Surveys and Market Research 101

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.