Customer Satisfaction

Back when the economy was flourishing and consumer spending was at an all-time high, many businesses were content with customers that were merely satisfied, not truly engaged.  Today, money is much tighter across the board, and these same businesses are realizing the importance of building strong and healthy relationships with existing customers AND employees.  Research shows that an organization's health directly correlates to how well they engage these two groups.

So how do you ensure your business is retaining clients and not losing them to competitors?  Perhaps the most important facet is providing exceptional customer service, and this level of service stems from employees who are passionate about their job role and their company.  They know that employee opinions are valued when management makes decisions. They are loyal, often times reccomending their organization when asked about their job.

Because these employees are guiding the customer experience, it is critical to keep them engaged.  Passionate and dedicated employees make for passionate and dedicated customers who are willing to purchase more and promote your business.  Companies who have such an engaged workforce are constantly collecting and analyzing employee feedback about their day to day experiences on the job.

In addition to collecting feedback from employees, it is extremely important to gain customer insights about their thoughts and experiences.  This information can help you make important business decisions, but can also help you to win back the favor of clients who may have had a recent negative experience.  Keeping a pulse on your client base to ensure high customer retention is simple and easy through the use of survey forms.

The most important thing to remember is that it is not the data alone that will help you to retain your clients and employees.  Being able to synthesize the information and make the appropriate adjustments is the key to improving employee morale and client satisfaction.

Measuring customer satisfaction is nothing new, neither is benchmarking that data and tracking improvements. It's typically easy to find dissatisfied customers. When you're looking for customer feedback, dissatisfied customers often come out of the wood work to let you know you're not holding up your end of the bargain. Sometimes understanding why those customers are unhappy can be a challenge.

If you have a well designed survey form with strongly written questions, answering Why suddenly becomes a lot easier. Here's my best suggestion: Read the comments. Comments are often where you're going to find the most customer insights. You'll also be able to see trends emerge as you read through. Training, missing features, poor support, issues with the sales process, they'll all begin to emerge. If you have dissatisfied customers, they usually will let you know how you can fix it and transform them to happy customers.

In the past, I told you that as part of any customer satisfaction survey you should be categorizing customers to better focus your energy and bring in more revenue for your organization. As part of that categorization, consider grouping customers into buckets based on why they're unhappy. From there you can create action items for how to improve the overall satisfaction of your customer base. If it's not clear why a customer is unhappy, reach out to them to find out more. If you want to make things better and understand where you went wrong, chances are your customers are going to be happy to help - so let them.

A survey conducted by research firm BIA/Kelsey found that 9% of small and midsize business use Twitter for marketing purposes. An earlier survey by online marketing resource, MarketingProfs, showed that 84% of small businesses expect they will increase their use of Twitter and other social media outlets in the future. That same report also takes a look at how large businesses - including Dell and Disney - are using Twitter to reach devoted fans and potential customers. Companies large and small have begun using Twitter. I find this list of companies, although old, to be quite impressive!

At Cvent Web Surveys, we often recommend the use of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media outlets to reach a wider audience for your web survey. We've often found it to be most useful in monitoring and acted fast to ensure customer satisfaction. Bad news travels fast these days, and you have to be ready to react. 

If you are distributing your electronic survey in multiple channels (social media, your public-facing website, and through Cvent's email survey software platform) it is important to track where people are coming from. By analyzing where your respondents are coming from, you can more efficiently distribute your surveys in the future or weight responses. This is especially important if you are paying to advertise your survey - perhaps on traditional banner display advertising, website pop-ups, or search ads such as Google AdWords.

Cvent Web Surveys software provides two ways of tracking and analyzing this data. First, we have our "Reference ID". Reference IDs are a short string of text added to the end of your survey URL – "twitter", "yelp", or "google" – for instance, to allow you to track what other website "referred" the survey respondent to complete your online survey. These strings of text will then allow you to use the Cvent's built-in survey reporting to see, analyze, and slice and dice the information to give a clear view of where the survey respondents are coming from. 

Second, Cvent was proud to announce in our last quarterly product enhancement, the addition of Google Analytics integration. Google Analytics is Google's free tool for tracking visitors to your websites. The integration with Cvent Web Surveys software is extremely simple to set up and is a fantastic addition for our clients who use and love Google Analytics.

Now while I heartily recommend using social media as a tool to get your survey in front of more people, there is one thing that is crucial to remember: many businesses block social media websites. Robert Half International, an IT recruiting firm, reported 54% of companies completely block access to sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and even business-oriented LinkedIn. This means, if you're trying to attract those of us who work, you may be facing a higher hurdle than you imagined.

Too often companies make the common mistake of surveying customers after it’s too late. Many will use customer satisfaction surveys to gauge how they did last month or last quarter. In truly proactive, customer-focused organizations customer feedback is used on a daily basis to increase revenue and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty when the timing is critical for the customer.

Most customer feedback collected is of immediate importance to them and requires immediate attention. Waiting until a survey closes to attend to customer needs is a recipe for disaster. This could include missing out on hot leads for new business, up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, or worse not reaching out to identify the dissatisfaction from an irate customer.


Your customer is seeing how much you really care about their business. Why should they waste their time taking a web survey form to help you improve, if there is clearly no actions being taken to apply the feedback you’ve received? Why is a customer going to work with a firm that they feel is wasting their time? Now the customer is not only feeling as if you aren’t concerned about their needs and opinions, you’ve pushed them to look at your competitors. The goal is to take this opportunity to show the customer how much you truly care about their needs.

Having a system in place to streamline and automate your produce with real time alerts will allow you to serve you customers in a more timely fashion, keeping them happy and better yet loyal.

Marketing departments love client testimonials and customer quotes. They're great to share with the sales team when prospects need referrals, they're helpful to put in powerpoint presentations, and can be a critical piece of any marketing website. Getting those sound bites from clients can be a challenge, however. As you can imagine, the challenge only gets bigger if your organization sells consumer products. Admittedly, the growth of social media has made finding people who are saying good things about your product, services or organization has gotten a little bit easier. But, it could be easier still.

Imagine a world where you had a plethora of client sound bites and quotes to share with the outside world. A marketers dream. No more tracking down sales reps to talk to their clients and mangle their words. Everything is already done for you. Well, if you're conducting client satisfaction surveys or consumer surveys, you should be gathering those sound bites already. You can even consider using website polls and website usability surveys to get those sound bites. Depending on the online questionnaire design, you may still need to contact the customer to get permission to use their quote, but the hard part is still done. You have the quote.

Question remains, how do you pull these customer quotes out of your survey web form? You make sure to add an additional comment box. Customers who love you will typically share those sentiments in the additional comments area, particularly if there are not other open ended questions in the survey for them to share why they like an organization.

Still wondering why your marketing department needs sound bites? Opinions for others is one of the driving forces behind purchasing decisions. If you want to learn more about the importance of customer reviews, check out this past post. It's also worth mentioning, this same idea can work for employee surveys and your HR department for recruiting purposes.

Some people still believe in using paper surveys instead of designing online questionnaires, sending personalized email survey reminders and utilizing electronic survey methods. Sometimes I have to wonder, Why? Some of the reasons people claim they want to use paper questionnaires instead of web survey forms is because they think it's cheaper. That's not usually the case.

Consider this: Online survey response rates are typically hire than response rates on a direct mail survey. Online survey research designed well will yeild response rates from 20-40%. Let's be conservative and say the paper survey you plan to send out will get a 20% response rate as well. I looked up the cost of a ream of standard multipurpose paper (500 sheets) on Office Depot's website: $7.09. A black ink cartridge for a laser printer is $77.99 and will print on a maximum of 2,200 pages. Most printed surveys will be kept to three to five pages, longer than that your survey form looks over whelming from the very beginning and is going to lower your response rate. This is how that cost quickly adds up:


Keep in mind these costs don't include the staff time of stuffing envelopes to send out the direct mail survey, or the staff time of manually entering in all of the responses into some sort of data collection software, be it Excel or a survey software tool. You can figure it will take an intern a week to send out 5,000 survey responses and another week for them to do the data entry for the 1,000 responses. So that's an additional cost of $600 to $800 for one survey campaign. What if you want to do a quarterly customer satisfaction survey? You're looking at an annual cost of over $25,000.

For me, that would be enough reason alone to look into an online survey software application. With a web survey tool, you have the ability to not only send one invitation, but reminders survey emails as well. Sending reminders, as we've mentioned before, can drastically increase your survey response rate. My suggestion: don't fall for the myth that paper surveys are cheaper than online surveys. It's definitely the other way around.

USAA Survey says Shoppers Plan to Use Cash this Holiday Season USAA, the insurance and financial company who we've reported tops customer satisfaction surveys time and time again says shoppers are planning to use more cash and less credit this holiday season. Their insurance survey report shows 85% of shoppers plan to use cash and 62% plan to use more cash this year than last year.

They also found that 56% of consumers have been saving cash throughout the year to spend during the holidays. This jives with other survey research that Americans are, in general, saving more and spending less. Perhaps more important to USAA's financial services business, though, is their data which shows that 74% of those who plan to use a credit card for their holiday purchases plan to pay off the balance immediately. 

On a broader note, a retail survey commissioned by the National Retail Foundation reports overall holiday sales will be down about 1% and that two-thirds of families have adjusted their holiday plans due to the economy.

Online retailers continue to be the bright spot, however, with sales expected to increase about 8%, according to Forrester Research. 

Rarely are we asked the question, What is a survey? Typically questions follow the path of, Why do I need a survey program? What am I going to get out of conducting online web surveys to collect customer feedback? Or How do I get started measuring employee satisfaction with online questionnaire templates?

However, sometimes it's good to define market research and what it means, and answer the rarely asked question, What is a survey?

Market Research Definition (mahr-kit-ree-surch)
The gathering and studying of data relating to consumer preferences, purchasing power, etc., especially prior to introducing a product on the market.

Survey Definition (ser-vey)
Collect quantitative information about items in a population. Surveys of human populations and institutions are common in political polling and government, health, social science and marketing research.

Chances are though, you're still wondering about those other questions. These posts may help you answer those ever burning questions about why you should create and design surveys.

Cvent offers a variety of Pre-Designed Survey Templates you can choose from for your first online web survey. These internet survey templates contain default questions, email, welcome and thank you text which you can utilize when designing a questionnaire. You can also choose from over 50 different graphical templates to suit the look and feel of your survey forms. Here’s a list of the different pre-created survey templates that you can use to build the base of your survey:


Besides this vast list of pre-designed questionnaires and graphical survey templates, Cvent also offers you a Question Library, which is filled with Customer Service, Demographics, Event, HR/Training, Marketing/Sales questions that you can utilize in your survey.

So! Go ahead and Sign up for an online web survey free trial account now and enjoy these á-la-carte features absolutely free.

Completing a study is just the first step in the market research process. A good researcher knows there is plenty of work left to be done analyzing survey data and taking action on survey results.

Stay in touch with the client and schedule presentations of the research. If you have a client contact assigned to the project, go over the preliminary survey data to see what key findings they feel are the most important to share. Create presentations around these key findings. You can also create separate market survey reports for different groups within the same company.

For example, if you have just completed a large product survey that includes feedback on customer satisfaction, the client may want a presentation simply on customer feedback for their customer service team.

A good researcher also has an eye for finding problems. If you notice an area for improvement in the course of your market research analysis, propose a solution to that problem for the client. Take this market research survey example, customers complain about being on hold too long when calling customer service. You could propose several ideas from hiring more staff to setting time goals for staff to talk to customers.

Even though the client may not agree with your solution ideas, ignoring problems you identify through the research is a bad idea. The client is paying you to compile and analyze research data, and they will likely appreciate all your efforts even if the information does not fit in with their current business plan.

Market researchers write survey questions for different audiences all the time. Sometimes the groups are broad, like consumers or non-consumers, and sometimes they are far narrower, like employees at a small advertising agency. When writing surveys for any audience, be sure and use the clearest and most sensible language to communicate with that audience.

For instance, if you were hired by the small advertising company to complete a 360 performance survey, you should use the correct title structure for supervisors and employees at the company. You don’t want to refer to managers, if at the agency supervisors are referred to as account executives. It would be confusing and yield improper results for your employee questionnaire.

Similarly, if you were performing a bank customer satisfaction survey, you wouldn’t want to ask survey respondents who only have standard checking accounts about their habits with their savings accounts.

In addition to doing the research necessary to communicate with your audience, you must also use clear language. There’s nothing worse than trying to respond to a survey questionnaire that is poorly written, with confusing grammar or overly long sentences.

Writing as clearly and directly as possibly will give you the answers you need. Have multiple people proofread your survey if possible. Everyone processes information differently and a variety of people may find different errors or points of confusion. Having others read the survey is beneficial, because as the survey creator it is hard not to be biased. You need to make sure it is clear to the respondents and as the survey creator, it is hard not to be biased.

When many of us think product market research, we think along the lines of consumer interest or consumer satisfaction studies. But what about a study conducted specifically to find ways to improve a product?

Sometimes a client may want to find ways to improve an existing product or service. It is risky to launch a brand-new product, particularly in today’s economy when businesses are failing more frequently. It is often better to grow a successful product than try and start from scratch.

When you are conducting a study for this purpose, it is important to analyze from several angles. You need to gather current consumers for a consumer satisfaction survey, as well as non-consumers for a survey or focus group. To gather product feedback ask the consumers questions like:


Utilize the survey to gather their opinions on pricing, quality and more. The client can use this information about what they are already doing right as a baseline for improving their product.

The non-consumers are a little tricky. You need to find out why they don’t purchase or use the product. Maybe the price point is just a little too high. Depending on what type of product it is, perhaps the client might be able to offer a similar item at a lower price point to gain more customers.

Perception of non-consumers is just as important as that of consumers. Perhaps the reason they are put off is something the client can easily fix, thus gaining new and loyal customers.

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.

I got an email today from Smarter Travel announcing the winners of their 2009 Readers' Choice Awards. Notice anything interesting?

Some of you may have read my post a couple weeks ago about thinking ahead to reporting before you design your survey in an online poll generator. Well, I recently received a phone call from a client who works in the health care industry, and this particular call convinced me to write another post on the same subject, but with a slightly different spin on things this time.

The client who called me, we can call her Melanie, had set her online survey up perfectly considering the reports she wanted to run. She called because she wasn’t sure exactly how to filter for the appropriate data in each report. Melanie had conducted a client satisfaction survey. She wanted to run a survey report to pull contact information for all of survey respondents who had answered they were either dissatisfied or extremely dissatisfied with their customer experience. However, she only wanted to pull those respondents who had also indicated they were willing to be contacted regarding their survey responses.

Because Melanie had asked for the above information in two separate survey questions and she had also made these questions required, it was easy to walk her through the steps to generate the desired report. I instructed Melanie to run the Answer Details for All Respondents report, checking off the survey questions she wanted to see in the report and also the contact fields she wanted to view for each survey respondent. I then had her set up two advanced filters for the criteria she wanted to use to filter the report. I told her that she should apply the filters on all of the above criteria.

Since Melanie considered reporting before she sent out her survey invitations, she did not have any trouble pulling the report she wanted in the end. Always remember you can filter your final reports by contact information and survey questions, so make sure to follow Melanie’s survey reporting example and make these fields and/or questions required in your survey if you plan to filter by them in your reports.

Most survey poll creators will agree that while respondents always prefer to have choices explained clearly in words and phrases, numbers are much easier and far more effective when drawing inferences from the data collected. Take this typical sample customer service satisfaction survey question:


The client satisfaction survey sample question above from a measuring customer service sample survey looks much better by listing the choices as "Very Satisfied/Dissatisfied" as opposed to asking respondents to check one of the numbers between 1-5.


However, when the survey data collection is complete and it's time for data analysis and running survey reports, many survey administrators are left scratching their heads. What analysis do they draw from the individual number and percentage of respondents listed as "Neither Satisfied nor Dissatisfied", how to they compare these percentages to last year’s survey on a category by category basis and still draw an overall inference? How do they know the percentage increase in the level of satisfaction? Is it better to have a large number of people fall into the neutral category?

The answer to all these questions is the same – Export Values. The ultimate tool for anyone looking to analyze the data they have collected. Using Export Values the survey builder can assign a number (or a different word or phrase if you like) to answers as well as questions in their survey! In other words, instead of going through the never-ending text of questions and answers trying to find some semblance of meaning in the data, the questions in your report could be listed as CS1, CS2, CS3, etc. and the answers as 1,2,3,4 and 5 for each question. After exporting the Expanded Answer Details for All Respondents (the survey report with Export Values) to Excel, you can even use these numbers to calculate a mean or average – how much easier would it be for the decision makers in your organization to see the response to the above question summarized into a single number:


A case in point is our survey clients who go a step further and used this feature to export just such a report to Excel and then analyze it using SPSS and other survey research analysis software. For those of you who are already drooling over the prospect of generating such accurate feedback for your organization, export values are pre-included in your Cvent Web Surveys Professional or Enterprise account. Go on, generate that perfect report – you can thank me later.

Customer care and client service novices (and professionals) often wonder: What is the best survey formula to ensure customers have the ability to share their satisfaction, concerns, evaluations, etc. of their company?

My customer service suggestion: Whenever your customer care employees speak to a new client, make sure they make that client aware that your company does quarterly (bi-annual, annual, etc.) customer satisfaction surveys, as well as surveys pertaining to satisfaction of other aspects of your company, events, product enhancements, new marketing initiatives, etc.  Let them know that data is benchmarked and used for important decisions pertaining to customer initiatives. Validate that the customer information is being assessed and acted upon.

Do you want higher response rates? Do you want data that is useful from your customers? Set the stage early with your customer service team, and your customers WILL REMEMBER to give you feedback!

Don't be frustrated with survey data after the fact. Deal with client expectations up front so your customers give you data time and time again.

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.

Did you know there are 6 steps in the market research process?  While this process speaks directly to marketing research professionals, the process applies to HR, customer or education surveys as well:

1. Identify and define the problem.  Before you start any web survey project, you should identify the key issues you hope to be able to solve.  This step should also include clearly defined objectives.
    
2. Develop the approach. In this step, you need to establish a budget, understand influencing factors such as the environment or economy, decide on sampling and survey methods, and formulating hypotheses.
    
3. Research design. Designing a survey or questionnaire is considered the most important step in any survey process.  Question design takes a lot of thought and time.  We like to say, "If you put garbage in, you'll get garbage out."  This means that if the questions are bad, the data will be bad as well.  During the survey research design, keep in mind sampling methods and data analysis factors you intend to use.
    
4. Collect the data. Don't forget to test your survey before to ensure you're fielding the correct data.  Thankfully, with the help of an online survey tool, this step is relatively painless.
    
5. Analyze the Data. The types of analysis you planned to perform on the collected survey data should have been decided in earlier steps, but after collecting the data you have to actually perform the survey analysis.  Analysis can be performed using survey analysis tools like office programs, such as Excel, or more advanced programs such as SPSS - the complexity of the questions will determine this.
    
6. Report, Present, Take Action.  The final step in the market research process is to present your survey research findings and draw conclusions.  While Step 3 is the most important because it defines the outcome of your survey, if you fail to complete this last step and act on the findings in some way, the previous steps don't matter. 

As I mentioned in the beginning, this same process can be applied to any type of project: product evaluations, customer satisfaction questionnaires, public relation surveys, etc.  If you give each step the attention it deserves, each of your online surveys should be a success.