How Customer Surveys Can Plant Seeds of Loyalty
As individuals, companies, and product and service providers, we can benefit from introspection, especially at a milestone like the arrival of a new year. In fact, there’s no better time than now to do just that.
While you’re looking back at the business year and analyzing successes, near-successes and setbacks, one thing to seriously consider is to augment that thinking with input from those who know you best, your customer or client base.
There are many types of surveys and other methods to engage your customers in a productive dialogue. Customer satisfaction surveys can help you define or update a benchmark measurement and are valuable in assessing your products, operations and even associates. For marketing, branding and message development, however, a quantitative satisfaction survey has limited value.
What we want to do is get a fresh insight into who you are in your customers’ eyes. What does your role in their business mean to them? We need to determine whether the features and benefits of your offerings, which you spent hours and dollars developing, are really the features and benefits that keep that customer interested in conducting business with your company.
You want to get out of your head and into theirs to find out what makes them tick. Your success, it seems, lies closest to the approach that you take with the survey and how you process and act upon what you learn.
The best surveys focus on the survey taker. That sounds simple enough, but consider this hypothetical approach:
- How’s company X doing in helping you with your taxes?
- What’s the three best things about company X’s people when they come to do your taxes?
- Is company X’s brand promise working for you?
Seems straightforward - and it is - but you’re not really asking them to open up about their motivation for engaging you, Mr. or Mrs. X. And that survey approach is all about your company, not them. Consider this approach:
- As tax deadlines begin to approach, what concerns start cropping up in your mind as you’re running your business?
- Rank these concerns in importance to you and your business.
- Which aspects of company X’s services best put your mind at ease? Why do you think that is the case?
- In light of this, what do you think makes company X best qualified to serve your tax needs?
Now these examples are oversimplified, but there are several points we’re trying to demonstrate here:
- The survey is for and about the customer. Focus on them in the line of questioning. You’ll glean your value from the responses. And, nine times out of 10, they’ll be grateful that you’re asking.
- Direct the survey respondent with your progression of questions, but give them ample opportunity for open-ended responses as well. Often, this is where the gold nuggets are unearthed.
There are many ways to survey your customers, including on-line, telephone and in-person methods. All of these work, but telephone and in-person interviews often yield the best results because the survey becomes a dialogue or a conversation. You want your customers to open up, which leads us to a final point.
You or others within your organization can survey customers yourself, especially customers with whom you have strong relationships. But the best results come when you have a third party conduct the survey. There are two reasons for this. First, it demonstrates to the customer that the survey is about them by separating your organization from the process. Second, it gives your customer the opportunity to open up and be honest, which is valuable to you and your objective in seeking customer feedback.
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