Customer Research

When performing a market research study for clients in certain marketplaces, it is important to remember the competition. If, for example, you were doing a customer market research survey for a fast-food restaurant, Burger One, you would want to gauge survey respondents’ feelings about the competition as well as your client.

You might ask restaurant customer satisfaction questions like:


If respondents frequent Burger One and four other fast-food restaurants, that gives you insight into the survey data provided. If respondents only frequent Burger One, that is helpful to know as well. Take this example of how survey results can be applied to the restaurant's over all marketing strategy:


On the other side of this equation is what Burger One's loyal customer base thinks. If customers who only eat fast-food at Burger One express no interest in the new sandwich, it may not be the best possible sandwich to launch. However, if respondents who frequent competitors more often than Burger One express high levels of interest in the new sandwich, it could spell an opportunity for Burger One to gain new business.

It’s best to analyze market research from all angles when launching a new product – there are multiple factors at play.

Does your customer survey have "survivor bias"? I'm betting it does. Why? Because when most survey designers create business questionnaires or client satisfaction surveys we only collect feedback from individuals who are still customers. What about lost business? Why aren't those customers who left asked to complete your client feedback form? You better believe they have feedback.

In her post at the Dimensional Research blog, Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Avoid "Survivor Bias", Diane Hagglund defines "Survivor Bias" as drawing conclusions only from data that is available or convenient and thus systematically biasing your results. AKA biasing your survey sample by only asking "happy" customers. They may not be over the moon about your product, but they're at least happy enough with your offering if they're still paying you.

I agree with Diane on this one, it's pretty ridiculous to allow this bias to creep into your customer market research. It's easily avoided considering you should have all the customer data you need to send them the same client survey template. Make sure you're measuring client satisfaction among customers who left you for a competitor as well as those who simply decided not to renew the service (and didn't go with anyone else).

When you begin writing customer survey questions to create client questionnaires or update your annual template for a client satisfaction survey make sure you think about your former customers. If you don't know who they are, this is a good time to find out. Thank goodness for internet research software and customer insight solutions to make the act of surveying clients a little easier.

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?

According to an Ad Age article published today, there is no longer an average American. This doesn't come from a consumer survey they conducted, but from the expected results of the 2010 US Census. There are approximately 309 million people living in the United States, and over time, we have become a complex, multidimensional society.

For consumer marketers, this may be a big shift. No more "the American consumer," no more "Average Joe." The U.S. Census is the largest market research project of the decade. The Census Bureau will be gathering data on American consumers and spending upwards of $15 billion doing it. There's a reason that Peter Franceses, demographic trends analyst at WPP's Ogilvy & Mather, New York, calls it the gold-standard of consumer market research studies.

Here are some of the expected findings Franceses shared with Ad Age:


What does this mean for consumer marketers and survey samples? Getting a representative survey sample is becoming even more important. With the death of the "Average American Consumer," market research survey designers can no longer rely on data collected from just one group. When making business decisions, organizations will need to look at the entire picture.

What else? Focusing on niche markets will become more important. It's already very difficult to please everyone, but it's getting harder and harder. Consumer products that will work for a single couple living in New England is not necessarily the same consumer product that will work for a blended family in California. It's important to make sure you're conducting your own product market research. While the Census is collecting a lot of information about consumer trends and consumer behavior, organizations still have to conduct their own market research related to their particular markets.

The first part of this two-part series outlined how to write survey questions that are relevant to your audience in order to design good surveys.  This post will provide the rationale for asking questions to a competent survey sample, and how doing so reduces error and increases the validity of your survey results.

In general, when employees, customers and other types of respondents receive online consumer research or opinion surveys, they believe it is for a logical reason.  They are usually selected because they are employees with insight about a certain company, have previously used particular products and services, provided contact information to you (such as an e-mail address), or are believed to possess other information and/or opinions that are valued by researchers and organizations at large. 

Because of this, respondents naturally feel they should "know the answers" to your market research questions (i.e. they are competent regarding the concepts covered in the survey).  In fact, if your survey respondents come across a question that confuses them, or one that they do not know the answer to, many will select a response regardless of whether it accurately reflects their behaviors or opinions.  To design surveys that can reduce this possible source of error, you should attempt to include questions about which your survey sample is knowledgeable and able to answer. 

You know your customers and survey population best; asking them client survey questions for which they are unqualified to answer can not only confuse respondents, but may cause you to end up with bad data.  Design survey questions that are appropriate for your target market - this means your questions are both relevant to your audience, and that your audience is adequately informed about the concepts addressed in your feedback form.

Survey reports in the Cvent Web Surveys software tool offer a wide variety of ways to view your data and begin conducting your market research survey analysis. The answer summary by question report, for example, pulls up a table, a graph and basic statistical analysis for each survey question. Another example survey report, answer details by respondent, offers you the option of seeing each respondent’s answers on a separate page or answer details for all respondents gives you the opportunity to see all the answers for all respondents on a single page!

But sometimes these are not enough when you want to make a professional report for your boss to present to the board members. This is exactly why Cvent has the presentations feature within the survey application. The presentations section allows you to create reports with unique combinations of filters and display options. You can use our presentations creator to access data views that are unavailable with other out-of-the-box survey reports. Creating distributable reports in the Cvent Web Surveys software tool makes it easy to communicate the survey results in either Word or PDF format.

To determine what you see on each page of your sample report, choose from the options below:

Just because you find correlation in your data when analyzing survey results does not mean there is causation. I find this is a common mistake in lots of survey reports when someone is new to survey research or conducting data analysis. Take this example:


Some people see this connection as a causation. Customers are satisfied because you contact them frequently to make sure everything is going well. The problem is, it's not a causation. Causation are extremely hard to prove because you cannot control every factor. For example, you may split your territory by industry and your solution suits some industries better than others. Or clients who are really satisfied simply use the product more often so the customer success managers reach out to them more frequently, because they are more likely to have questions. While those who use the product less have less to be satisfied about and may feel they are wasting those budget dollars.

To be able to prove causation, you need to be able to rule out all other possible explanations for the connection. As you can imagine, that's almost impossible to do since we do not control outside factors influencing the survey respondent or even the greater survey sample. Instead, when situations like these occur, we're seeing a correlation between two things. In my customer survey question examples, there's a correlation between how satisfied customers and how often they are contacted.

This principle does not only apply to customer survey research, it also applies to analyzing employee feedback forms, product surveys, market research and any other type of data collection and analysis.

After writing survey questions, creating an online survey using one of the many online survey software tools available (I recommend you try Cvent's survey system - of course!) and finally posting survey questions to the web, you need to get your survey sample in order. Posting the survey online can be an easy task with survey hosting software that does all the coding and back end work for you. But selecting your survey sample can sometimes be an added headache in the online survey questionnaire process.

Chances are you're going to look to email marketing to invite survey respondents, probably even using the email survey tool that's part of the system you've chosen. But how are you going to select the sample and get your consumer market research, credit union survey or any other type of questionnaire into their inboxes?

Hopefully when you were shopping for satisfaction survey software or a market research tool you made sure the system had a robust contact database you could segment based on various criteria to fit your survey needs. Using our tool, you can segment your database and easily send email survey invites to the resulting survey sample. There's no need to export contacts between systems to select the group of contacts for this survey.

Cvent's online data collection tool makes it easy to collect customer insights when conducting consumer surveys. Sign up for a product demonstration to learn more about how Cvent Web Surveys software can help with your next survey project.

No matter what kind of survey questionnaire you're working on, whether it's an employee satisfaction survey, product market research, a customer service questionnaire, a job performance review template or a customer satisfaction survey, having some basic knowledge of statistics and related terms is helpful.

If you're using survey analysis tools, chances are all the statistical calculations will be done for you, you only need to select the survey analysis methods. It's still important to know what the terms mean that are describing the data. Here's a quick "crash course" in basic statistics and what the terms mean:

Mean: Typically "mean" is used as a synonym for "average." While this is not exactly accurate, it's good enough for a high level understanding. To get the population mean, or the expected value of a random variable, take the sum of the results and divide it by the number of results.

Median: Separates the top half from the bottom half of the sample. The median is the exact middle number of your responses. To figure out the median, you order the finite list of responses from the lowest value to the highest value and select the middle value. If there is not a unique middle value, take the mean on either side of where the median would be (ie. in the list a < b < c < d the median would be the mean of b and c). The reason you would use the median over the mean is if there are outliers in the population that don't matter. Outliers will skew your mean in the direction of the outlier. However, using the median prevents the average from being skewed.

Mode: The mode is the response or variable in a data set that occurs most frequently (i.e. in the list a, a, b, a, b, c, c, d the mode would be a because it occurs the most). While the mean and median might be very similar for a data set, the mode may be very different depending on the data set's distribution.

Variance: Describes how spread out the distribution of a data set is.

Standard Deviation: Describes the probability of the data set's distribution. A low standard deviation means the the data points tend to be close to, or the same as, the mean. A high standard deviation indicates the data is spread out.

Yesterday I was out to dinner with a friend, and we started talking about retail surveys. She was expressing her frustration with the survey questionnaire design for her company's retail surveys. Apparently, they always score low on this one question:

Most people don't come into her store looking for pants, so the sales associates don't harass customers asking if they need the fits explained. Makes sense. Then why is their online survey asking for customer feedback from all consumers regardless of their primary purpose in visiting the store?

Oh, wait! There's the problem. The survey writer neglected to ask survey respondents why they came to the store. Because of this omission, the survey question in question (Were pant fits explained?) isn't presenting very valuable survey data. The clear solution would be to add a new question and use some form of survey question logic (perhaps branch logic might be ideal here) to only ask those people who were shopping for pants if the pant fits were explained to them. Ideally, when you're testing your survey, you should think through the question flow and catch situations like these.

Another minor point about this question, what about those customers who were asked if they'd like the pant fits explained and declined? How are they going to answer this question to give you accurate data? Even if you would answer "Yes" because it was offered, not all online survey respondents will. This would be a more useful question, after being paired with a screener question, if it asked if a sales associated offered to explain the pant fits.

This same concept applies to hotel surveys, customer satisfaction research, website surveys, etc. The reason why a guest stays at a hotel (business or leisure travel) matters. What someone was looking for when they visited your website (trying to purchase X vs. looking for information about Y), makes a difference. If they are looking for information about Y it does not make sense to ask them if they found information on Z.

Do you know how satisfied customers are? Do you know commonalities satisfied customers share? What about dissatisfied customers? If not, you're missing out on valuable information that could help identify how your organization can boost revenue. All you need is to conduct some customer satisfaction research. If it could help boost revenue why wouldn't you be interested in measuring customer satisfaction?

One way to begin to classify customers in customer satisfaction survey research is to ask a series of Net Promoter survey questions about overall satisfaction, likelihood to repurchase and likelihood to recommend. As I've mentioned in past posts, many online survey tips recommend placing overall satisfaction questions before more specific questions. This applies here as well. Asking about repurchase likelihood and chances of making recommendations should be placed where ever they fit best within your questionnaire.

Here's the important part: the survey analysis. After getting back your questionnaire responses and you begin the survey results analysis and calculate customer satisfaction scores, look at how you can divide up customers. Typically, customer survey best practices say there are four distinct customer satisfaction categories:


This should just be one step in your survey research analysis process. From here, one of the things you should look for is commonalities between each group. Does everyone in the dissatisfied column have something in common you can fix? Does everyone in the secure group do something the bottom two groups do not, maybe you could better share these benefits or features.

How do you get product enhancement requests? Do you look to competitors for new features or have an open product enhancement questionnaire posted on your website? Do you create product survey templates and survey customers or does your marketing team sit around a conference room coming up with product ideas with no outside input?

All of these are methods companies use when it's time for product upgrades. However, sometimes organizations spend a lot more time sitting around thinking about what would be cool and comparing their feature list to their competitors and not enough time looking to customers and prospects for what they want.

Surveying customers is not a requirement when it comes to listening to their needs at product enhancement time. You have employees on the front line talking to customers everyday, answering their questions, trying to help them create workarounds when features don't exist. You have a sales team talking to prospects daily, sometimes losing deals because your offering doesn't have a critical feature. Do you know what these deal breakers are?

A lot of times this type of information already exists within the organization, but it's not being shared between employees or pushed up to decision makers. My guess is this is due to the organization's culture. So how do you get the information that already exists? ASK employees who are talking to prospects and customers. If you just ask once and they don't give you a response because they don't know, they're probably not prepared - after all, you don't usually ask. You'll need to shift the culture. My best suggestion is to get them to pass the information on as they get it. That way, you don't need to worry about them forgetting a great product enhancement. An easy method to collect these new ideas, host something on your intranet - or create an online survey that only contains a few questions (maybe just one open text box). All the information will be collected in one place for whoever decides what the next product enhancement will look like.

Similar data can also be found, in some cases, in customer market research and customer satisfaction surveys. Depending on the goals of the survey (one should always be figuring out what you can do better), customers will tell you what you're doing wrong. And remember that additional comment box you should have in every survey questionnaire? Customers will write in the things they want if you didn't give them another opportunity to voice those through survey questions.

Looking at competitors and their product offering is important, but it doesn't matter if that's not what customers and prospects are looking for. Keep your ears open and listen to what customers are saying they want. They're using your product, they know where it's failing to meet their needs and how it could do a better job working for them. If you don't already have this information, consider creating a product survey to send to customers.

When was the last time you asked your hotel guests for customer feedback? Some hotels do an excellent job of sending out hotel surveys to gauge customer's satisfaction and experiences; others, well, I'm not sure they collect feedback from guests.

Just like it's important for a business to collect customer feedback by conducting customer market research and customer satisfaction surveys, it's important for hotels to build surveys for data collection as well. Travelers have lots of options, if you're constantly coming in below expectations and providing negative customer experiences, travelers will book rooms somewhere else.

If you have never done a hotel survey or don't already have a survey program in place, setting goals should be the first order of business. (I know, I'm so predictable, you knew that's what I would say.) Coming up with goals for your questionnaires can be one of the hardest parts if you've never done it before. While it's important to always create your own survey goals, here are a few things to think about for your hotel guest surveys:


Even if you're not gathering feedback about your guests visits, chances are other groups are. Every time I book a hotel through Expedia or another travel site, I receive a survey afterwards so they can ensure people booking through continue to be satisfied customers. The last thing you want is for your rating to go down because you didn't know there was a problem.

Conducting customer satisfaction research or customer opinion surveys in countries who do not speak English? It's a no brainer to make sure you're translating your survey to the native language. Our online survey technology make's it easy to build online surveys in either English, French or Spanish. However, we don't pretend to be an online translator. I strongly recommend looking into a translating service if you're not fluent.
Customer survey best practices for translating surveys is to translate into the language you want to build your survey and then translate back to your native language. Seems like a lot more work, but it helps ensure the translation is done correctly. When you're using your survey results to help create marketing strategies for international products, making sure you're getting the right data back is essential. This translation best practice doesn't only apply to customer surveys, but any type of marketing piece from printed advertisements to power point presentations to other types of market research.

Customer feedback management can be a challenge for any organization, both large and small. Someone passed on an article by Kalena Jordan in SiteProNews, How Twitter Is Teaching Businesses the Lost Are of Conversation, that I thought had some good insights. While Twitter gets lots of positive buzz, there is still large numbers of internet users who are unsure of Twitter - both individual users and businesses.

Conversation is powerful, and as Jordan points out, one of the most persuasive business tools. According to recent stats from Nielsen, Twitter is the fastest growing community online and the largest user group are 35-49 year olds (there's a good chance these are also your decision makers). The article argues that as we move from web 2.0 to web 3.0, conversation is taking over the thrown as king, displacing the cry Content is King! Some big brands such as Amazon, Starbucks, Home Depot, Jetblue, Kodak, etc. - if conversations weren't important, these brands would not be investing in this business channel. But as I've said before, customers are having conversations with or without your participation. If you're not part of it, you're missing out on valuable customer insights.

Jodan polled her followers asking the question:

But what kind of business tool is Twitter? It goes far beyond customer service or customer feedback. Here are some basic suggestions for how an organization can implement Twitter into their marketing mix:

The first step to using Twitter to really get the most out of potential customer market research strategies and customer feedback efforts, you need to be willing to open a dialogue. Unlike other forms of marketing communication, Twitter is a two way conversation that you need to be ready to invest time into customer relationships. The toughest part, in my opinion, is the mind shift it requires. Twitter cannot be all about You, You, You. There needs to be a level of transparency and selflessness.

Sometimes, all the tips for creating and designing survey invitations are just not enough of a push in the right direction to get you started sending email survey invitations. I like to be able to look at examples when starting a new type of project - particularly when business decisions hang on your survey results.

Last week, I was invited to take customer satisfaction marketing survey on my credit card experiences. The email survey invitation so closely follows these tips for sending survey invitations, I wanted to share the example:


This survey invitation email get's to the point quickly, introducing the electronic online survey, telling me how long I should expect to spend on the questionnaire and offering an incentive that is unlikely to cause people to skew the results just to get the market research survey report.

I was looking through a customer survey template the other day and the first question was "Which of these products do you use?" The options were Product A, Product B, Product X and Product Y. Umm, hello? The point of a customer questionnaire is that you're surveying customers, which means you should already know what product survey respondents bought. Now if you're a B2C organization that distributes products through retail stores, this statement might be a little unfair since a consumer can go into any Target and purchase your product. But for now, let's assume you don't have this channel for product distribution.

Why are you making your business survey longer instead of shorter? You already know the answer, put this information in the contact record. Since you have the data, I would even recommend including the question, hiding it and importing the answers to this question for respondents before sending out any email marketing soliciting survey responses. This way, you can utilized online survey tool features like Pipe Logic. Using Pipe Question Logic allows you to personalize the respondent experience and keep them more engaged. Customer survey best practices tell us more engaged respondents are less likely to abandon your survey, aka increase your response rates.

What other common questions could you eliminate during customer research studies because you already have the data somewhere in your organization?

I came across a blog post on Valeria Maltoni's Conversation Agent Blog not too long ago where she outlines the Top 10 Reasons Why Your Customers are Being Difficult. The list includes things like changing the rules, being negative and being the only game in town, but there are four I liked best. They are also, in my opinion, the easiest to rectify:

• Not listening to what customers have to say. Customer questionnaires are too structured so that you're leading the conversation, instead of giving them the opportunity to tell you what they want to tell you. Valeria makes the comparison to a trial: Objection! Leading the witness!

• Not soliciting feedback. I have to agree with Valeria on this, not asking is worse than not listening. If you're making any changes to their product, ask them first. I've mentioned before it's important to run customer surveys and conduct customer research particularly when it's a decision that is going to impact your customers big time!

• Not following up on customer feedback. I've written entire posts about how conducting any type of feedback questionnaire causes customers to set expectations that you will act on your client survey research. This should be a no-brainer, because if you're not going to act on the data you get back, why are you even wasting your time (and customers' time) with a survey?

• Not everyone is going to like you. While this one is not directly related to creating an online survey or questionnaire, it's important to keep in mind when reading through feedback. Not everyone is going to like you, and you can't please everyone. Particularly if you're one of those lucky (or unlucky) organizations to be the only game in town.

I recently came across a research brief at Media Post stating "Advertise or Die." The gist of the research report is that more than 48% of adults in the US believe a lack of advertising by an organization during a recession indicates the organization is struggling. If an organization continues to advertise, the surveyed adults perceive them as competitive and committed to success. This study, Advertising's Impact in a Soft Economy was conducted by Ad-ology Research. The research findings suggest that advertising plays a key role in signaling to customers how an organization is doing.

Ad-ology Research also found:


In a tight economy, it can be hard to justify spending those precious marketing dollars. If you know how and where you've acquired customers in the past, the justification may come easy. Unfortunately, not everyone knows. You should have some idea where your customers live online, what newsletters they read (because presumably you're reading them too), etc. Conduct a quick brand survey online help figure out where you should spend those dollars to get in front of customers. The last thing you want to have happen is be ruled out simply because they're not seeing your brand enough in their professional lives.

You know when you're sitting in a room, how the feeling in the room can quickly shift one way or another based on people's body language, comments or tone of voice? The same thing can happen in your focus group or forum (even if it's being held over the phone or online). I'm sure you've felt it before, in fact, sitting in a meeting today I experienced several severe swings - and no one was even talking. Silence can have the same impact.

This can have big impacts on your research - whether it's market research, a customer advisory panel or a town hall meeting. I don't want to launch into some long drawn out thing about why you should conduct surveys instead of these other methods, because I believe both research methods have a place in an organization (and even within a project). I do want to stress that because of various factors impacting discussions, it's important to have a surveying aspect as part of the project. Qualitative research methods can give skewed data very quickly just because of what one person says or does, and that's small point compared to how unrepresentative most research can be or the added social desirability bias.

A good example of this is pretty much any PR fiasco happening in social media or any FAIL hashtag. A couple months ago I posted about how conversations in social media isn't necessarily representative of your target population after Lightspeed Research found most moms were not negatively impacted by the Motrin Mom commercial. A few mommy bloggers took offense to the ad and blogged about it. It spread quickly and before you knew what everyone was pointing and saying FAIL about the entire conversation had changed.

Lots of people think of focus groups as conversations that happen in person or over the phone. But in today's new world, that's not always the case. You have the opportunity to monitor conversations surrounding your market, competitors, your product, etc., but that doesn't mean you should act just based on what you hear. One person can quickly swing the conversation in an entirely new direction just because they disagree with something. The only unfortunate part about the quick spread of information online is before you have a chance to stop it everyone has formed an opinion about something they have never even heard of. For this reason, I think its important to keep surveys in your back pocket when you need data to make business decisions.

Where have you see instances of results being skewed because of a shift in the room's atmosphere or an online discussion?