Photo Credit: iStock.com/Artist's Olga_Danylenko
Customer satisfaction surveys. I’m sure you’ve heard of them so many times by now that the original intent and purpose behind it has been lost to the annals of time.
It’s time for a refresher on customer satisfaction surveys and how they can be put to effective use so that your business retains your customers come boom or bust period.
Do customer satisfaction surveys actually work? In retaining your customers that is?
According to a survey of nearly 200 senior marketing managers, about a whopping 71% of them responded that they found a customer satisfaction metric very useful in managing and monitoring their businesses. A marketplace where competition is at an all time high, customer satisfaction is what helps people differentiate the great companies from the ok ones. Business strategies really need to invest in online surveys that can help them keep customer satisfaction rates higher.
The goal of an effective customer satisfaction survey? Getting some actionable customer feedback, The kind that goes a long way in improving your business’ customer experience.
Any business that doesn’t listen to its customers might as well as cease to exist. Surveys can help, especially if they follow these golden rules:
Keep it short – Ask no more than 10 questions.
Do ask them this – Questions about value, support, education and user experience are a must. Together they make up the core of delivering good services all around.
Overall Satisfaction – Want to really know how the sum of all parts of the user experience is? Do ask that for an insightful answer.
The Net Promoter Score – this is a significant feature to evaluate customer loyalty. It breaks down the ‘promoters’, the ‘passives’ and the ‘detractors’ categories of customers to give you the most authentic results.
Customers are more receptive to finishing surveys if they feel like it hits the right notes. As a brand, you need to send them to the right people.
And here’s why. It helps build customer trust and aid in retention when your customers know that their feedback is actually considered and attended to. A stale looking customer satisfaction can nowhere near get filled up, let alone be picked up by a customer.
In order to ensure that your loyal customers don’t defect to competitors’ services, making the right kind of customer satisfaction surveys AND taking action on it, has been proven to work. Online surveys can even track customer satisfaction for you over a period of time, helping you correlate available data with changes in business for better formulated strategies to retain customer base.
Kelvin Stiles is a tech enthusiast and works as a marketing consultant at SurveyCrest – FREE online survey software and publishing tools for academic and business use. He is also an avid blogger and a comic book fanatic.