Do you want to drive your business forward? Do you really know what your customers think about your business? In order to ensure that you achieve both of these things you may wish to consider conducting a customer feedback survey. With the help of such a survey not only are you improving your customer retention and profit but you are also advancing satisfaction levels and prompting interest in new products and services that you offer. Basically, with the help of a feedback survey from your customers, you are building up a relationship with them, which will enable you to tailor your business more towards their needs and enhance the chances of increasing your own sales.
A customer feedback survey isn’t just about asking a few simple questions, you need to ensure you focus on the aspects that matter. This includes the underlying purpose of the survey and the best methodology of reaching your customers. Depending on the type of business you run, there are a number of options available to you including mail and telephone surveys. However one of the most effective methods that we are seeing today involves online surveys, or combined online and mail surveys.
Before you actually deploy your survey, make sure you read through it very carefully a number of times, or get someone else to do it as a means of checking that you are asking the right questions and also that you are asking them in the correct way. What this will do is help you not only construct the survey but also ensure that you are getting the best feedback from it.
One of the most important aspects of these surveys is analyzing the answers that you receive. This should actually help you decide what sort of questions to be asking in the first place. For example, closed-ended questions are a lot easier to analyze than open ones, so keep your customer feedback survey simple but informative. It is also helpful when you are analyzing the results to achieve as many completed surveys as possible. So don’t dive in too eager to examine the results. Let you survey gather up responses over a matter of weeks and then collectively analyze these results.
Another great feature that you may not be aware of where customer feedback surveys are concerned is the fact that you can also use them as a means of publicizing aspects of your service that your customers, until now, have been unaware of. So not only are you gathering the information needed to improve your service but you are also promoting your business in the process.
No matter what type of business you run or for that matter what size your business is, you will benefit from the help of a customer feedback survey. It will help you manage your business initiatives and push your business to improve in all areas. Also whether you receive negative or positive feedback it is important that you take the points on board and use them to make any necessary changes. Although it is hard to face up to criticism, what would you rather do, admit you are doing something wrong and fix it or watch your business fail because you did nothing about it? I think we all know the answer to this question and I think this alone is enough to demonstrate just how important customer feedback surveys can actually be.
Marc I. Tillman is a member of the professional services staff at Amplitude Research, Inc., a full-service mail and online survey company headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida. Amplitude is an industry leader in the design, programming, survey hosting, and reporting of customer feedback surveys.