 2,000 people as long as they are selected entirely randomly from your database. Bear in mind, though, that with postal surveys there is a tendency for only your fans or those who feel aggrieved by you to respond. For an in-depth telephone survey, 50 or even just 20 responses should give you the broad answers you need.
Checking The Basics
A survey is also an ideal way to bring your customer database up-to-date. So ask them to check you have the right name, address and phone number. You can also use it to build your customer profile with simple closed questions: age, sex, type of business, preferred newspapers or whatever. However, you are more likely to get the unvarnished truth if responses are anonymous.
Increasing Response Levels
Replies to your survey will increase dramatically if you make it easy and potentially worthwhile to respond. Ease of response is down to design. Try to fit your survey on one side of a large postcard with a freepost address or a stamp attached. As an incentive, consider offering a reward to every person replying. For example, money off your next order or an entry into a prize draw.
Telephone Survey
A telephone survey allows you to clarify questions and gives respondents scope to expand on open-ended answers. However, telephone surveys can be time-consuming and costly. Whether you do it in-house or through an agency, you still need a tightly-designed script and the discipline to stick to it. If you do it, don’t get drawn into a discussion or get defensive.
Get More For Your Money
One big cost of a mailed questionnaire is the postage. So why not take the opportunity to do some selling as well? Pop in details of some special offer or new service, maybe. Be careful, though, that this doesn’t obscure or compete for attention with the questionnaire, which is the main reason for the exercise.
Another way to capitalise on a customer satisfaction survey is to ask respondents for a couple of names as referrals. You can also use any favourable comments from the survey as testimonials (with the sender’s permission, of course).
Prepare Properly
Good project management is vital. So prepare a detailed, written plan of what needs to be done, who is going to do it and by when. Think what would make you slog through a questionnaire if it landed on your desk. Explain why you have sent recipients your questionnaire and why they should give up their time to fill it in.
The survey must be professional, relevant and of potential benefit to your customers. Your first customer satisfaction survey will be a benchmark – follow it up with another one about 6-12 months later to measure your progress. Trends are as important as absolute results.
Show Your Gratitude
Thank customers and tell them how valuable their contribution has been. Tell them the results honestly, perhaps with summary charts, and highlight the actions you will take to correct problems that the research revealed. Publish the name of the winners of the prize draw and send out their prizes promptly.
Interpreting The Responses
How will you analyse the answers? This depends on the number of responses you expect. You can analyse a few by hand. For larger numbers, you could use a database or spreadsheet. But how will you deal with multiple choices or open-ended questions? There are some good, relatively inexpensive, survey analysis packages on the market now which make analysis much more straightforward.
Collate the replies and decide what the implications are for your business. Once you’ve drawn conclusions, plan what specific actions you will take to address them. A good customer survey will let you base the development of your business on solid facts rather than on intuition or hope.