In this article you will find out…
- What a good customer survey can look like and examples of one
- What questions should be asked
- How you manage to get management to make decisions based on the customer survey
Quicksearch has been conducting relationship surveys for over 20 years and are experts in statistics, survey methodology and analysis.
For 8 years I have worked on setting up and delivering solutions that somehow capture customer feedback to develop businesses. A month ago, I received two simple questions that turned everything upside down. The questions were asked at a wedding dinner where I met a newly appointed internal project manager at an e-commerce company who had been tasked by his boss (the company's CEO) to develop their customer survey, which unfortunately had been neglected. The questions he expressed were as simple as the answers were many when he started doing research.
The questions were:
What is a good customer survey? What should it look like for my CEO to be really satisfied?
We joked a bit but when my honest answer failed, he repeated the question but with the addition, "Seriously, what should I do?" I asked to come back when the wedding frenzy subsided and I thought I'd share it with you who read my answer.
A customer survey is good when:
- The customer wants to answer the questions
- The employees at different levels in the company want to listen to the answer
- Management can make decisions based on the results of the customer survey
"Thanks, but it doesn't help..."
“No, you're right. But if we answer above, we will get really close to the solution.”
The customer wants to respond when:
The question is relevant, quick and the experience is still fresh in the mind.
You often achieve this by understanding your customer's journey and when the decisive experiences occur, for example immediately after you have won a deal, it is relevant to ask what decided that the choice fell on you...not in the customer survey 9 months later and in the worst case which is sent to the wrong person.
Short ongoing surveys triggered by your CRM system may be the right way here.
Read more about our interaction-based surveys.
The employee at different levels wants to listen to and understand the answer when:
You did not ask the customer about what you want an answer to, but what the customer wants to tell.
This one is challenging, how do you ask questions whose answers are as relevant to your CEO as to the person who has to deliver in everyday life?
By having the answers to these three questions, you can solve this:
- How does the customer view you overall? Ask them using any of the following KPIs, Net Promoter Score®* (NPS), Customer Effort Score** (CES) or Customer Satisfaction Score*** (CSAT)) Here you can find out whether it is a relationship you need to save or a relationship with unused opportunities.
- What is the main reason why customers feel the way they do about you (what is most important for the experience of your company)?
- What needs to be improved for the experience to be really good? Or if your customer already thinks you are cruel, what is it that makes you perceived so well?
Management can make a decision on the result when:
The CEO wants to listen to the feedback when the results show a constantly fresh key figure on how customers experience the company and whether the trend is going up or down. But the collected feedback also shows what is decisive/most important for the customer and whether you are good or bad at what is most important.
The employee or manager deeper into the organization who must deliver in everyday life gets answers to what it is in practice that needs to be improved or what has been done well. But above all, he receives an email when an important customer is not satisfied. In everyday life, they can turn dissatisfied customers and also use satisfied customers to develop their accounts.
Now how do you manage the point of making management feel that they can make decisions based on the customer survey?
My experience is that when they understand the connection between your business and customer feedback, it is easier to prioritize based on customer feedback. You solve this by linking each customer's financial data to their feedback. When you can answer how much it is worth to increase the results of your customer survey with X% then it can be compared to the cost.
Anyone can actually put together a survey with questions based on a tool, but to really succeed with customer feedback you need to know and understand the HOW, and this is exactly what we at Quicksearch can help you with.
Being the person within the company tasked with delivering measurable and actionable customer insights to the organization can feel challenging. To provide further guidance on which questions to ask before a customer survey or an ongoing NPS measurement, we have compiled a guide.
*Net Promoter Score – A recommendation and loyalty measure that captures customers' willingness to recommend a company.
**Customer Effort Score – A method used to find out how satisfied customers are with the service they received based on how easy the company made it for them to handle their case.
***Customer Satisfaction Score – Is a measure of the degree to which a product or service meets the customer's expectations.
