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.