Monday, March 30, 2009

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

By Dennis Lewis

In times like these, the importance of constantly measuring customer satisfaction has never been greater.

In a down market, everybody is revisiting their purchasing decisions searching for every possible means of saving a dollar. Your customers, like everybody else, are asking tough questions before committing to even the most stable business relationships. When payroll isn't easy to make, we actively start evaluating old business models and cashflow becomes king.

But if your customers don't answer your surveys, all the effort and expense of measuring goes straight into the trash can. For a satisfaction measurement system to be successful it must achieve adequate rates of responses. The following five points are critical to make this happen:

Don't waste their time. We don't live in Mayberry and today everyone is in a hurry. That means that you can't expect your customers to fill out page after page of monotonous questions. You must show respect for their time and implement a system won't take more than a couple of minutes of their time.

Invite your customers to participate. Distributing a stack of surveys to each office and hoping they get filled out isn't going to cut it. Filling out surveys isn't fun, and unless you actively encourage your customers to join in, they probably won't do it. This requires a premeditated plan and a strong backing by the whole organization.

Build satisfaction measurement daily routines. Don't let measuring customer satisfaction be a twice a year job you do as an afterthought. Instead, make it part of the way you interact with your customers on a day to day basis. That way you'll be able to collect a continuous flow of valuable management information.

Give your customers feedback from the results. Once you've gained valuable insights from your customers' opinions, share them! I'm not saying you should publish all the gory details, but at least send out an email with the major conclusions you're going to be working on. You're customers will appreciate the effort you're putting into satisfying them.

Demonstrate the importance of their satisfaction. Be careful with the presentation and delivery of the survey. If you put in place a modern and innovative system for measuring satisfaction, you'll be sending the message that you really take this seriously. If, on the other hand, you limit the effort to a quick printoff on recycled paper, what does that say to your customers?

All of these factors can be implemented quickly and affordably thanks to an innovative new system called Gustometria. Customers answer quick surveys by touching the screen of the "gustometer" with their fingers. Since the entire survey process usually takes about a minute and a half, the use of the gustometer can be incorporated into the normal day to day interactions with your customers. Once completed the survey is automatically collected by the Gustometria servers, tabulated and ready for analysis.

In the analysis stage, Gustometria really shines. Thanks to the sophisticated business intelligence system built into the Gustometria website, you are able to contrast your custom profile questions with the scores for every one of your valuation questions. This way not only can you extract the maximum value from your collected data, but you can also adapt your surveys on the fly to meet new customer perceptions and needs.

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.

Pick up the phone and call Gustometria toll free at 1-877-448-7865.

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