A lot of companies carry out customer surveys, but not all understand the importance of thinking through the best way to get as much as possible from them. A well designed customer survey is a good first step towards an excellent customer experience. Below are some parameters it is important to take account of.
- Have clear objectives – that’s the bottom line.
- Only ask questions when you can act on the answers – an important rule of thumb.
- The time between the customer making a visit/using a service or product and the time of the survey as well as the scope play an important role.
- There are different survey methods. The one you need depends on how your customers will/are able to respond. For example online questionnaires, paper questionnaires, in-depth interviews and focus groups. Is one method sufficient for your customers, or do you need more? Which method suits your organisation best?
- NPS and/or CSI? The Customer Satisfaction Index (CSI or Nöjd kundindex/NKI in Swedish) helps in identifying strengths and weaknesses in the whole organisation so that the managers in your organisation can design strategies and targeted interventions for good customer relations. An NPS measurement (Net Promoter Score) can be designed so that you get an overview of where in your organisation client encounters are working well and where they need to be improved. Which suits you best, or are both needed?
- Consider Quality Monitoring (QM) if you have customer and transaction intensive operations, since this makes it possible to measure and evaluate quality on an ongoing basis.
- After the customer survey – feed back to your customers that you intend to act on their feedback, talk about taking your customer relations seriously!
- Use the results to create customer satisfaction!
And last but not least, the most important job – every member of staff in every encounter making customer relations better. By working actively with both customer and employee surveys you can identify the challenges which are holding back increased customer satisfaction. One way to make the work even more concrete is to cross analyse employee relations with the results from the customer survey(s).
Take a serious look at these suggestions on how to think about each point.