Whether planning a new customer survey in 2012 or preparing to re-field a past study, here are five tips to improve the customer feedback programme in your organisation.
1. Are you measuring what’s important?
Does your survey generate actionable data, or is it a scorecard that simply allows you to pat yourself on the back when the results are published?
If your survey wasn’t reviewed during 2011, re-evaluate your survey in early 2012. We often hear a requirement that “we want to keep this and that because we want to compare to last year” but are these items still relevant and important today? Key drivers of customer loyalty may need revising, especially if your organisation has undergone significant change in recent years.
2. Keep the survey short
I say this all the time. Customers will complete surveys, but they are busy, and online surveys have a lot more to compete with for attention today than five years ago. A prize-draw incentive doesn’t often make a lot of difference; the customer survey is a chance to give feedback in the hope of improved or continued good products/services in future – and this shouldn’t be taking more than ten minutes to complete.
3. Run surveys more frequently
Some customer research is better conducted as a ‘transactional survey’ because customers will not remember details over time. For example, feedback on complaint handling or product repair should be requested within days/week of the contact, rather than presented as another section of an annual customer survey. Why wait 12 months for an update on progress?
4. Use surveys to perform service recovery
A survey can pay for itself by helping service recovery amongst unhappy customers. Customers often want information and for their voice to be heard, not compensation (PDF link), and adding email alerts to notify relevant teams about dissatisfied customers is easy to do. ‘Customer at Risk’ reports help identify recurring problems too, and when combined with running surveys more frequently it is a lot easier to convert the disgruntled customer into a satisfied customer (or perhaps a raving fan!).
5. Conduct proper analysis and act on findings
What happens after the survey reports are published? Who gets the feedback?
Don’t restrict results to senior management – local managers and front line staff can benefit from, even be inspired by, customer insights too (although keep it relevant). Your staff may even have recommendations(!) and can take action from the ground up, rather than wait for direction to filter down.
Planning a customer survey in 2012? Surveylab offers more than professionally designed surveys and easy-to-use reports. We have years of experience designing, implementing and managing customer feedback programmes (and more from past careers and partnering with specialist consultancies). Get in touch!
Offering expert advice for designing and implementing online survey best practice. We share our experiences working in the fields of customer satisfaction and employee engagement research.
Yes, keep the surveys short! And control how long they can become depending on the answers. I worked a temp job once (in Wimbledon, where you guys are, as it happens), doing phone surveys. It was um.. hard.
There was one survey I still remember, about postage stamps. It opened up by asking where the respondent bought postage stamps – post office, supermarket, petrol station etc. I used to PRAY that they’d only say one or two places – if they said 5 or 6 then we’d have to go through the same hideous set of about 80 questions for each place, it was mind-bending, with respondents wanting to bail out etc.
So I agree, keep ‘em short…
http://www.peterbennett.net
80 questions, and then ask them all over again… Ouch! Did anyone ever complete the third, or fourth round of questions?
In the past we have converted a few telephone scripts to online studies (and also host the data-capture for telephone surveys) and there are often a few items we can change in a telephone survey script to make the survey easier to complete online. (not always). Some questions are also easier to answer as a written question, for example if you’re asking “how satisfied are you with …” and then present a list of attributes, say:
- Ambience inside clinic
- Punctuality of Osteopath
- Thoroughness of case health history
- Thoroughness of clinical examination
- Clarity / helpfulness of diagnosis
Then the respondent can race through these questions faster than an interviewer can read aloud. (not always). That doesn’t mean we should cram in more questions though.
Thanks for sharing!