I recently came across a post that was too good not to share. The Service Witch, aka Kimberly Nasief, posted an excellent post on the good, bad and the ugly of customer satisfaction surveys. Let’s face it; everyone uses some form of CSat survey in their process. Are they all timely, well-designed and actionable? The short answer is NO! This is where we can make a difference.You do not need me to remind you that time is a valuable asset. In no place is this resource scarcer than in the lives of our customers. As a parent, employee and community member I can speak from personal experience that my time is valuable and indeed my most precious resource. With this in mind why do we ask our customers to spend five to ten minutes to tell us about their experience? Well we do it because we know the opinions they have to share are valuable and often provide clues to how we can do what we do better. Capitalizing on this is how companies succeed in slow economies.
Keeping the focus on our customers, it is our mission as marketing researchers to provide timely insights to management in a fashion they can act on. We can do this by keeping our CSat surveys as brief as possible and free of the annoyances that may make our lives easier, but convolute the experience for the survey respondent. Some key points from Kimberly’s post include:
- Keep surveys as short as possible
- Avoid overuse of NPS-style questions
- Do not succumb to the temptation of asking a question twice using different formats
- Leave the kitchen sink in the kitchen, by keeping the focus on specifics, and not ask about ‘everything’