Customer Surveys are a great resource for improving your company. Perhaps you’ve noticed a dip in sales. Maybe your new product that launched last months didn’t have the sales you expected. Nothing is ever perfect and it can sometimes be hard to pin down what exactly is wrong. The best way to know how your customers feel about your products and services is to ask them.
The data gathered from customer surveys can be used for a plethora of advancements in your company. They can shorten product development times, improve ratings and even increase new customers. Let’s take a look at how your company could benefit from a customer survey.
1. Understanding Who Your Customers Are
Your business is after all, for your customers. Your success rests on their level of customer satisfaction so it’s helpful to understand if they are or are not happy with your company and why. When it comes to pleasing your customers, you need to learn to speak their language. Customer surveys can help you to break the language barrier and fully translate your clients wants and needs. By asking clear questions with a large number of responses or even an open-ended response you can begin to understand what your customers want.
Surveys can also reveal information about your client base that you weren’t expecting. For example, a men’s shaving company may not expect to have 35% of their customers be female. Or perhaps you have a product that you imagined would be great for 16-20-year-olds but it seems 25-35-year-olds are more interested. These details about your customers can help you better adapt your business for them.
2. Improving Customer Connections
Surveys at the end of customer service encounters are one of the most common surveys around. These can be extremely useful for any company who has contact with their clients. They are great for large companies that may not have the time to check on every employee and ensure they are carrying out their jobs correctly. These surveys can also help start-up companies to learn the ropes of customer service through their customers themselves.
Satisfaction surveys can help you build better customer relationships as well. You’ll get to know what opinions your customers have about your company and its workings. And, if you track who completes each survey, you can begin to put together a plan to win over your dissatisfied customers.
Abandoned surveys happen extremely frequently. According to Forbes, 80% of customers have abandoned a survey halfway through. Noticing where your customers left can help you understand what to avoid saying when contacting them. It was found in the same study that 52% of customers would not spend more than 3 minutes on a feedback page. By taking these things into account, you can create surveys that are catered to your customers. Having this grasp on your customers’ language makes it easier to connect with them. By giving your customers this sense of connection and understanding you can also help gain return customers.
3. Operate at Maximum Efficiency
You may be offering the highest quality version of your services. However, this does not mean you should stop looking for ways to improve. By asking customers about new features they may like you can stay on top of your market. These customer satisfaction surveys can help you better understand where your customers think you could do better.
Simple questions like “Rate how easy it is to schedule an appointment.” Or “Do we return your calls in a timely manner?” can help you see if your customers think you’re operating efficiently, and then make changes accordingly.
4. Create Better Products
If you are considering adding a new service or product to your business, surveys are the way to see if it will be successful. It could be as simple as asking them to select which of 4 proposed new services they would buy from you. Perhaps asking which material they prefer their products be made out of.
Gaining this knowledge about your customers and their preferences can expedite the product development process. You can avoid multiple trial and error experiments by knowing exactly what your customers want.
5. Prioritize Goals with The Customers in Mind
Analyzing the responses to a satisfaction survey highlights your company’s strengths and weaknesses from your customers’ perspective. Focus on areas of your business that achieve very low satisfaction scores and prioritize improvement programs so that you can remedy any serious problems in those areas.
These improvement programs can take the form of changes to business processes or employee training. If the survey indicates poor performance in areas such as order processing or telephone response, you may be able to improve performance by automating the processes. Responses that highlight problems with employee attitudes or knowledge indicate a need for training.
Moving Forward with Your Survey
It is clear that customer surveys can have a plethora of benefits for your company. But how do you create one? Or relay it to your customers? Or read the results?!
This is where survey companies come in handy. By investing a small amount of cash into a good survey tool you can receive comprehensive data on your customers without having to stress over the statistics to do so.
Conclusion
Explore all of the options available to you. Tools like the surveymonkey audience can be useful, but be wary of their “open source model”. This means that professional survey takers can sign up to join the panel. They also buy data from so-called “partners” to fulfill orders. This mix of purchased data and professional survey takers leads to consistently poor data quality.
