Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Customer Satisfaction Surveys That Deliver Actionable Business Insights

A customer satisfaction survey is essential for any company that wishes to remain in business and continue to prosper. The customer satisfaction survey is how a company keeps a pulse on customer sentiment toward its products and services. Every company needs to do this, whether it is done biennially (every two years), annually, or biannually (twice a year). The most common period for a customer satisfaction survey is annually. In some instances, performing the survey every other year is adequate. Less often, a customer satisfaction survey can be performed every six months. It is extremely rare to need to conduct your customer satisfaction survey more than twice a year, since the cycle of design, deployment, execution, analysis, and action planning usually exceeds three months.

It is important that you do not jump into customer satisfaction without enough planning. This is a common mistake. A hurried customer satisfaction survey can do more harm than good by creating a negative impression with otherwise satisfied customers. You can avoid the common pitfalls of customer satisfaction surveys and implement a truly useful system for feedback and action by creating a professionally designed survey and following a few simple guidelines.

It takes time to develop a customer satisfaction program and clearly understand customers’ wants and needs, but that investment pays dividends in the form of happier customers. Survey Design & Analysis recommends the following two activities at the start of any customer satisfaction survey program. These ensure the customer satisfaction survey starts out in the right direction and puts it on firm ground for future implementations of the survey.

Customer Needs Assessment

This involves conducting in-depth interviews (face-to-face or over the phone) with select customers to make sure you understand what is most important to customers, what their needs are, what they think of your company, and what they think about providing feedback to you on your products and services. This two-way communication early in the process has been found to be a critical success factor for obtaining actionable information and ensuring that your survey asks the right questions of the right people in the right way. Read More

Hold A Stakeholders Strategy Session

The success of a customer satisfaction survey is measured by the actions it drives. It is critical that the survey asks the right questions and addresses customers’ needs, but the feedback system also needs to be integrated into your company’s operations.

Since your customer satisfaction survey will be an ongoing part of running your business, it is very important for the survey to have broad support and understanding. A strategy session should bring together key people from sales, marketing, development, and operations for a four- to six-hour meeting to work on the survey objectives and how they align with the company’s mission and values. The session might also include discussions on the appropriate customer segments to target, training from a customer satisfaction expert (internal or external) on best practices, and/or defining the scope of the customer feedback you will solicit.