Monday, March 30, 2009

How to get phenomenal response rates to your customer satisfaction surveys?

By Dennis Lewis

When times are tough, keeping an accurate pulse of your customers' satisfaction is a question of survival.

Right now your customers, just like you, are placing every expenditure under the microscope. If a dollar can be saved, or a payment postponed, you can be sure they are considering it very seriously. Everybody is questioning the fundamentals of their business models and even the most enduring relationships are being revised. When money is short, you can be sure that cashflow is the highest priority.

However, all the effort and expense of your surveys won't serve for anything, if your customers don't answer. To be useful and meaningful, your satisfaction measurement system needs to have adequate response rates. The following five ideas are essential if you want them to answer:

Keep the survey short. If you try and make your customers sit down and fill out three pages of detailed questions, you're going to fail. Time is a scarce and valuable resource for everyone, and especially so for your customers. Show respect and design your system in a way that allows them to finish in under two minutes.

Ask your customers to participate. You can design the best survey in the world, but if you think distributing them to your offices and waiting for responses is going to work, you're in for a sad surprise. Make sure your entire organization appreciates the importance of the initiative and actively encourages customers to contribute their opinions.

Integrate Measurement into your business processes. Measuring customer satisfaction can't be something you do as an afterthought once every six months. You need to integrate it into your day to day contacts with your customers. That way you'll have constant feedback and high response rates.

Don't hoard the results. The important conclusions and insights that you learn from your measurement system can and should be shared with your customers. That doesn't mean you need to publish the nitty gritty details, but rather the major initiatives that you'll be working on. This is a very effective way of letting your customers know you truly value their opinions.

Demonstrate how serious you take this. Your efforts to measure customer satisfaction should reflect that you take the issue seriously. If you don't pay attention to the design and delivery of the survey you could end up sending a very negative message to your customers. Put in place an innovative customer satisfaction measurement system, however, and you'll prove to them that this is a critical element of your strategy.

These steps can be implemented, quickly and at little cost, using a new system called Gustometria. By touching the screen of the "gustometer" with their fingers, customers answer a short survey. Usually it takes them about a minute and a half to finish, and once they're finished the results are automatically collected and processed by the Gustometria servers.

Thanks to the built in business intelligence tools included in Gustometria, you are able to contrast all of your valuation questions quickly and easily with your custom profile questions. You can adapt and change the surveys on the fly, and thanks to the variable structure of each survey, you can measure hundreds of details about your company without having to ask any one customer more than a few questions.

This simple and affordable solution can be up and running in less than a week, and will provide you with valuable information that you couldn't acquire any other way.

Don't hesitate to call Gustometria toll free at 1-877-448-7865. - 23802

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