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The Art of the Customer Surveys
Guy Kawasaki of How to Change the World | September 30th, 2008 - 08:05 AM
(36) found this useful. Do you? 
As a small business owner, you’re probably concerned about what your customers think of you, and many of you have done, or would like to do, customer surveys. A buddy of mine, Dave Wanetick, shared some interesting thoughts about customer surveys. He is the managing director of IncreMental Advantage.
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Accurate reads on customer thoughts are nearly impossible. Responses can be swayed by just one word or even the order in which the questions are asked. Some have compared trying to read customer sentiments to the soothsayers of yesteryear who tried to divine meaning from chicken entrails. Consider how one word conjures up drastically different recollections in this real-world exchange:
Lawyer to Witness: How fast was the car traveling before it ran into a telephone pole?
Witness: Forty-five miles per hour.
Lawyer to Witness: How fast was the car traveling before it smashed into the telephone pole?
Witness: Sixty-five miles per hour.
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Depending on who is responding to the survey and in what setting, the results can change. Many survey respondents, for example, are self-selecting, which skews the results. Sometimes asking the same people the same question at different times of the day—for example, before or after a meal—will yield different responses.
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Customers do not want spend time answering surveys. Completing a survey that takes longer than the delivery of the service in question is annoying. The mere act of sending a customer a survey can so greatly annoy some people that it tarnishes the company’s brand. Thus, customers often race through surveys to get them over with, and their haphazard responses are a precursor to the collateral damage that will result from relying on such information.
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Excessive soliciting of feedback will inevitably result in criticism. Unwarranted criticism is most likely to be evoked when people believe that their ability to criticize is a sign of their intelligence. A serious problem arises when this criticism shakes the employees’ confidence. This criticism can demotivate sales people and render them less effective.
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Some customers are not worth having. The peril in soliciting extensive feedback is that the most critical and demanding suggestions are likely to come from customers who offer the company diminishing prospects for profitable returns.
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Customers who are only moderately disappointed with a company may become irate when their concerns are not addressed. Thus, companies that rely on extensive surveys are faced with a dilemma: either bend to the customers’ wishes or suffer their wrath when failing to do so.
According to Dave, some of the most revealing customer surveys can be quite simple. Dave cites Fred Reichheld’s idea that one can distill customer satisfaction surveys down to one question:
“Would you recommend our service to your friends and colleagues?”
This is a powerful question because it gauges whether or not customers like your product enough to put their own reputations on the line with their friends and colleagues.
Dave is the author of The Power of Incremental Advantage. If you liked his insights here, you’ll like his book, too. Click here to learn more about it.
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Discussion Boards
"www.ShawnDrewry.com" | September 30th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
I’ve learned that it always pays first as a business owner to keep your mouth shut and listen to the customer. Although the customer may not always be right, listening to his or her needs first gives you a humble insight as to how to best serve them. Remember, as an entrepreneur, staying on top means being humble and not so quick to sell. Therefore, you can learn from your customers, while applying that knowledge you learned from previous ones to better serve others down the road.
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Darren | October 2nd, 2008 at 10:11 pm
It’s with more than a little irony that I note the following question right below this entry’s title:
“(6) found this useful. Do you?”
And there’s only one answer offered up to that question.
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Eric Gregg | October 3rd, 2008 at 11:50 am
I love the topic, and agree with many of the points, including the value of a single question customer satisfaction survey. However, my experience has been that if part of a true effort to improve service, customer surveys are not only welcome, but can positively impact the perception of the company asking for feedback. This Harvard Business Review article reports similar conclusions: http://www.harvardbusinessonline.org/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?ml_action=get-article&articleID=F0205A&ml_issueid=null&ml_subscriber=true&pageNumber=1&_requestid=110665. Specifically, in a professional service firm or B2B environment, where an ongoing relationship exists, clients will often gladly spend a few minutes giving their feedback if they believe it will ultimately lead them to a better experience. I talk more about how my firm’s experiences differ some from Dave’s suggestions on my blog at http://www.inavero.com/retentionsquared.
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3Jane Tessier-Ashpool | October 3rd, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Re: bullet 2 - The only people who respond to surveys are chronic complainers. Yes, your results will be skewed. All negative. Bullet 5 is a corollary to bullet 2.
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Hugo | October 3rd, 2008 at 1:30 pm
Jane, I’m glad to disagree with you. In my company we monthly deliver a survey for all our customers, over 80% are positive responses, many with thankful notes indeed. Listening to the positive 80% is what keep us going but listening to the other 20% makes us better every day.
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Brian Glassman | October 3rd, 2008 at 4:57 pm
Dave Wanetick opinions on survey seem very negative.
Survey are just one tool in an business persons arsenal, and many of Mr. Wanetrick’s comments paint survey as a less than useful tool, and this I very much disagree with.
Quickly, customer survey can be used for many different functions, like:
1. Marketing research for a new product, product penetration, pricing and so on.
2. Feedback on current services (performance, satisfaction, so on)
3. Promote a new product or survey and raise awareness
4. Communicate new information to customers.
5. Mechanism to capture new ideas from customers.
Benefits of (online) surveys are:
1. Easily administered to large number of people,
2. Low cost to distribute
3. Results quickly can be compiled & analyzed (if multiple choice)
Downsides are:
1. Gaming of survey
2. In ability to follow up with more question
3. Structure of the survey limits responses.
4. Self-select in participating
Both surveys and interviews has the problem that it is difficult to get an “Accurate reads on customer thoughts” that is why researchers combine many instruments to get the most accurate read on a question.
As for, “Customers do not want spend time answering surveys” I totally disagree. I think this varys by customer group, for example I know a farming chemical firm who has 80% survey returns from customers, which is fanatic.
As for, “Excessive soliciting of feedback will inevitably result in criticism” again I disagree, some customers like evangelist need love as Guy say in his book Art of the Start.
As for “Customers who are only moderately disappointed with a company may become irate when their concerns are not addressed.” This is true to some degree, so good customer relation says at minimum these customers’ comment should be acknowledged.
http://www.VideoUsher.com
Thank you
Brian Glassman
Ph.D. Candidate in Business & Innovation management at Purdue University
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Anthony Mitchell | October 4th, 2008 at 11:07 pm
Tips from the trenches:
Choose metrics for your surveys:
• Call completion rate (percentage of calls offered that are answered)
• Average hold time
• Average call handle time
• Percentage of inquiries handled on the first call (no callbacks)
• Percentage of calls transferred
• Caller satisfaction (1-10 range)
Maintaining a QA unit separate from the line organization encourages integrity of results. Record all calls so that personnel can be screened over time. Try to screen all agents a set number of times per week.
New agents need the most screening. For them, screening can be real-time with barge-in options (or double-jacking).
An experienced QA person can often tell whether a telephone call is successful. Simple indicators include tone of voice and whether callers said ‘thank you.’
A big factor in customer satisfaction is whether a company can leverage customer data across the enterprise. Having to provide the same information multiple times pushes up costs and depresses customer satisfaction.
Small Canadian centers used to be a smart choice for outside QA. With currency changes, Canada is now less attractive.
QA and customer satisfaction monitoring should be performed early and often. The longer a customer-relations management program goes off the rails, the harder and more expensive it is to fix.
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DS | October 5th, 2008 at 2:19 am
“…one can distill customer satisfaction surveys down to one question: Would you recommend our service to your friends and colleagues?”
This ONE question leads to the NPS calculation: %Promoters - %Detractors. Wonder how many CEOs of sucessful companies would base their business on just one metric.
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Allison O'Neill | October 5th, 2008 at 7:58 pm
I’d like to argue that staff surveys are more important than customer surveys. Staff are so often overlooked, or asked the wrong questions - meaning that any answers are labelled ‘worthless’. Staff can provide insight that improves the customer experience drastically THEN do a customer survey. Staff will spend time answering a survey - if this is not true of your company it is probably because the staff feel you will do nothing with their responses so its not worth the effort. Critisim or what i call ‘the yuck’ is most important in staff surveys. Since we are only strong as our weakest link. I believe good businesses and bosses seek to always find the ‘yucky’ bits and fix them instead of avoiding them and pretending they dont exist.
Sorry if this seems off topic - but I believe staff surveys are much more important than customer ones. Customer ones should be tackled when the staff turnover is superlow, engagement is super high and the whole company is buzzing - that is when customers can give you an accurate evaluation.
http://www.thebossbenchmark.blogspot.com
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Brian Glassman | October 6th, 2008 at 7:14 am
Anthony Mitchell
Thanks for your comments you obviously have a wealth of information on this subject.
Brian Glassman
Innovation Management
Commercialization
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Brian Glassman | October 6th, 2008 at 7:31 am
Allison O’Neill
I definitely will remember that one.
Thanks for the comments, that is very interesting, and I think very relevant. Basically, you are promoting a first line customer satisfaction survey with staff, and using their insight to improve customer relationships. Nice
Brian
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