Author: BusinessReport.US

Periodic measurement of customer loyalty can be an excellent way to gauge the success or failure of ongoing customer relationship management. Typically, online customer loyalty surveys are administered as part of a program of client satisfaction surveys. This allows for simultaneous measurement of both aspects of the customer relationship, which are in many cases (but not always) interrelated items.

A well-designed client survey will not exceed 10 to 12 minutes in length and ask customers to rate overall satisfaction with the company, provide specific reasons for overall satisfaction or dissatisfaction, inquire as to customer loyalty, and include a number of targeted questions regarding satisfaction with specific products or services and aspect of the customer experience. Developing the final list of customer experience attributes is an important part of the design process and needs to cover the key issues that are potentially related to overall satisfaction and customer loyalty. Most importantly, the attributes should be fine-tuned for the specific product or service offerings of the company and use wording that is easy for the average customer to understand and interpret as intended.

As part of the design process, it is also important to examine where the company offers its products via different channels or has distinct products or service offerings requiring separate sets of questions. In such cases, the use of online customer surveys provide the opportunity to use skip logic so that different customer segments can view different sets of questions based on their specific profiles. These questions should be appear as supplements to the main survey questions, which should be applied across all segments (if possible) to facilitate overall customer satisfaction and loyalty measurement.

In designing customer loyalty surveys, it can also be important to collect information concerning customer demographics, other characteristics, and/or past behavior or usage of the company’s products and services, or the use of similar products and services in the general market place. A key advantage of online customer feedback surveys is that it can often circumvent the need to ask many of these questions on the survey instrument. Instead, the questionnaire can be pre-populated with relevant profiles or the information can be merged with the post-survey data to facilitate reporting analysis. This reduces the length of the survey questionnaire.

At this point, it is important to comment on several key aspects of the survey design process that are often over-looked when conducting a customer loyalty survey. First, correct sample selection is critical. This phase is easy if all customers are invited to participate in the survey. However, if only select customers are invited or the number of available email addresses is limited, sample selection needs to represent the overall customer population or the collected feedback may not correctly represent the overall perspective of the customer population. Furthermore, even if the sample is selected in the correct manner, or all customer sample is used, the mix of respondents may differ from the company’s survey population and distort the results. In the end, statistical techniques might be needed to accurately measure overall customer feedback and provide correct weight to each segment.

A second aspect of customer loyalty and client satisfaction surveys that is often over-looked is the use of existing customer information. This might include specific details on the type of service (such as a special bank transaction), type of product, number of support requests, number of years as a customer, and a long list of other metrics. Not only can this information be used to trigger skip logic on the online survey, but also variable inserts can be used to create respondent-specific questions. For example, “what is your overall rating of the [variable insert] you received on [variable insert] from the Credit Union?”

In summary, effective survey design of online client satisfaction and customer loyalty surveys can be a complex process requiring extensive review of existing customer profiles, identifying key attributes of the customer relationship, scoping channels or segments of product and service offerings, and making sure that both sample selection and the actual respondent pool is representative of the overall customer survey population. Although company budgets can sometimes limit the ability to engage in extensive data analysis of the results, it is not a good idea to move forward with a customer feedback survey without careful questionnaire design and sampling techniques.

Marc Tillman is a member of the professional services staff at Amplitude Research, Inc., headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida. Amplitude Research is one of the top customer survey firms specializing in client satisfaction surveys and customer loyalty surveys.

This Article is Part 3 of a series of articles on the subject of client satisfaction surveys. Part 1 covered the early planning stages including project goals and reporting deliverables. Part 2 examined selection of a survey methodology, with emphasis on the availability and quality of the records list. Part 3 focuses on the use of online customer surveys.

Once it is established that there is an adequate email records list for conducting client satisfaction surveys online, it must be determined whether an online customer survey is still the best choice over other methodologies such as mail or telephone surveys. This decision will often rest on a choice between telephone and online customer surveys, although mail surveys can the best choice in certain cases. The survey vendor should be able to provide helpful advice in making this selection. Key decision factors include project budget and customer relations.

Generally, client satisfaction surveys that focus on b2c relationships have similar pricing for telephone and online customer surveys. These types of surveys might include retail customers or service providers such as accounting, personal banking, auto repair, or mortgage lending. The common thread is a non-enterprise product or service where the end user is typically an easy-to-reach survey participant. For these kinds of client satisfaction surveys, the best choice can often be a telephone survey due to higher response rates.

Cost Considerations and Online Customer Surveys

But where client satisfaction surveys are of a b2b nature (such as enterprise products, services or software), and/or the end user is a corporate executive, online customer surveys can often result in lower pricing than telephone surveys, and similar or better response rates given the difficulty of reaching the respondent by phone. In addition, given the ongoing business relationship with most enterprise products or services, the customer might have a strong interest in timely participation in online customer surveys. In the end, each business relationship is different, and should be examined based on its own set of circumstances.

Customer Relations and Client Satisfaction Survey

Cost issues aside, another key consideration that is often overlooked in designing client satisfaction surveys is the overall impact on client relations. At its most basic level, this means considering the type of methodology most customers are comfortable using. For example, if there are ongoing email exchanges between the company and its customers, online customer surveys might be a natural choice. On the other hand, if customers rarely communicate via email, then blanketing them with email invitations to online customer surveys might not be the best choice even if email addresses are readily available.

Another element that is often overlooked is whether reaching ALL customers should be considered for client relations’ reasons, even though sampling of a portion of the customers is less costly and/or adequate from a statistical standpoint. Put a different way, it can sometimes benefit client relations to ask customers for their feedback on how you are performing. In some cases, such as alumni surveys, it might be politically incorrect to survey only certain alumni to the exclusion others. If that is the case, online customer surveys can often provide the least expensive method of reaching all of the participants while placing your corporate brand in front of them.

Determining the best survey methodology is not always an easy decision. The starting point is typically the availability and quality of the records list. However, this alone is not necessarily the determining factor. Cost considerations and client relations must also be considered. For many client satisfaction surveys, this will boil down to a choice between telephone surveys and online customer surveys. Frequently, the price points are similar when the product or service is delivered b2c instead of b2b. But where enterprise products or difficult-to-reach executives are involved, online customer surveys are often the least expensive option for conducting client satisfaction surveys provided the participants are comfortable responding online. Lastly, and often overlooked, are client relations’ considerations, such as allowing all customers to participate instead of a select group.

Marc Tillman is a member of the professional services staff at Amplitude Research, Inc., a full-service survey company located in Boca Raton, Florida. Amplitude Research specializes in client satisfaction surveys including, mail, telephone, and online customer surveys.

This Article is Part 2 of a series of articles on the subject of customer and client satisfaction surveys. Part 1 covered the early planning stages for customer satisfaction surveys including project goals, reporting deliverables, and initial discussions on survey methodologies.

The next step for an effective customer satisfaction survey is gaining a better understanding of the best survey methodology given the client’s project goals and budgetary requirements. As much time as needed should be spent discussing the characteristics of the target survey population. For example, if the customers are other businesses, what are their specific job titles and/or job functions? What is the typical client revenue size buying the products or services? If buyers are primarily comprised of consumers rather than businesses, what are the specific demographics of the customer – such as age, gender, household income, region of the country, etc.?

Once the customer demographics are fully identified, the most effective survey methodology can be explored. This will require a full and complete understanding of the scope and quality of the customer records. Most clients will have this information at hand and can provide estimates on the availability of email addresses, phone numbers or mailing records, as well as the quality / reliability of each. Others will need to check and get back to you with “best guesses” of list quality. The provided records information can then be examined in concert with the customer characteristics to determine the best approach for gathering feedback.

For example, a client might advise that the records list includes highly accurate phone numbers of almost every customer. However, upon further inquiry, the records do not include the direct phone numbers or extensions of the targeted respondents at each customer location and/or the individual names of the key contacts are unreliable. This can result in significant cost issues for a telephone survey methodology where interviewers face the prospect of “networking” at each business to find the correct person.

A second example might be a large list of email records – which is always good news – with the warning that most of the records are updated sporadically. In this situation, a well-designed approach might begin with an online customer satisfaction survey followed by mail or telephone interviewing. Or, if the client sells to a wide group of customers, it might be possible to reach qualifying participants through a web panel.

In the end, however, most clients maintain lists of customers that include multiple fields of information. This means that budgetary elements, as well as survey sampling issues, often play an important role in selection of the best methodology for conducting a customer satisfaction survey. A skilled research supplier should be able to analyze this information and come up with a plan of action based on the quality and types of records maintained by the client, the availability of web sample as a possible supplement, and the objectives of the survey. The use of multiple survey methodologies can often provide a nice balance between cost and effective sampling in the realm of customer satisfaction surveys and should be considered, as needed, to meet the goals of the client.

Marc I. Tillman is a member of the professional services staff at Amplitude Research, Inc., a full-service mail and online survey company specializing in market research surveys and client satisfaction surveys. Please visit Amplitude’s customer satisfaction surveys page to learn more about its service offerings.