Client Surveys

Your Customers: Talking Trash or Making You Cash? Why You Need to Know

Do you truly know how well you’re doing with your clients and customers? Are there trouble spots or holes in your customer support you’re unaware of? Want to discover what they really think? There’s really only one way to get this information—ask them! A well-crafted customer survey can be a useful tool to help you discover the answers to these and several other things you may not even have known were issues for your customers.

So why ask at all?

The primary incentive for a customer survey is to eliminate problems before they become part of your reputation, and reveal ways to strengthen your service or products. Most of the time, we never learn about a dissatisfied customer: they’ll simply look somewhere else. CustomerThink.com has discovered that more than half of consumers have experienced issues and complaints with the products and services they’ve purchased. Creating a survey helps you find and rectify mistakes which might be the difference between hanging onto a client or not.

What sort of questions work best?

Know what you want to learn from your survey, and be sure that you ask questions that need more than a number or checking a box. Don’t ask “Yes” or “No” questions as they don’t give you enough specifics. Permit your respondents to hold court on their experiences with your business.

How exactly should you hold the survey?

There are numerous ways to conduct a survey. However, if possible, the best way appears to be via an online survey, thus giving the respondent a good chance to think about and form well thought-out answers, something which may not occur through a phone call or personal contact. Look at offering a bonus for filling out your survey, and try to be timely as to when you send it. If you are new to this, use a company who specializes in this type of data collection, such as SurveyMonkey. However you achieve it, having a read on how your customers view your business is invaluable data to have.