Online Customer Satisfaction Surveys --

Vital and Easy to Conduct

Why Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Customer satisfaction surveys continue to be an important tool for your business or organization. They help you keep a pulse on the constant change in consumer opinion by getting you the answers to vital questions such as:

• What do our customers like about us?
• What do our customers feel we can do better?
• How do our customers rate our performance in various areas?
• How interested are customers in new products and services we are considering offering?
• How do our customers compare us to competitors?

Used To Be The Phone…

For many years such customer satisfaction surveys were conducted on the telephone. Because of the significant rise in spam call volume, people increasingly aren’t answering their phone if they don’t recognize the number of the caller. As a result, the number of call attempts to reach any given survey's respondent goal has grown exponentially, making most phone surveys cost prohibitive.

Fortunately, the use of online customer satisfaction surveys has become commonplace in recent years, and they offer important advantages compared to telephone surveys:

• Quicker turnaround of results since the survey data is collected and tabulated online as your customers take the survey.

• Increasing consumer familiarity with technology and doing tasks online.

• Online surveys typically cost a fraction of what telephone surveys cost. The main reason for this cost savings is the elimination of the substantial cost involved in hiring and training a staff of people to conduct hundreds of telephone survey interviews.

The Simple Online Survey Process

Here’s how the simple process of conducting an online customer satisfaction survey works:

• We work with you to develop the right survey questions for your company and its information needs. 

• We provide you with a link to the survey and language introducing the survey, such as the survey being anonymous and being returned to a third party outside research company not affiliated with your company.

• You send the survey out to your customers by email, which increases the likelihood of response for two reasons: 1) customers are more likely to recognize an email coming from your company’s name than from a research company’s name; 2) sending the survey through your email system greatly reduces the likelihood that the survey will be flagged as spam.

• We receive all completed surveys, tabulate the data, analyze the results, offer you recommendations for action, and provide you with a written report.

We Can Do That!

You might be wondering: this all sounds pretty easy, why don’t we conduct our customer satisfaction survey ourselves through the many available data collection platforms such as SurveyMonkey that are easy to use and thereby save the money we would pay an outside professional marketing research company? Sure, you can, but before you do, keep in mind the following areas in which a professional marketing research firm will add substantial value:

• Question Design. There is a lot to consider when developing survey questions.  If the questions aren't worded properly, you might as well forego even looking at the results you get, as they will most likely not be valid. Questions are worded properly when they don't use jargon or words the average person doesn't understand, don't demand too much recall from customers, or, perhaps most importantly, don't accidentally bias a respondent by the way in which a question is phrased.

• Question Order. Don't begin a survey "educating" respondents by asking them to rate your company or organization in various performance areas, thereby giving them unintended information they can use to answer a later question, such as when asking respondents for their overall opinion of your company. Ask for the overall opinion of your company or organization first and then ask that specific performance areas be rated.  Also, don't ask the most important questions at the very beginning of the survey when the customer is just getting familiar with the survey process.

• The Survey Instrument. There are other survey elements to consider as well. If the survey length is too long, or if the survey has too many open-ended (or written) questions, customers can easily lose focus, abandon the survey midway, or give haphazard answers without thinking. All of these will have an adverse impact on the quality of responses received.

• Data Analysis/Report Writing. There is the issue of what to do with all of the raw survey data once you have it. It takes a trained eye to know which survey results are important, and which ones aren't.  Someone might make a big deal over a small difference in two survey results that is in reality meaningless. And then, compiling a written report that can be presented to other decision makers at your company or organization for possible action can be a daunting task.

As you can see, while anyone can collect survey data through SurveyMonkey and the like, it takes the skill set and experience of a marketing research professional to properly design the survey instrument and then interprest the survey data in a way that is actionable for your company or organization. Simply put, the data arising from a marketing research survey is a means, not an end.

While we strongly urge you to consider online tools such as SurveyMonkey that can greatly reduce the cost of conducting a survey, we can't emphasize enough the importance of ensuring that time is taken to design a valid survey questionnaire on the front end and to also ensure that survey results are properly and effectively analyzed on the back end. The absence of such attention to these two important steps not only negates the benefits of the cost savings you might realize from using SurveyMonkey, but, more importantly, likely renders your survey results meaningless and creates the risk of making business decisions that are not based on accurate data. 

In Conclusion

I would welcome the opportunity to discuss with you how we can work together to conduct a customer satisfaction survey that will keep you up to date on your customers’ latest thinking about your company or organization. 

Or, if you have decided to use an online tool such as SurveyMonkey to collect the data for your customer satisfaction survey, we can help make sure that the survey questions you have constructed are valid and that the results will be analyzed properly. You will still realize the tremendous cost savings from using SurveyMonkey, but without having to worry about whether or not the survey questions and interpretation of results are handled appropriately. 

Please contact me at halfogelman@researchdynamicsinc.com or call 800/610-3772. 

For more information, visit our website at www.researchdynamicsinc.com.