One way to find out what your customers really think of your service is to conduct a customer satisfaction survey. The only problem is, how to get started? In this article I will show you how to carry out your own customer feedback survey.
The first thing to do is to take a look at the kind of problems your customers have been having recently. These areas of concern will form the basis of your survey.
For example, if your customers have been experiencing late arrival of their orders, one of the areas to cover should be how satisfied are your customers with delivery times.
Once questions have been compiled that further explore the problems customers may already be facing, then it is time to move on to some more general probing.
Questions such as “how happy are you with our customer support team” can give you a good idea of how satisfied clients are with the image you porttray to the world.
It is a good idea to use a mixture of open and closed questions. The closed questions should solicit a rating; 1 to 5 is the commonly used range. 1 is very poor and 5 is very good.
Open ended questions will go something like: “what do you think we can do to improve our service?”
This type of question should bring back some very useful points that you can use to make changes that will result in better customer service.
One important thing to remember is to keep you customer satisfaction survey short. In my experience, about five questions at a time is more than enough.
Customer feedback surveys can be carried out using a variety of methods. Good old fashioned surveys sent out in the mail can garner very good results. Email is more direct but more likely to be deleted before it is even read.
One of the least used ways to do a customer survey is by telephone. As long as the caller is polite, clearly spoken and most importantly brief, telephone customer satisfaction surveys can yield some of the best response rates.
Face to face surveys are a good way to personalize the process and will obviously get the best numbers of response. It is best to use a customer service consultant to do this, as there is a danger that if the customer knows the questioner ie., it is a company sales person of customer service representative, more favorable feedback will be given. After all, it is in most people’s nature (and dare I say it, customer’s nature) to be kind and co-operative.
I hope these tips and have helped to get you started on the customer survey process and that when the time comes to find out exactly what your customers think of your service, your customer satisfaction survey will be a huge success!