Looking for insight into what your customers want? Here's how to ask poignant questions they'll actually take the time to answer.
What's the best way to find out what people think of your business and where they think you need to improve? Just ask them, Sherlock.
Regularly surveying your customers can provide a direct insight into how happy your products and services make your customers, what deficiencies hurt your bottom line, and on what kind of new product development you should focus your efforts. Professional surveyors talk a lot about the concept of "fit:" Is your business meshing with your desired audience? If not, you might as well be throwing out money.
"Quality is in the end much more important than price in terms of determining overall satisfaction," says David VanAmburg, director of the American Customer Satisfaction Index. "It's very easy to attract customers by offering discounts. At the end of the day, if you don't offer a quality product that taps into what the customer feels is really a good fit for him or her, it doesn't matter where your price is."
Some corporations use customer surveys to impress their stockholders, others, such as public utilities, show the information to regulatory commissions, while still more use it to track trends over years. Customers who rank themselves as "completely satisfied" are worth three to six times more than those who say they are just "satisfied" or "dissatisfied," says Jeffrey Henning, founder and vice president of strategy of Vovici, an online survey management company that has worked with Marriot, Cisco, and many other large companies.
Most customers, VanAmburg says, are eager to share their opinions, and show a great deal of savvy for rating products. They're just waiting for you to ask.
Writing a Customer Survey: Identify Your Goals
Before you even start thinking about what questions you want to ask customers, survey professionals say you should ask yourself: What am I trying to learn, and what am I going to do with that information?
"If customers are happy, you really want to know that. If they're not happy, you can't hide," says Howard Deutsch, CEO of Quantisoft, a survey and consulting company. "You need to know why and you need to take action, or you're going to go out of business."
Deutsch says growing companies should strive to conduct a customer survey once or twice a year.
Don't ask customers a question without a plan for how it will be used to provide insight for you company's stakeholders, says Gina Pingitore, the chief research officer for J.D. Power and Associates, a global customer satisfaction research firm best known for its automotive quality rankings.
"What's the impact of being a yes or no on satisfaction scores?" she says. "You should have a very clear understanding of how you're going to analyze the data."
Deutsch says companies usually turn to two types of surveys. Self-service questionnaires through web services such as Survey Monkey, through which a company can write its own questions and then be presented with the raw data. The second type is to go through more individualized professional survey services that have their own survey methods and present you with analyzed data, charts, graphs and detailed comment reports.
Experts say common goals of surveys include:
- Measuring customer loyalty
- Helping human resources departments train staff or execute new staff initiatives
- Direction for new financing
- Gauging customer service effectiveness
Dig Deeper: Best Customer Service Practices
Writing a Customer Survey: Crafting Quality Questions
Designing a questionnaire is a more complicated science than most people think, Pingitore says.
"People get their Ph.D.s in it," she says. Every aspect of the survey can affect the outcome, including the phrasing used to pose the question, the order the questions appear on the survey and the options for how to answer, such as whether respondents are asked a yes-or-no question, or to rate their response along a scale.
Professionals say to keep these tips in mind:
- Don't write questions that are ambiguous. Make them as specific and targeted as possible.
- Don't write "double-barrel" questions, such as asking, "How easy and timely" an experience was. "They're two different constructs," Pingitore says.
- Use scalable questions that ask customers to rank their responses on a numerical or qualitative spectrum. The ASCI uses a "multiple indicator" approach that creates scores based on responses to three different questions that relate to customer satisfaction. By asking customers, for instance, 1) how satisfied they were with an experience, 2) to what degree did their experience exceed or fall short of their expectations; and 3) how that experience compares with their ideal, the results create a weighted three-dimensional picture, VanAmburg says. The ASCI uses a 10-point scale for its qualitative questions as well, which allows for more grey area than a more narrow scale, he says.
- Ask a lot of questions. "The more questions that you ask, the more facets of it you get at, the more you minimize the margin of error, the more you minimize the noise in any survey," VanAmburg says.
- If repeating a survey, make sure to keep the questions identical from year to year so the results can be compared.
- Include at least a few open-ended questions. They allow for broader feedback you may have left out of your survey. "If a question is worth asking, it's worth putting a comments field in after each section," Deutsch says. "They'll pour their guts out in many cases." Open-ended questions are tricky because the answers often aren't specific, Pingitore says. But as coding software even for large-scale surveys has improved, these kinds of questions help round out your survey and add more flavor to the outcome.
Dig Deeper: Who's Reading Your Customer Feedback E-mails
