Customer Service Surveys

Customer Service Surveys That Improve Every Customer Interaction

Customer Service Surveys are an important part of a customer satisfaction program. You work to make your products as good as possible but try as you might problems will arise. Now, your relationship with your customer depends on how well you respond to problems, that is the effectiveness and quality of your customer service.

A customer service survey gives you an opportunity to monitor the quality of the service you provide customers. By installing an on-going “transactional” customer service survey you are able to identify and correct problems related to service as they occur in a timely fashion.  A transactional survey is one that is conducted at the end of a service event. Depending on your specific situation it is best to survey your customer as close to the time of the service event as is practical so that the particulars of the service are fresh in the customer’s mind.

Your business’ customer service events may occur many times per week or only a few times per month. In the latter case you would sample 100% of your customer service events in the former you would likely want to sample only a fraction of the customer service events. In both cases you will want to monitor all responses so that you can take action when a customer situation warrants immediate attention. In addition you will want to roll up all the responses on a quarterly or biannual basis to identify trends that can point to systemic problems.

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 ask the right questions and address the needs of customers, but the feedback system also needs to be integrated into the operations of your company.

Since your customer satisfaction survey is going to be an ongoing part of running your business, it becomes very important for the survey to have a broad base of support and understanding. A strategy session should have key people from sales, marketing, development and operations who get together for a four to six-hour meeting to work on the survey objectives and how they tie to the company 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.

Call us to talk about how Survey Design & Analysis can help you get started with a customer satisfaction survey program.