Putting Your Customers' Needs First

Too often companies initiate actions based on “sound bites” of information rather than taking the time and effort to obtain and analyze valid data so that an “informed decision” can be made. Choosing to conduct a survey can be a valuable tool in helping an organization to properly determine the facts necessary to make an optimum decision. While performing surveys is not an exact science, it should be a very structured process if you hope to obtain meaningful results. Today, users are inundated with an ever-increasing number of survey requests via email, popup boxes, direct mail, phone and/or even personal interviews. In fact, it is getting so bad that laws are being considered to treat unsolicited survey requests as “spam”. If organizations that performed surveys only followed a few key principles, they would be much more successful in obtaining useful feedback from their target audiences. o Don’t poll the entire universe if you are attempting to determine facts about your own products and services; query the people that USE your products and services, so you can get an “informed opinion” based on their “experience” with your company. If these users are existing customers; they should be familiar with your products and services as part of their regular job duties and, therefore, should have a vested interest in what you have to offer. o Don’t perform a survey “just because YOU want to KNOW something”. If you are NOT prepared to follow-through on the recipients’ suggestions/recommendations, then don’t waste their time by asking them in the first place! Over time, if you continue to do this, you will lose their loyalty and trust and they will cease to give you meaningful feedback or even respond to your requests. o Don’t over survey! Some companies overwhelm their prospects and customers with numerous survey or feedback requests; these actions only serve to reduce meaningful feedback when you REALLY need it. A good, well-designed survey conducted every few years should provide you with more than enough feedback and action items to keep your company busy providing new enhancements and services for several years! o Don’t just ask a bunch of questions that you ALREADY know the answer to … you are wasting your time and theirs! Do include one or two open-ended questions … i.e. If you could make only ONE suggestion for a new feature/enhancement … what would it be? While these open-ended questions require more work to summarize the results, you will likely find your most valuable feedback to be buried in these comments! o Don’t make the survey so long that it takes 15 or 20 minutes to complete as you will lose participation and/or get inferior answers to your questions; most surveys should be limited to ten questions or less and ideally most of your participant classification data should already be coded to the questionnaire that was sent to your customer. o Don’t “skew the questions/choices toward some pre-determined objective or hidden agenda…create a “neutral survey”. Survey results should reflect what the customer wants … not what you think they want . Open-ended questions (while harder to summarize) can be very useful in that you gain insight as to what is on the customer’s mind (which might lead you down an entirely different path than what you expected) . Here are a few “Don’t” guidelines when conducting surveys: