How can surveys grow you business?

Does My Business Really Need To Monitor Customer Satisfaction, and how can surveys grow your business?

Most entrepreneurs grow their businesses by forming strong relationships with their customers. As their business increases in size and more staff are recruited to look after sales, these personal relationships can become difficult to maintain with the same frequency. Even so, some entrepreneurs may be of the view that customer satisfaction surveys are a case of ‘locking the stable door after the horse has bolted.’ This view implies the focus, when bandwidth is limited in a small business, should be instead on ensuring the customer is happy whilst they are receiving the product and service, rectifying any issues at the time, rather than sending out post purchase surveys. Rectification from survey actions might come too late. For others the block is, as their businesses scales, developing the skillsets required to build effective and professional looking surveys that compliment the business’s brand and marketing. Finally finding the time to analyze and develop meaningful metrics that can be acted upon can be a challenge. Survey results run the risk of becoming a set of graphs that are no more than glanced at weekly before moving on to the next task. 

This blog tackles all of these issues  to explain how introducing effective customer metrics for improved customer centricity is an essential component of business success. 

Different Methods of Measuring Customer Satisfaction 

There are numerous metrics and mechanisms that may be already in place within a business to measure customer satisfaction. The sales forecast will indicate customer demand, whether that is rising or falling. How many referrals the business is receiving and customer retention rate (or repeat orders) can help understand performance against competitors, who could also be responding to customer feedback and enhancing their offers.   

Monitoring the number of complaints and associated metrics such as response time, resolution rate etc. might provide at least some initial insight as to trends in customer satisfaction. Equally monitoring compliments / positive feedback can be important but is only really of value where there exists a formalized system to do so and ad hoc comments are of little value in terms of a metric. 

Customer surveys provide a formalized and consistent route to understand and accurately quantify customer feedback. In relation to earlier view that it is better to invest this effort in ensuring good customer service when the customer is present, this should be prerequisite in any successful business. Survey feedback can better direct that customer contact effort, measure it, ensure consistency and better direct it to focus on the elements of the service or product that really matter to the customer. 

Building Effective Customer  Feedback Surveys 

For many businesses the first hurdle to building an effective customer experience (CX) mechanism is the time, skills, costs and effort involved in setting up the system and building a survey that, when customers receive it, they will respond to. There are a wide range of survey tools available and those aimed at professional market researchers are often complex and can be difficult to learn how to use in smaller organizations where time and expertise are more limited. For small and medium-sized organizations a survey tool which offers a range of standard expert designed survey templates that can easily be adapted to the business requirements is important. Tools that are cost effective, easy to use and can have a customer survey design built and emailed to all customers in less than an hour are possible, even for those who have never before sent out a survey. The challenge remains however on what specific additional questions to ask and how to tailor the survey. Any survey is only as good as the questions it asks and trying to guess what elements the customer values most about a product or service can be difficult even for the most experienced staff since it can vary from customer to customer. Finally, once survey results are received, if all questions receive an equally mid-range rating, how can you then prioritize the business actions that will have the most impact on customer satisfaction? 

CX Metrics 

Whilst there are many metrics in use including Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES) monitoring metrics is only of value where actionable insight can be developed to steer the business in the correct direction. Most small and medium-sized businesses will have limited resources for complex data analysis and interpretation. It is therefore important that the tool offers final metrics and insight that is truly useful in driving the business forwards and making it more customer centric. 

Conclusion 

There are many customer experience and satisfaction survey tools available and whilst reviewing options any organization should consider the resources they have available and the real desired goals of the research. Implementing a mechanism to measure and monitor customer satisfaction is a means to an end rather than the actual end goal. The focus should be on the best way to continuously take customer feedback data and translate that into meaningful insight that can guide business decisions to make the business more customer centric and improve retention ultimately growing turnover and profitability. 

PxidaCX has been built specifically for small and medium-sized organizations with these factors in mind. Expert designed customer survey templates can be quickly and easily modified to suit requirements. Colors, font and logos can be changed appropriately to produce beautiful on-brand surveys that render perfectly on any device without the need for any specialist graphic design skills.  

Perhaps most importantly, to solve the problem discussed earlier of knowing what to ask about and prioritize what improvements would be most valued by customers, PxidaCX’s  unique proprietary ‘What Matters Most’ survey type can be integrated into any customer survey to understand what really matters to customers, and how the business currently performs for those things the customer values most. It provides the business with clear recommendations on what actions to take to improve customer retention, increased turnover and profitability, a feat no other customer feedback tool making claims of “actionable insight” can match. 

Reach out for a demonstration of PxidaCX on [email protected]