When should you survey your customers?
By: Mary Song

Companies with short-range strategies such as cost cutting might see returns from a customer satisfaction survey in the near-term; however, there are also long term benefits such as sustainable growth and profitability if they pay attention to their customer satisfaction levels.

Customer satisfaction directly correlates to increased sales and profit margins over the long run. Satisfied customers will more likely recommend or refer your business to others. In addition, satisfied customers are less price sensitive, because they believe that higher levels of service and product/service quality merit higher prices. Lastly, it’s far less costly to retain and sell to an existing customer than to attract and sell to new customer. It’s therefore important to know not just the satisfaction levels of your clientele, but the range and degree of those levels.

It’s never too late to begin taking a customer-focused approach, but remember that adopting a customer-oriented culture in your organization is just the first step. Ultimately, it will define your objectives, planning, budgeting, even training and benchmarking criteria.

However, as Marshall McLuhan said, “Perception is reality,” and in business, this tends to be true. Your customers’ perceptions of your company, and the value or quality of your products and service levels will determine their buying decisions and ultimately how well your company fares. If they think you’re giving them less for their money, they’ll go elsewhere.

Where do you start?
Your observations or intuition should give you clues about when it’s time to survey your customer’s needs. If you know your business, you probably have suspicions about when you should survey your clientele. However, it’s a good idea to take a systematic approach to ensure you have it right. Starting with a standard marketing research approach, you should define your problem or need, analyze the situation, get problem-specific data, which you then interpret to solve the problem.

Define the Problem: This is often a difficult task. Your inkling or observations about your customers’ attitudes will be the first step, but it might be hard to determine what dimensions you should be focusing on. A good way to frame the objectives of this phase is by concentrating on major marketing strategy variables like pricing, product, promotion, placement, and customer service to frame or structure your problem definition.

Analyze the situation: Once you’ve framed the real problem or need, you should scan available resources and secondary data sources, as these might lessen or eliminate the need for complex data-collection instruments. Then develop the best approach for obtaining primary (i.e., first-hand) data about the problem from your customers. It’s in this phase, for example, that you might decide to use an on-line poll versus forming a focus group or sending out a costly paper-based questionnaire.

Collect and Interpret Data. You have many survey options, such as phone surveys, paper questionnaires or online surveys. Online surveys are a good choice as they offer lower implementation costs, higher response rates and scalability, fast, easy and accurate tabulation, and good follow-on utility for site traffic attraction and stickiness.

You can use a survey to determine customer opinions—and preferences—regarding quality, service, pricing, complaint resolution, gaps in your product/service mix, and more.

Implement Solutions: Sometimes the collected data points to significant changes, and more work and expense, than you expected. You need to be prepared for, and do everything in your power, not to shirk on this. Be prepared to implement needed changes or risk losing credibility with your clients—or the clients’ business. To paraphrase the old saw, “Don’t ask the question if you really don’t want to know the answer.”

Final thoughts
You’ll get relevant data if you start with a well-formulated customer survey that asks the right questions. Keep the survey simple, short, and easy to understand. You’ll get a better response rate and you’ll zero in on key data. If you’ve surveyed a statistically relevant sampling, your survey should then point out the most obvious courses of action. For example, formulate questions that ask the customer to prioritize issues, opinions or concerns. That will keep the guesswork out of where to start the implementation process.

Lastly, always trumpet your survey-driven successes. If you institute positive changes resulting from your customers’ feedback, be sure to toot your own horn! That lets your customers know that their input matters.

Article Source: http://www.ArticleJoe.com

Mary Song is CEO of Search Engine Internet Marketing (SEIM, Inc.), a search marketing firm specializing in real estate, travel and politics. A veteran of online marketing, Song combines her unique knowledge of real estate, travel, politics and entrepreneurial skills with her online marketing background to shape SEIM’s search marketing strategy and services. She was the founder of Rent101.com one of the founding companies of Homeaway, became their director of SEO / SEM and was promoted to Global Search Strategist prior to leaving to start SEIM, Inc.

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