Are you responsible for customer satisfaction in your company? Are you trying to implement an effective way of improving your customers’ perceptions? One of the key steps you must complete is choosing which questions to include in the survey to achieve meaningful and useful results.
Although I can’t pretend to tell you exactly what to include in your survey, the purpose of this article is to orient you towards the key ingredients. Hopefully you will at least be able to use it to check and see if you’ve left out anything important. At the end, I will also give you a recommendation which will boost significantly the return on your surveying investment.
Every well-structured customer satisfaction survey should include the following five basic types of questions:
1. General Evaluation Questions
2. Specific Departmental Questions
3. Effectiveness Questions
4. Customer Experience Questions
5. Profile Questions
It is important to include at least two or three general evaluation questions in your survey. One of the most important results of the process should be the identification of factors which maintain a high correlation con overall satisfaction. These factors are where you should expend the greatest effort. Questions like “What is your overall opinion of our performance?” or “Did we adequately meet your expectations?” permit us to establish these correlations.
The meat and potatoes of your survey are the detail questions. You should make an inventory of the “contact points” that your customers experience when they do business with you. Who do they talk to? Which departments are responsible for meeting their needs? For each of these contact points, you should design a specific question. If you run a hospital you might ask “How well did the nurse administer the iv?” or “Did your doctor keep you informed every day?”
Time is always of an essence. For this reason you should include questions to determine if your team is responding efficiently to your customer’s needs. This shows that you respect his or her time and want guarantee an efficient relationship. For example “Was the checkin process quick and easy?” or “Did you have to wait too long for us to take your order?”
The last type of valuation questions you should include center around your customer’s perception of doing business with you. These questions should clarify the impression that you are causing in your customer’s mind. Optimally they should enjoy working with you and believe that you provide a professional and friendly service. “Did we show interest in solving your problems?” and “Was our staff caring and concerned with your recuperation?” are examples of customer experience questions.
Last but not least you need to use your measurement system to build powerful customer profiles. This way you will be able to segment the collected opinions and isolate the groups of customers who are not perceiving adequate value. If you are a restaurant you might want to know “Did you come for business or pleasure?” or “How many times a week do visit our restaurant?” However a car dealership probably needs to ask “How often do you change your vehicle?” or “Which type of vehicle do you prefer to drive?”
Finally, you should try and make your surveys as specific as possible. Vague questions which don’t help you improve concrete aspects of your business are basically useless. Why would you ask, “Is our hotel conveniently located?” If not, are you planning on moving it? Meanwhile “Were the portion sizes adequate?” is a great question for a restaurant.
Since you’ve endured to the end of this article, I’d like to share with you a new and exciting solution which makes measuring customer satisfaction much easier. It has several characteristics which will help you reduce your costs and maximize your participation rates.
Called Gustometria, this system measures customer and employee satisfaction in realtime. Customers answer short surveys by touching the screens of the “gustometer” while they are waiting for their receipt or invoice. The whole process takes about a minute and the results are available immediately for analysis.
More importantly Gustometria incorporates a very sophisticated business intelligence system which will allow you to extract the maximum value from your survey data. You will be able to contrast your custom profile questions with the results of each valuation question. Gustometria also allows you to adapt your surveys on the fly an to structure your surveys in a way which assures high participation rates.
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.
Don’t hesitate to call Gustometria toll free at 1-877-448-7865.
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