Flexibility plays a major role in your relationship with clients. Effectively relating to your customers and pinpointing their needs will help you to build a loyal customer base. In addition, it will earn you a reputation as an invaluable and useful resource. Surveys are an excellent way to find out how your customers feel about the products or services you provide. A survey will also tell you what your customers expect of you and your company, and clarify how well you’re performing in their eyes.
If done correctly, it’s easy to get impressive results without spending a lot of money. However, consider any amount of money spent on surveys an investment to the success of your business. The following nine tips can help you create an effective survey.
Make sure your objectives are clear.
A strong survey must have a clear focus (i.e. get response to a new product or service; learn why once loyal customers are now shopping elsewhere). Spell out, right from the beginning, why you’re surveying your customers, and you will get results that can help you make your business more effective.
Give customers reason to respond.
You’re asking your busy customers to take time out of their lives to help you out, consider this when creating the survey. Some experts suggest including discount coupons for certain products or services with the survey as an incentive. Another option is to offer some sort of percentage discount off their next order, 10 percent is enough to thank them for their participation. This is particularly useful if you’re trying to gather new customers with the survey.
Customers like to feel involved in the companies they patronize. It’s a good idea to have a simple sentence at the top of the survey indicating that you’re using the outcome of this survey to evaluate current policies and products or possibly to create new ones. This will very clearly demonstrate to your customers that you value their business, as well as their input. Since you’re a home business, and don’t have a customer service department for your clients to complain to, a survey may provide your customers a unique opportunity to vent about problems you are totally unaware of. By allowing them to discretely inform you of areas where you don’t quite meet their expectations, you may prevent them from turning to your competitors.
Make sure to ask the important questions.
If you’re asking your customers to fill out a survey, make sure it’s relevant to how they interact with your business. Don’t concern them with issues that don’t pertain to them, such as hiring, promotion or anything else not directly involved with the services provided to them. Make sure that each question is important to your customers’ needs, not your internal management. Plus, try to keep your survey interesting and, if possible, fun. Make the survey creative and original, without wasting your customers’ time.
Keep it short.
Don’t waste your customers’ time by making your survey too long. Ideally, it should contain 10-12 questions neatly spaced on one page.
Use easy-to-answer questions.
Questions that are direct, simple and brief are the easiest to answer. Multiple choice questions such as scaled questions (strongly agree, moderately agree, disagree, don’t care) and yes/no questions are the easiest to answer. Avoid long, wordy or multi-part questions. An example of a good question: How well do you feel our services fulfill your needs? Have your respondents state their answers on a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent).
Get their opinions too.
For every question, have a “Comments” line, encouraging your customers to express opinions – both positive and negative. A question such as, “If this were your business, what would you do differently?” is a clever one to ask. If respondents feel strongly about the issue, pro or con, there’s an excellent chance they’ll answer it well.
Make it easy.
The easier you make it for people to respond, the more response you’ll get. Self-mailers, such as postcards, are highly recommended because they require less paper and postage costs. The next best is to include an addressed pre-stamped envelope.
Make it confidential.
Customers that deal with you on a regular basis may not feel comfortable complaining to you directly about you. Make sure to make the survey completely confidential, and make sure that your clients know that. This will help to increase your chances of getting the most honest answers possible.
Survey your best customers.
Loyal customers are really the ones whose opinions you value most. Don’t think you have to mail a lot of surveys to get valuable information. If you have a large amount of valuable customers, consider sampling enough to give you a varied result pool from which to work. A 50 percent return is considered excellent; 30 percent is considered good and 10 percent is dismal.