Customer Analysis

Many people ask the question How do I create a customer survey? The basic steps are the same no matter what type of client survey you're writing: customer satisfaction, global market research, product development surveys, etc.

Step 1: Sit down and figure out what the goal of the survey is. Are you trying to identify upsell opportunities? Want to discover features missing from your current product? Figuring out if it's a good idea to take your marketing overseas and attack a global market? In the very beginning of the survey planning process, you should know what it is you want to get out of the consumer survey. If you don't have a firm customer satisfaction survey objectives in the beginning, while you go through the other steps such as writing survey questions or selecting the best survey software, you're going to stray from the path. If you stray from the path, you may find the final survey results are not as helpful as you had hoped.

Step 2: Decide on a research methodology. Your goals should help you on this step as well. You need to first decide if you're planning to do qualitative or quantitative research. From there narrow the scope further, if you want to do qualitative research are you interested in focus groups, advisory boards, one-on-one interviews? With quantitative research you may decide on comment cards, feedback forms and surveys. Is your survey method going to be online, telephone-based or paper questionnaires?

Step 3: Survey Design. I'm making the assumption since you're reading a survey blog about how to create customer surveys, you're not interested in the other market research methods right now so I'm going to focus on the process of building customer surveys. Once you've gotten through the first two steps, you're ready to start writing survey questions (Finally! I bet you thought this would be the first step!). Customer satisfaction survey design can be the biggest challenge. Luckily, there is survey designing software to help you step through this. Survey software tools often have templates and question libraries to help you write good survey questions.

Step 4: Data collection. Okay, you've picked your customer survey methodology, created a client survey and you're ready to field your survey (or use the data collection tool in your survey application to collect responses). Exactly what you do in this step will depend on what type of survey you decided to collected: telephone, paper, online. One way to get survey responses is to use email marketing tools to send personalized email surveys. You can also share the link on your website, social media sites, invoices, etc.

Step 5: Analyze customer feedback. Analyzing survey data is one of people's least favorite parts of the surveying process. We have some tips for how to analyze survey data here. Don't be afraid of this step. You need to conduct the survey customer analysis to achieve your goal. It's what you set out to do, so keep your chin up. You're only a step away from the final product (and once you choose survey analysis methods you should be almost finished).

Step 6: Share the survey findings. This is what you set out to do. Get answers to your customer questions. Take the customer feedback analysis you completed in the last step and format it. You're creating a survey report you can share within your organization (and maybe with others outside of your organization). If you need tips for creating survey reports or an example survey report, you can read more about them here.

Step 6.1: Take action. This is still part of step 6, but it's important enough it should be broken out. In your customer analysis survey report, you should have shared your recommendations for moving forward. Make sure you make recommendations and there is an agreement about moving forward based on the customer survey findings. If you don't plan to take action in Step 1, then you should save yourself the time of conducting the customer research in the first place.

Any other survey research design tips? How have you used these steps to create a customer survey that improved processes in your organization?

Day 3 of our top blog post count down. Today we're focusing on email marketing and email survey invitation best practices. Here are our top 5 posts from the last year about best practices and our email survey tool.

• Does Your Online Survey Software Tool Send Automated Thank You Emails? Cvent Web Surveys software allows you to automate survey invitations, reminder invitations to non-respondents and reminders to partial survey respondents, but what about other types of emails you can automate with our email survey software tool? I feel like the automated completion emails that are out-of-the-box with our email survey software is often over looked. This post points out why you need this email from your survey software provider.

• Tips For Writing An Email Survey Invitations: Most marketers have less than eight seconds to convince recipients to click through an email when they send personalized email surveys. The tips in this post should help you create email survey invitations.

• Even More Tips to Boost Email Deliverability: Increased email deliverability means increased survey responses, which allows for better customer analysis or marketing research data. In this post, we highlight 3 ways to make sure your email survey invitations reach invitee inboxes.

• Best Practices for Email Marketing Design: If email marketing is part of you marketing strategy or to gather online survey responses, there are several of email marketing design best practices you should keep in mind.

• 5 Email Marketing Tips To Increase Online Survey Responses: A good subject line may be the most critical part of the formula for a high open rate. In this post, we provide five tips to get you the email survey responses you need to make business decisions.

I was reading through Bruce Temkin's 6 Laws of Customer Experience (CxP) yesterday, and I was struck by how well a survey program fits in with his CxP laws. I talk about implementing online survey programs to gather customer feedback all the time, to the point that I sometimes feel like a broken record. Often though, employees are overlooked as an essential part of the customer experience especially if they aren't front-line employees. For that reason, my favorite two laws are numbers four and five:
Obviously, conducting client surveys to find their satisfaction levels is important for customer analysis, product enhancements, customer service feedback, etc., but checking in with employee's satisfaction is equally important. Here are a few of the highlights from Bruce:

Various types of employee feedback and HR surveys can include questions to evaluate how your organization is doing when it comes to fostering the correct environment for providing amazing customer experiences. A quick online survey can show management if they're doing a good job communicating organizational goals, motivating employees, boosting morale by celebrating their successes, etc. One of the best ways to measurce customer experience is to measure employee loyalty and morale using surveys.

Employees are an organization's biggest asset; but if employees aren't motivated, don't understand or are just expected to churn through tasks, they could also be your biggest liability when trying to boost customer retention. A good first step to checking in on your customer experience is to check in with your employees through some type of employee satisfaction survey.

If your organization doesn't currently conduct employee surveys or conducts paper based surveys, I'd recommend signing up for one of our online product demos or a free trial of the Cvent Web Survey software.

Have you ever been asked to take a customer survey and a few questions in told you don't match the survey criteria? It's pretty frustrating. I've told the organization, "sure, I'll spend a few minutes giving you feedback for your customer research project." Then, I'm rejected and kicked out of the online survey. Usually, I'm kicked out after answering questions they should already have on file. Seems silly they even wasted any email marketing on me. These organizations need to step up their game and invest in quality customer survey software (I would recommend Cvent, obviously).

If your online survey tool is a good one, you have the ability to import critical information into the contact database. We've mentioned before how important having a robust contact database is for segmenting purposes, but the value definitely goes beyond that. I could argue this is a matter of poor email survey segmentation, but sometimes it's important to turn the problem a few degrees and see it from a new side.

Perhaps you don't have some information on a customer you'll need later, you can quickly survey customers to gauge product satisfaction and gather other customer information. You can create any number of custom contact fields in the Cvent contact database, beyond the basic address, phone, email information.

It may be important to your survey projects to be able to run cross-tabulation survey reports based on which tier customer someone is. If all tier 1's feel a certain way, and all tier 2's feel differently, maybe there's a problem that needs to be addressed. While my opening example was a matter of poor segmentation, this one isn't. It's a matter of needing quality data for strong customer analysis - without having to ask the extra questions. You should only ever ask a customer a basic question once. Remember: the likelihood of abandonment increases with each additional question asked. I would argue it skyrockets when additional questions are questions the organization should have (somewhere).

This is another basic case of respecting your customers' time. If you constantly tell them they aren't qualified to complete your customer feedback survey, they're going to stop volunteering to take it - then how will you conduct market research and analyze customer feedback?

Many organizations have broken customer feedback programs. Organizations gather lots of information and feedback from customers: they conduct surveys; they engage through social media; people call or email customer service. Then organizations take all this data, plops it into presentations and fails to do anything with the results. More importantly, different departments never even bother to connect the information they have. So customer feedback survey reports don't even include the full picture.

Do you think this is broken? I do.

Organization who are good at listening to customers gather feedback from all over: blogs, forums, Twitter, Facebook, sales people, customer service representatives, emails, online surveys, etc. There's no one place an organization can go to get a simple solution for listen or conducting customer analysis. They need to get better at listening and act on the feedback. It's no longer big companies versus an individual. The internet has allowed customers to talk to each other, spread good (and bad) stories about an organization in minutes.

There are tools that can help organizations listen. I would recommend starting with a customer survey program that includes customer service surveys and monitoring inbound feedback.

I recently came across a speech Seth Godin gave in 2006 about how things are "Broken" and his reasons for it. While it may be three years old, I think his points are still relevant.


Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.
What are your tips for improving Customer Feedback Programs?

Final unrelated thought, if you're conducting any type of survey with incentives, think about Seth's advice on prepaid credit and debit cards.

The hardest part of any survey project is creating a solid questionnaire. If you create a good survey and plan the analysis, interpreting the data should be a walk in the park. Here are five easy steps on how to analyze survey data:

1. Take a birds-eye-view. A good first step of interpreting survey data is to take an overall look at the data and responses. Consider these questions:

• How many people completed the survey?
• What was the response rate?
• What was the average amount of time respondents spend completing the questionnaire?
• How well do the respondents represent the survey target group?

Answering these questions at the beginning should help you understand how reliable your data is and evaluate how potential biases could be skewing survey results.

2. Look at the responses to your key survey questions. If the goal of the survey was to evaluate customer satisfaction and identify possible product enhancements, a key survey question may be what percentage of respondents said they were unsatisfied and what percentage were extremely satisfied. What kinds of enhancements could improve the customer experience and increase the satisfaction with the product?

3. Cross-tabulate demographic characteristics with responses to key questions. By cross-tabulating the responses by demographic characteristics such as age, gender, experience levels will help you which features may be more important to key groups. Cross-tabulating helps marketing executives further identify target markets.

4. Look at the open ended questions. We've given you tips to help analyze open ended questions in the past. Using open ended questions in any type of market research or customer survey should help you identify the language your target market is using. Sometimes marketers think customers understand the messaging they choose, while the customers are describing the problem and the ideal solution in a completely different way. Open ended questions can help identify some of these disparities so the marketing department can create messaging to speak your customer's language.

5. Create a "to do" list and take action. We've mentioned before that conducting surveys, whether they're online questionnaires or paper feedback forms, create expectations. Be sure to act on the survey results.

Giving the survey analysis techniques as much thought as the survey creation is critical if you want to be able to really improve your organizations value adds. Some people believe that the analysis process beings only after the web based survey has been launched and responses have been collected. Unfortunately, this approach will hurt your survey results. You should consider the types of customer analysis you want to do while developing a questionnaire. The question type you chose when creating an online survey will limit the analysis. So while the above steps have to do with interpreting the data, you need to think about the process in the beginning as well.

Increased email deliverability means increased survey responses, which allows for better customer analysis or marketing research data. We recently posted a couple of tips to help improve the deliverability of your email marketing, and now we're sharing even more:

• Compelling content. ISPs monitor click-throughs and open rates, too. What does this mean? If you aren't delivering compelling content resulting in click-throughs to your online survey, your next email may be marked as spam and might never make it to the recipient’s inbox.

Deliver gripping subject lines and emails every time to help boost your response rates. This helps your current and future surveys.

• Respect respondent’s time. We cannot stress this enough. Emailing your contacts too often can trigger excess spam complaints. This does not apply to just those using email marketing for surveys, it applies to the whole organization.

If your customer service department is sending out customer service feedback forms and your marketing department is sending our promotional emails to the same contacts too often, you could be hurting your email reputation without even realizing it.

Your respondents are busy people, if they begin to hear from you too often and feel you're wasting their time, they will report you. To avoid this potential deliverability nightmare, experts recommend centralizing email lists so every email is logged and tracked.

• Use real email addresses. If you have bounces going to an email address that doesn’t exist, it's going to damage your deliverability. Including "Do not reply to this message" in your email shouldn't hurt as long as the email address you're sending from is real. But as we suggested previously, you want those replies and bounce backs to help you cleanse your list and boost deliverability.

Make sure to file these tips in your email marketing best practices folder and start using them today. You may be surprised at how a few changes could boost your response numbers.

We work in a world surrounded by electronic white noise. The average American worker receives nearly 100 new email messages per day in their work inbox alone. Many of these messages are the direct result of companies such as yours and ours – marketing messages, sales communication letters, special offers and the like. Let’s face it, most of these messages are usually glanced over for a second or two, then discarded or deleted.

The white noise has programmed us to grant little attention to such emails. It’s not surprising; we do the same thing during television shows. Commercial time usually means a snack or bathroom break. So how do you ensure your message is truly read and digested?

The answer is quite simple: Relevance.

If a message piques your interest, it likely contains something that is relevant to you specifically. This might mean it’s a product you’re actively interested in learning about. Perhaps the message addresses a problem your company (coincidentally?) is looking to solve. In either case, relevance bridges the gap from marketing white noise to relevant communication.

In order to decide what's relevant to your target audience, you must first learn about it. Customer analysis can help your organization build a database of robust customer knowledge that you can leverage in a multitude of ways. Send only the messages that matter, and at times when they are more likely to be read. Call customers with offers you know will pique their interest.

Analyzing customer feedback can help you build this knowledge base. Once you have this customer analysis process on its way, you’ll likely begin to notice the white noise clearing up and your messages getting across.

It’s likely you’ve heard about the 80-20 Rule, which states that 80% of a company’s profits come from 20% of its client base.

The implication is pretty straightforward: to maximize profits, a company needs to retain its best customers. Especially during times of economic difficulty, businesses need to strategically maximize focus on this base of profitable opportunities.

For many organizations, the key lies in implementing a customer satisfaction campaign. Such a campaign requires effective customer satisfaction questionnaires, user satisfaction surveys and customer service feedback plans to help understand the dimensions of satisfaction that mean the most to your company. Also essential is an action plan for using this customer analysis in ways that will increase revenue from renewal business, cross-sells and installed base opportunities.

Cvent has published a white paper to help managers and C-level executives learn about how to maximize bottom line profits by retaining a company’s best customers through a comprehensive customer satisfaction program. The white paper is available at Cvent’s Survey Resource page.