> Why Survey?

Why survey your customers?

Customer satisfaction is a key element of customer data management (CDM) and surveys are an efficient way to evaluate your customers' reactions to your service, new promotions, prototypes, and more. A better understanding of your existing customers allows your business to both attract and retain high-value customers. Customer surveys offer you a constant yardstick for measuring the success of your endeavors.

Best practice, in terms of customer retention and loyalty, is to integrate CDM information into your feedback surveys. This automatically cuts out time-consuming introductory questions about how long the respondent has been a customer of the company, their age, gender, socio-economic group, etc. Not only will there be fewer questions for the respondent to answer, always a good idea when it comes to persuading customers to respond, but showing your customers that you have detailed information on them can make them feel as if they are known and valued. Since you are not wasting their time asking questions to which they feel you should already know the answers, your questions can be focused to customers' specific needs, based on their previous history with your company. Specific surveys could be sent to customers that bought a particular computer three years ago for example, or a survey could be designed to follow up on clients that have recently taken on investments, with questions directly related to the performance of the investments they chose.

Writing customer-specific surveys is obviously time saving and good for customer relationships. At the same time, knowing exactly what it is that you want to find out about a customer, a product or a service, clearly helps in constructing your survey and deciding on your questions.

For the most reliable answers, questions need to be phrased very carefully. It is always better to avoid double-barreled or leading questions; respondents can be confused when confronted with two-part questions, they may not be sure which part they are meant to be answering and results may be skewed as a result. Questions should also be phrased in a manner that is as unbiased as possible; you don't want to imply a particular response.

There is clearly a place for qualitative data but questions that are too open-ended make it difficult to analyze and evaluate the answers. Consider replacing open-ended questions with more specific ones. For example: What kind of vacation do you prefer? This question is completely open-ended and could be better phrased with specific options thus:

On vacation, do you prefer – beach resort, city, adventure / activity, romantic getaway? Please choose one.

If you are interested in the level of satisfaction experienced by your clients, consider a numerical score – but limit the number to a maximum of five, fewer if possible. If you give respondents too large a range – perhaps from strongly agree, somewhat agree, slightly agree, and so on, through to strongly disagree you are likely to get a large number of responses that avoid the extremes and – when calculated numerically – may well cancel one another out, giving you an average score that is not very informative.

Questions that build on the relationship you already have with customers and that are based on your CDM data will attract a higher number of respondents and should enable you to analyze feedback in such a way that you can both retain your most valued customers and learn how to best attract new ones. Specific survey questions should provide you with the data you need to target your marketing efforts. InSite's online survey software allows you to add or edit questions, track responses and analyze results. You can even generate real-time reports.