Why should you bother?
Good customer service is the life blood of any business. Although you should try and attract new customers good customer service will help generate customer loyalty and encourage repeat business. With each satisfied customer your business is likely to win many more customers through recommendations and remember, if you are not taking care of your customers, your competition will.
A customer satisfaction survey will demonstrate to your customers that you care and are proactive in looking for ways to improve the service that you provide.
Where do you start?
Objective – Before you start creating your survey clarify the objectives of the survey, in that way you will find it easier to decide what are the right questions to ask.
Analysis – In addition to the objectives consider how you will analyze the answers having completed the survey.
Keep in mind that ‘closed’ questions (where a respondent is asked to choose from a limited number of responses) are much easier to analyze than ‘open’ questions (where the respondent can reply in anyway they want).
A great deal will depend on the expected volume of respondents, the higher the volume the more important it is to have an easy method of analysing the results.
Opportunity – As well as obtaining valuable market research data keep in mind that customer surveys are also a good way to publicise aspects of your service that your customers may not be aware of.
Before you publish the survey confirm that the questions you have asked will provide you with market research data that when analyzed will help you make informed decisions.
Then, from a marketing view point read through the survey, confirm that you have phrased each question so that every opportunity has been taken to promote your business?
The ideal question will perform the following three functions:-
- Market research – provide valuable feedback to help you improve your customer satisfaction levels and in turn your business
- Marketing – promote aspects of your business
- Information/Education – advertise a service that you provide that your customers may not have been unaware of
For example:- Do you find the in-store baby changing facilities useful?
In asking this question the store will hopefully not only receive useful feedback on the baby changing facility but they will also promote the store as being child-friendly even beyond the customers who actually require the facility.
Warts and all – be prepared to accept criticism.
A well designed customer satisfaction survey will enable you to identify problems so that they can be addressed; regular customer satisfaction will prevent complacency and give you early warning on where you might be losing out to your competitors initiatives.
What should you ask?
Although each business is likely to have specific and unique factors that are important in providing good customer services there are common areas that are relevant to all businesses be they a physical store, online internet store or a service industry. The following are key areas to providing good customer service.
Communication – What do you do to help your customers communicate with you?
When customers telephone are their calls answered quickly; are their enquiries about products or services handled properly? A good business will make every effort to ensure that whatever the customers query it is resolved by the right person, quickly, politely and fairly.
If a problem is not resolvable immediately do you promise to respond in a given time period and do you deliver on your promise?
Use a customer satisfaction survey to confirm that all your staff are perceived by your customers as being helpful, courteous and knowledgeable.
Location – Do your customers find it easy to visit you, if a physical bricks and mortar store, is it conveniently located with good access?
Making it pleasant, making it easy – For a virtual business it is important to ensure that your website is easy to use and aesthetically pleasing.
Regardless of the store being a bricks and mortar or purely an online internet store, is the store properly laid out, can your customers find what they need and is there sufficient information and help on hand to explain how a particular product works?
The right quality products – In addition to measuring the quality of the service that you provide you should ensure that the products and services that you provide do in fact match your customers’ requirements.
Value for money – Cheap or expensive is not always a good measure, value for money is.
Do your customers consider that the products you sell or the services you provide are value for money, if not, why not?
Speed and attention – Customers want their enquiries or queries to be dealt with quickly but attentively.
Are you doing everything you can to avoid any delay?
A good business will try to treat each customer as an individual, does yours? Attention is one thing but this has to be hand- in-hand with a quick and satisfactory resolution of the query.
Demographics and Specific issues – Take the opportunity to profile your customers, for example their gender, age group and where they live?
Understand your customers more and you will be able to better target your business.
Within the survey allow customers to highlight specific problems and provide contact details.
What next?
Analyze the results once the survey has been completed.
Trends – Look for common and specific areas where the service is failing.
Ask yourself honestly if any criticism that you receive is valid and if there anything that can be done to resolve or minimise the problem?
Training – Are the staff properly trained and do they have sufficient knowledge?
Where employee training programmes have been implemented have they had a positive impact on the business?
Follow-up – If a customer has raised a specific issue through completing a survey ensure that they are contacted and that their complaint is properly addressed.
Don’t lose a customer by squandering an opportunity to resolve a problem.
Continuously Monitor – Make changes based on the survey results and then re-measure by issuing further surveys.
If you are concerned about customer satisfaction and would like to view a sample survey for a store that will demonstrate some of the above advice please view the Sample Customer Survey
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