Customer Survey Questions

Surveying Customers: Is Sampling Needed?

Thursday, February 4, 2010 by Georgeta Solomitchi-Lester
The production background to satisfaction also comes into focus when you look at what should be sampled. For statistical quality control of production machines, you take a sample of items that have been produced and test each for conformance.

For customer satisfaction, the equivalent is sampling by product purchased, or for service industries, by service event. However, particularly in business markets, this can cause sampling problems in that a single customer may buy several products or make use of a service several times. If you sample these customers regularly, you are likely to face rapidly diminishing customer survey response rates and soon have no data.

The compromise is to take a sample of customers and to ask about their experiences over a certain period of time. Unfortunately for process control, this feedback typically just reflects the average view and will miss any key extremes that are important from an operational view.

For businesses, it is also very likely that you will have a small number of large customers and a large number of small customers. As you are trying to judge quality of delivery, clearly interviews with larger customer are of more importance than smaller customers, yet typically satisfaction is biased toward the views of the many and not the few. Indeed, it is also likely that the way in which you deliver to your largest customers is different to the way in which you service smaller customers, for example, an account team, specialist logistics, and custom builds.

What is Good Customer Service? Do You Measure Up?

Monday, February 1, 2010 by Sharon Long

They say a happy satisfied customer will tell three people about your business but unhappy customer will tell 10 people about their bad customer experience. That right there should convince you to take a hard look at your business to make sure you’re providing good customer service.

To evaluate your own customer service, you’re going to have to go to the source: the customer. The customer is always right, and only the customer can answer the question, What is good customer service?

To learn what makes good customer service according to your consumers, conduct an online customer survey. People love to express their opinions. But you’ll learn enough from all this new data to make any painful comments worthwhile. That is, if you listen to the customer insights you collect and improve your customer experiences based on those comments!
 

5 Membership Satisfaction Survey Tips

Friday, January 29, 2010 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Membership surveys are to associations as customer satisfaction surveys are to businesses. Measuring customer satisfaction is important for every business, whether they use customer surveys with defined customer loyalty metrics or something else entirely. The same should be said for associations and non-profits. When it comes to associations, membership dedication and participation is what makes the chapter worthwhile. As a result, how could you not want to conduct attitude surveys? When you're still small, you may know all your members personally and not have a need for a formal survey process. But as your chapter grows, it will be come nearly impossible to keep in personal contact with all the members to ensure they're happy. If they're not happy, well they'll let you know - by not renewing their membership.

Like with community surveys, by conducing membership surveys often you provide an outlet for members to give honest, relevant feedback. Sometimes the feedback collected in a survey is different than what someone will say directly to your face. By conducting surveys frequently, you'll have all the information you need at your fingertips when it comes to making critical decisions, such as how many events to have next year, what programs receive the most funding, etc.

If you've never conducted a survey before, let alone a membership survey, it can feel like a daunting task. Here are five tips to help you get the most out of your next association survey.

Understand who's answering your survey. Understanding what types of members are answering your survey will help you better understand the survey results at the end, because you'll be able to segment the data better. Here are a few membership segments you might want to consider:

How long have you been a member?
Have you ever served on the board or a committee?
How many chapter functions did you attend this year?

It shouldn't matter what type of survey (anonymous or not) you're conducting. Having this type of information is very helpful. If you choose to conduct anonymous surveys, asking these questions is even more critical. If you aren't conducting an anonymous survey, hopefully you already know all this information - and if you don't, you should only have to ask it once.

Understand why they joined your chapter. Your current members are the best way to grow your membership. You should be using this to your advantage, and ensuring you're doing everything you can to keep your members satisfied is a good step. But beyond that, understanding the answers to some critical questions can help you recruit new members in the future:

How did you find out about the chapter?
What made you decide to join the chapter?
Are there any other people that might be interested in joining? If so, please list them.

Find out how members feel about each aspect of the chapter. You should ask specific questions about new projects, as well as old ones:

How valuable do you think the chapter newsletter is?
How would you rate the usability of the chapter's event registration process?
How smoothly do you feel the board elections went?

Ask about events. The events your chapter hosts are a major component of the chapter's value. As such, you need to make sure your membership believes the the programs you're putting on are valuable. Again, if you don't ask and they don't see them as valuable they'll let you know, by not renewing. I suggest conducting a short post-event survey after every seminar or workshop:

How valuable was last month's speaker series?
What was the best aspect of this year's conference? The worst?
What venue have you liked best this year?

If you host a big conference, it's important to also have a post-conference survey to better prepare you for next year. Conferences are much bigger than a workshop or a seminar so you may want to give that survey more thought than you would a seminar survey.

Plan for the future. Like businesses, associations depend on renewals, repurchases and continued loyalty. Conducting surveys is one way to help you build these strategies. But you also have the opportunity to gauge future income and identify key areas for improvement during these surveys.

How likely are you to renew your membership?
Do you have any suggestions for improving next year's annual conference?
What would you like to learn about in the next continuing education event?

People often separate out for-profit, not-for-profit and associations as being completely different. While there are a lot of things that are significantly different about these groups, there is also aspects that are very similar. One of these similarities is that they all need to collect feedback from their stakeholders and constituents. Say it with me: membership surveys are to association chapters what customer feedback questionnaires are to businesses.

Why Online Customer Surveys

Friday, January 29, 2010 by Georgeta Solomitchi-Lester
For many decades customer surveys have been an important - but often flawed or cumbersome - tool for businesses and other organizations that rely upon information for success. But with the advent of advanced online software, customer surveys have emerged as an absolutely indispensable and revolutionary resource.

Customer surveys conducted online are cost effective and provide a substantial return on one's investment, unlike traditional offline surveys that are expensive, labor intensive, inaccurate, and subject to counterproductive delays. Online survey software offers multiple benefits, including but not limited to:

• No hardware to buy or install.
• No programming to distract or occupy your IT personnel.
• No security issues to troubleshoot and take responsibility for when surveys are deployed.
• Instant access to customer feedback.
• Customized customer survey questionnaires.
• Expert computer analysis of data and results.
• Multiple report formats with updated data integration.

Additionally, online surveying of your customers eliminates the need for protracted and expensive in-house evaluations by delivering instant access to survey results in "real time" - a feature that is critical in this day and age.

Net Promoter Score Defined

Wednesday, January 27, 2010 by Bart Hart
Net Promoter Score is a management tool that can be used to gauge the loyalty of an organization’s client base. It serves as an alternative to traditional customer satisfaction measurements.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a metric developed by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix to measure customer loyalty. The Net Promoter Score was first introduced in the 2003 Harvard Business Review article, The One Number You Need to Grow, by Reichheld. The idea behind this customer satisfaction survey methodology is to create more Promoters and fewer Detractors. The NPS metric is simpler for employees to understand and act on than other more complicated customer satisfaction measurements.

If you decide to go the NPS route for customer satisfaction measurements, what do you need to do? As I've alluded to throughout this post, it's simple. When writing client survey questions, simply add in a question similar to this one: How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague? The answers should be on a survey scale that starts at zero and ends at 10. Client survey respondents should be categorized into one of three groups: Promoters (9-10 rating), Passives (7-8 rating), and Detractors (0-6 rating). To calculate what your Net Promoter score is, simply subtract the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters after all the data is collected. A score of 75% or above is considered quite high.

Sample End User Survey Question: How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?
Sample End User Survey Question

Sample Consumer Survey Question: How likely is it that you would recommend Product XYZ to a colleague?
Sample Consumer Survey Question


NPS proponents claim this customer loyalty metric can reduce the complexity of implementation and analysis associated with measures of customer satisfaction, providing a stable measure of performance that can be compared across businesses, departments, and even across industries. In addition this also allows trend analysis to be much simpler.

Some proponents believe using a NPS method motivates an organization to become more focused on improving products and services for clients. They also believe that there is a direct correlation between an organizations score and revenue growth.

In its arsenal of question types, Cvent Web Surveys software offers a NPS question type that actually tabulates the score for you.

The concept of the Net Promoter Score has been adopted by many Fortune 500 companies.

5 Things to Remember When Shopping for Online Customer Feedback Software

Wednesday, January 27, 2010 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Voice of the Customer (VOC) is one of the fastest growing areas of market research. Voice of customer data is a powerful source of business intelligence for your marketing team, regardless of the size of your organization. Sometimes new initiatives can be overwhelming to know how to start, what to do, etc. Thankfully, voice of customer research doesn't need to be a complicated project. My suggestion is to take the leap into customer market research by conducting a website survey.

Before you get started, you'll need to select an online customer feedback software tool. Here are 5 things to keep in mind when shopping for a web based customer survey tool.

1. Budget. You need to decide on your budget for the voice of customer research initiative. There are a range of survey tools out there to choose from. However, not all of them will meet the requirements you have for a customer feedback tool, and you should consider that. If you go with a cheap, or free, solution, you're going to be doing a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to extracting customer insights from your customer data. It's going to be worth your time and budget to look at more powerful, enterprise feedback management solutions.

2. Design and Methodology. Your customer feedback tool needs to give you the flexibility to answer all your business questions. This means having a variety of question types (rating scales, single-select, constant sum, multi-select, matrix questions, etc.) and sophisticated survey question logic. It's a much better idea to vary your question types and keep the customer survey form interactive and engaging than to ask 25 almost identical likert survey scale questions. By having the flexibility in your feedback management software to vary the question types and use question logic to show different questions to different respondent segments, you'll have much more reliable data (and a higher survey response rate)!

3. Metrics. You need to decide on what metric you're going to look at for your VOC program. There are various schools of thought on the best metric. You'll need to weigh the pros and cons and pick the one that will work best for your program goals. One school of thought is to measure customer loyalty with the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Other people believe in the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). ACSI is recognized as being the gold standard for measuring customer satisfaction, particularly in the eCommerce industry. You can of course choose to go a different route as these aren't the only two options.

4. Reporting. Here's another reason that you should look seriously at professional survey tools instead of free ones. Reporting is essential to customer survey programs (well really any survey program from employee surveys to product surveys to market surveys). Your survey tool should give you the ability to look at dashboards, drill-down and filter by segments. Enterprise survey tools will allow you to select key segments and response criteria, creating charts and graphs automatically from your selections. Be sure your survey software lets you "get your hands dirty" if you want to export answers into Excel or SPSS data analysis tools. Here having the ability to pre-set export values can save you a lot of recoding time.

5. Survey Professional Services. Often times those people who are conducting surveys online or by paper don't have the background for deep statistical analysis. For example, your marketing team, who typically know that most about your business, usually have communication backgrounds not statistical backgrounds. Your survey solution should be able to help you get into the nitty gritty with means, statistical significant, chi-square tests, etc. Think of your enterprise feedback management solution vendor as an additional resource to your current employee base. Web survey professional services not only can provide you additional statistical survey analysis you can't do on your own, but they'll save you alot of time.

When evaluating different customer satisfaction survey software, keep these five points in mind, in addition to comparing features you think are essential for your own survey initiatives. If your survey provider meets all of these points, you still need to make sure they have features like automated email survey reminders or self-cleansing database functions if those are essential to your projects as well.

Luxury Brands and Surveying Customers

Friday, January 22, 2010 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Luxury on Rodeo DriveHave you ever noticed how luxury brands don't ask for a lot of customer feedback? It's definitely a weakness. They don't ask for customer feedback, don't search for customer insights, don't measure customer satisfaction because they feel awkward. Earlier in the week, I told you to face your fears. Luxury brands are no exception, but sometimes it helps to break down the myths that make you feel uncomfortable.

What is it that makes luxury brands feel uncomfortable asking for customer feedback?

A big draw luxury brands have over everyone else is that they already glow with self-confidence: They are the best. Everything they do reinforces this fact. If they weren't the best, their customers wouldn't be shopping in their stores, they'd be shopping in someone else's store. Admitting that there is room for improvement, if you will, is like saying: Well, maybe we're not the best.

Second, luxury brands don't see a survey form, whether it's a feedback form on a comment card or web questionnaire, as being "on their level." Everyone got comfortable completing online surveys for everyday, attainable brand names like L.L.Bean. Online surveys are effective and successful for Main Street, they are successful for luxury brands too - done correctly, of course. People who are luxury brand customers are comfortable with technology, just as the people on Main Street are. They're already sharing their opinions about brands through social media. Listening to customers is critical. You never want to be the last to know there's a problem with your brand. It doesn't matter if your average purchase is $1 or $100,000.

Luxury retailers depend more on a smaller group of customers to make up the majority of their revenue than most brands. 80-20 rule is probably more true for luxury brands than in any other industry. This group of retailers very much depend on relationship marketing and improving relationships with customers. No one expects you to do it all on your own, and asking is a lot better for your brand in the long run regardless of how uncomfortable it makes you feel. Just because you're viewing online surveys as below you doesn't mean you're right. It's essential to measure customer experience, and online surveys are an effective way to do that. You already know how to create a quality customer experience. That same knowledge will transfer to creating an online survey.

L.L. Bean Ranks #1 for the Third Consecutive Year

Monday, January 18, 2010 by Cvent Survey Staff
In the past, we've shared the National Retail Federation's (NRF) customer service winners. Last week, the NRF shared the results from their fifth annual NRF Foundation/American Express Customers' Choice survey. For the third year, L.L. Bean ranked number one in customer service, followed closely by Overstock.com and Zappos. The same retailers that held the first three spots last year.

Congratulations to the 2009 Customers' Choice Award winners:
1. L.L.Bean (last year #1)
2. Overstock.com (last year #2)
3. Zappos.com (last year #3)
4. Amazon.com (last year #4)
5. QVC (last year #8)
6. Coldwater Creek (last year #9)
7. HSN (last year #16)
8. Lands' End (last year #5)
9. JCPenney (last year #7)
10. Kohl's and Nordstrom (last year #18 and #10, respectively)

Kathy Mance, NRF Foundation Vice President, shared her thoughts on the survey results, With competition as its peak in 2009, retailers this past year made sure to focus on excellent customer service all year long. Any company who secured a spot on the list this year should congratulate themselves and their employees for a job well done.

I must agree with Kathy, continually ranking on the top ten list year in, and year out, is definitely something to be proud of. One thing retailers like these never take for granted is their ranking in the NRF Foundation's retail surveys. With so many companies battling to be named in this list, it takes a lot of hard work to stay there. Often though, organizations become complacent when they rank well in customer or consumer satisfaction surveys. Just because you're ranked the best today, doesn't mean you'll be ranked the best tomorrow. It's critical that no matter how good your organization is at providing exceptional customer service, you continue to innovate and improve year over year! If you don't, one of these years you will find you've slipped of the list.

This annual consumer attitude survey polled 8,600 consumers in September 2009. Each survey respondent answered the open ended consumer survey question: Thinking of all the different retail formats (store, catalog, internet, or home shopping), which retailer delivers the best customer service? You can visit the NRF Customers' Choice Awards website to learn more about the survey or see the survey results for the last five years.

Piggybacking Client’s Research

Monday, January 18, 2010 by Kelli Kelley
More and more market research client’s may be interested in piggybacking, or combining funds to complete a research study. This is beneficial for all parties because you might gain new clients who would not otherwise be able to afford your services, and they will be happy you can accommodate them.

Piggybacking lends itself more easily to certain types of studies. Employee surveys, customer satisfaction questionnaires or product-specific studies may not necessarily be the best fits, but general state of the marketplace studies are perfect.

Work with all the parties to collaborate and write a questionnaire that encompasses all their needs. If sending an online survey, be sure that the survey sample meets all parties' requirements. Find out what type of data each one needs and write the survey to ensure that you can answer all their questions.

You may have to make separate market research report presentations of the data for each organization, to fit their criteria. You can also make a larger, comprehensive presentation or whitepaper for all of them. If they are interested, you can even do a press release about the whitepaper listing them as sponsors of the study. This could help establish them as leaders in their field and inspire more clients to contact you about joint studies.

Listen to your customers and Know your customers

Thursday, January 14, 2010 by Evan Willingham
The 80/20 Rule. Nope, this isn’t a short-hand arithmetic trick your 4th grader brought home to help master the intricacies of long division. In fact, this is one of the most trumpeted ideas in the world of customer-oriented business. Essentially, this business axiom explains that for most companies 80% of their profitable revenue comes from just 20% of their clients.

Although many organizations recognize this aspect of their customer base, they often fail to implement this common business knowledge into the analysis of their customer satisfaction surveys. It is critical that organizations leverage a web based customer survey tool that allows them to include the value and profitability associated with each client in order to efficiently address the concerns of the clients that really drive bottom line profitability.

Utilizing a sophisticated survey analysis tool, like Cvent Web Survey Software, that allows you to add more than 40 custom contact fields (i.e. industry, size, contract value, favorite cartoon) to contact records is integral to being able to develop in-depth reports that segment customer feedback from your most valuable, most important clients.

Are Forward-to-a-Friend Referral a Gimmick?

Thursday, January 14, 2010 by Sherrie Mersdorf
People argue about the value of a Viral Forward-to-a-Friend feature many email marketing and email survey tools have. Take this DMNews article. One of the email experts think forward-to-a-friend is a gimmick for email marketing tools to say they're viral. On the other side of the fence is the argument that that feature grows your list through referral marketing, so there's value.

Here's how I look at it: if it helps even a littler, why wouldn't you do it?

Even the guy who thinks it's a gimmick cites survey responses from the Email Experience Council's survey that asked, What is your most successful list building tactic? 6% of survey respondents cited forward-to-a-friend functionality. While it's not going to get you the list growth that purchasing a list will, the referrals are still significant. And in marketing, sometimes it's simply a numbers game.

So how does forward-to-a-friend relate to your next online customer loyalty survey or web poll research project? If turning on the forward-to-a-friend functionality, when you're building surveys online, could get you a handful of additional responses, why wouldn't you want to increase your respondent pool? Even if your respondents don't use the built in forward-to-a-friend option in your web based survey software, it might make them realize you want them to share the survey. A lot of times, when I receive a survey email, I assume that I was singled out for a specific reason: I bought a specific product, I'm in the age range they want to learn more about, I live in the right region, etc. I assume I'm part of the survey's target audience. I may not know what qualities I have that causes me to be part of that population group, so I would be unable to pick out other people who share the necessary qualities. Instead of skewing the surveyor's data with irrelevant respondents, I don't forward on the email survey invitation. If I saw a forward-to-a-friend button, while I might just hit forward in my email client, I'm more likely to share the opportunity to give feedback.

In my opinion, gimmick or not, turning on the forward-to-a-friend feature if valuable. The only time it doesn't make sense is if you're conducting a census survey or purposely selecting your respondent pool, like with a work performance assessment form or workplace employee relations survey. In those cases, you wouldn't want an employee to forward the survey to just anyone, you'd want to limit responses to those who work for your organization. Likewise, if you're only surveying customers who bought a Whats-it 14, you may not want to let them forward it to anyone. In a case like this, however, you could customize the forward-to-a-friend message to say something to the effect of, Please forward this message to others you know who have purchased Whats-it 14.

Allowing your survey respondents to forward your survey to a friend or colleague is simple when you're using Cvent's online survey solution. If you want to grow your email list or increase your respondent pool, consider turning on this feature in the future when you begin building surveys.

When to Field a Survey

Thursday, January 14, 2010 by Richard Pink
Even a well designed survey may be undermined if a researcher does not give adequate consideration to the timing of a survey. It is important to consider when to survey new or returning customers. If a company waits too long to solicit feedback from customers, they risk the possibility that a potential respondent has lost interest in the product or service transaction and will not invest time in participating.  If a survey is fielded too soon after a transaction occurs, the feedback could turn out to be erroneous. Consider the following two real life customer survey examples.

Example 1: A couple of weeks ago I bought a new laptop computer. After several uses, I noticed that automated alerts were continually popping up requiring an action. However, following the instruction and taking action did not produce any change. Later the same day of working with technical support on a solution, I received a web survey asking about my experience and the outcome. To the best of my knowledge, when I was completing the survey, I thought that all was fixed and all questions answered accordingly. Unfortunately a few days later I noticed that the problem had resurfaced. Had the company waited an adequate amount of time to experience their solution, the feedback that I provided would have been much more accurate and valuable to them. However, the (mostly positive) feedback that the company had from me was now quite flawed.

Example 2: A second call to technical support went worse. After implementing several potential solutions to a different problem, my laptop performance had deteriorated to the point where it was now requiring a SECOND full restore.  There was no doubt that I was going to provide an accurate, albeit negative, feedback from this experience. But this time a web survey never was initiated. So decision makers at the company now are deprived of an opportunity to correct some flaws in their knowledgebase and customer service. 

The take away is this; a company offering a product or service must give proper consideration to when they field a survey in order to maximize both survey response rates and accuracy of information. Send out customer feedback surveys too soon and there is a risk not getting a complete picture. On the other hand, if you wait too long, you may end up missing out on valuable information and even alienating customers.

3 Reasons to Conduct Customer Surveys

Friday, January 8, 2010 by Jasmine Dhir
Surveying your customers is incredibly important for several reasons:

Customer loyalty: Understand the magic, what customers like and dislike. Knowing what they like keeps them coming back again and is secret to success of loyalty. They will then spread positive word of mouth.

Customer satisfaction: Satisfied customers are those who do not have an outstanding negative issue concerning your company or product. Just because they are satisfied doesn’t mean everything is perfect. It’s important to survey clients to give them a chance to talk to you. It’s a way for them to share their ideas uninterrupted. Upon surveying, it is essential to follow through.

Effective Communication: By inviting customers to talk to you through careful survey design, you can effectively inform customers about things they may not know or remind them of important changes or innovations in your organization.

Executives are realizing that good customer support is vital to build trust with current clients as well as future buyers. Strong customer service can build sales and visibility as companies try to distinguish themselves from competitors. Tracking customer service satisfaction through online client survey forms is an easy way to find what's missing from the service mix to help improve customer loyalty.

The Bottom Line: Happy customers generate more profits. Customer service surveys measure customers' relative happiness with your organization. Feedback surveys help you collect customer insights that may otherwise go unnoticed, shining a much needed light on your businesses strengths, weaknesses, and challenges for the future.

2010 Survey Resolutions

Wednesday, January 6, 2010 by Sherrie Mersdorf
Happy New Year!It's that time of year again: time to hit the gym, quit smoking, volunteer at the local food back, cut back on frivolous spending... It's time to make your resolutions for 2010. When people talk about resolutions, they usually just focus on their personal lives, but what about making organization resolutions. You might call these your corporate goals or objectives for the year. That might be fair. However, some of your programs may need their own resolutions.

Here are a handful of survey resolutions I think should be added to any customer survey or employee feedback program:

• We will use online surveys to collect feedback from customers (or employees) on a regular basis.

• We will create web survey forms that strengthen our brand by using an online survey tool that allows us to customize the look and feel of our questionnaires.

• We won't ask biased, double barreled, or any other type of bad question (After all, garbage in equals garbage out).

• We will use the feedback collected through our survey programs to influence business decisions and make improvements.

• We will integrate our survey tool with our CRM solution so we are better armed when talking with current customers and prospects.

I would love to hear some of your other New Years Resolutions. Please feel free to share them, you might have something good none of us thought of!

Website Performance Impacts the Bottom Line

Friday, December 18, 2009 by Jake Waage

Slow website will affect current shopping carts and future shopping cartsForrester Research recently put out the results of a survey, on behalf of Akamai, that looked at how users of shopping sites react to poor performing websites. It seems obvious that slow-loading sites could lead users to abandon their shopping carts, but the impact is larger than you may have suspected: 79% of shoppers were less likely to buy from that site in the future and 75% said they would likely not return to the site. Both of these numbers are up markedly from a previous market research study in 2006.

As we've discussed many times on this blog, surveying customers to understand why they are or are not loyal to your brand is a great tactic. Forrester's research indicates that site load time is one factor that does impact loyalty. 52% of consumers surveyed said it is important. That number, however, jumps to 61% when you look at online shoppers who spend more than $1,500 per year on the web.

Now that we understand why it is important to perform customer and market surveys, you need a customer survey tool to it. In looking for a customer satisfaction survey software tool, remember that customers hate it when your site loads. They're going to hate it even more if they're doing you a favor by providing customer feedback and your online survey tool is slow and hard to use. If you select a survey company with a less than professional survey tool that makes the survey respondent experience frustrating, your data will suffer. 

Internal Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Thursday, December 17, 2009 by Kelli Kelley

An internal customer satisfaction survey is similar to an employee satisfaction survey but must be treated differently. With an internal survey, all the customers and service providers are part of the same organization. The survey should be presented using the same survey methods you would use for an external customer survey. External and internal customer satisfaction surveys focus more on direct product or service satisfaction, not overall job satisfaction like with an employee satisfaction surveys.

However, internal customer satisfaction surveys can be more involved than external customer satisfaction surveys. You will have to work closely to determine who is responsible for what. Often, companies have more complicated hierarchies internally than they do externally, with several departments involved in one end-product. Determine for whom the the customer service team is supporting. Build the internal customer satisfaction questionnaire according to that hierarchy. The survey should be looked over by several members of the organization to ensure it makes sense. An internal customer satisfaction survey with factual errors about the service providers and end-users would be useless. The questions wouldn’t make sense to the respondents, and if they did respond, the data would likely be skewed.

When conducting internal customer satisfaction surveys (like with other types of surveys), remember to ask open-ended questions in addition to survey rating scales. 

What's the Difference Between an Objective and a Goal?

Wednesday, December 16, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
I always say you need to have survey goals and market research objectives. But too often people confuse these terms and just don't set study objectives. This is a mistake! Setting survey objectives and goals makes it easier to develop survey questions. It keeps your survey shorter, resulting in a higher survey response rate, because all of your questions are focused and targeted.

Objectives. An objective is something you want to achieve. Objectives should be simple and high-level: improve customer loyalty, grow market share, increase employee retention rates, develop a new product, etc. An objective helps you keep focus and gives you something to rally around. Every strategic plan should have objectives - something you're trying to achieve. A survey form is the same way, whether it's a web questionnaire or a paper comment card.

Goals. A goal needs to be measurable. You noticed there wasn't really anything tangible stated in the example objectives above. Goals give you guidance for how you can fulfill your objective. Want to improve customer loyalty? Your goal might be to get an 80 NPS score on customer satisfaction surveys. Having a goal of getting an 80 NPS score will also support your objective of increasing market share (if you have satisfied customers, they're probably sharing that satisfaction with others and getting you more business). Your objectives should align such that one goal supports multiple objectives.

So when it comes to your survey, what kind of objectives and goals should you have? Well, it obviously will depend survey to survey, organization to organization. But just to keep you thinking along the right track, here are a few objectives and goals that will apply to a lot of your needs.

• Objective: Increase customer loyalty and retention programs
• Objective: Understand why prospects choose a competitor
• Objective: Measure employee job satisfaction
• Goal: Get a 20% survey response rate from sending personalized email survey invitations

How have you used employee and customer survey research to achieve your organization's objectives and measure your goals?

Surveying Customers and Non-Customers

Tuesday, December 15, 2009 by Tyson Gingery
The idea of surveying only past and current customers has many positive temptations: you likely have contact information such as email addresses, so they’re an easily accessible population.  You probably know their interests, behaviors and tendencies, and you can gain valuable information from people who have proven (with their wallets!) they are relevant and have insights to help you best achieve your business goals. 

However, limiting your survey population exclusively to past and current customers can also limit your objectives and your results.  First (and probably most important), your customers are your customers because they likely have a positive opinion of your products, services, and company in general.  While a current or recent customer survey can elicit information such as what they like (as well as how your customer base might react to minor changes), it may not be the best test market for entirely new products and services.  This type of homogeneous product market research sample will also be less likely to tell you if they’d really dislike something.

Just like colleges and employers conducting exit surveys or interviews, you can gain additional consumer insight from those who were never customers, as well as from those who are now ex-customers.  If you can get them to respond (possibly by offering an incentive), these populations will honestly tell you the shortcomings of your products and services, as well as provide the best avenues for new ideas and directions.  If one of your goals is to expand (which is usually the case), it’s a good idea to expand your survey population accordingly.

Secondary Research as an Initial Step in Survey Design

Monday, December 7, 2009 by Tyson Gingery
Market research can take many forms.  While primary research consists of the original research projects you take on to gather new data, secondary research is gathering, analyzing and synthesizing data that already exists.  Secondary research data may have been collected for a purpose different from your own, but can nevertheless provide valuable information to compliment - and even affect the design of - your primary research projects (such as customer surveys).

Secondary research can be internal or external.  Internal secondary research involves going through or “mining” the data that already exist for your organization.  These data can come from sources such as revenue, sales and market projections, and any number of customer data fields via avenues such as previous research, prior product/service orders and contact submission form data. 

External secondary research comes from sources outside your own collections of information.  This information is usually publicly available, and can consists of consumer demographics, market supply and demand reports, and traffic patterns (to name just a few).  Business plans, for instance, are primarily made up of secondary research and market data.

By undertaking secondary research, you can inform and adjust your survey design appropriately.  For example, if you have already have extensive customer demographic information, you can shorten your survey by omitting these questions from your survey instrument, thereby decreasing respondent burden.  You can also use external data sources to identify gaps in product or service availability, as well as determine particular segments of your market(s) that have an established pattern of preference and purchasing behaviors.

Sample Attitude Survey Questions for Customer Questionnaires

Thursday, December 3, 2009 by Sherrie Mersdorf
I've talked about customer driven surveys a lot this week. To help you get started creating internet surveys to collect feedback from customers, here are a few sample attitude survey questions that you can pair with open ended survey sample questions in your next customer survey.

Example of a Questionnaire: Why did you choose our product over others?

Example of a Questionnaire: How would you compare our product to other similar products?

Example of a Questionnaire: What is your overall satisfaction with our product?

Did you miss the mini series this week about why you need customer surveys and how they should be event driven instead of calendar driven? Get caught up with these posts: