5 Effective Customer Satisfaction Survey Methods
In a world dominated by Net Promoter scores, it’s easy to forget there are other types of customer satisfaction surveys that, if performed and acted up on correctly, will drive up your Net Promoter scores.
July 21, 2017
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If you missed our guide to lost customer surveys, check it out here.
For all the hoopla and complexities of customer satisfaction surveys, ratings and competitive benchmarking, it’s tough to beat a lost customer survey.
If it’s done right, it can minimize customer attrition and maximize competitive performance.
Remember, a lost customer survey is not a win-back campaign, but gets at five key elements:
why your customer chose your company to begin with
why that customer left
which competitor you lost that customer to
why that customer chose the competitor
what it would take to win the customer back
Gap measurement surveys can help you identify your company’s performance in key areas and prioritize areas for improvement by asking customers how often you perform to their standards and how important those areas are to them.
You arrive at a gap score with areas of improvement by measuring the gap between your performance and customer expectations and multiplying it by the importance level.
The formula: (Expectations – Performance) X Importance
Example: If customers, on average, give customer service expectations score of 7, a performance score of 5 and an importance score of 5, the gap score for customer service is 10.
If customers, on average, give billing accuracy an expectations score of 7, a performance score of 6 and an importance score of 7, the gap score for billing is 5.
Tip: Since each question or area of focus requires three answers from your customer (performance, expectation and importance), clear instructions are vital to obtaining meaningful data.
For every supplier-customer relationship, there are moments of truth.
Some argue that any key contact point with a customer is a moment of truth, but they are not equal in terms of their impact on customer perception, satisfaction and, most importantly, retention.
For example, the first time a customer gets a bill for telecom or cloud services is a significant moment of truth – arguably the most important of them all.
Is the bill correct?
Is it understandable?
Is it priced as the customer was expecting?
Did the customer have service troubles and now is getting billed on top of those headaches?
Other key moments of truth can occur at contract renewal time, changes in pricing and plans, during software or network failures, or any major event that reasonably would cause a customer to reevaluate the relationship.
Like lost customer surveys, good moment-of-truth surveys are surprisingly simple.
To keep with our “first bill” example, you would call your customers, or in the case of large companies, a sample of customers, within three days of obtaining their bill and simply ask if they have any questions on their bill, if services have been running as expected and if there’s anything they need that is not being addressed.
In general, you want to survey the customer within 72 hours of any moment of truth, while the experience is fresh in their mind so you can drill right into the exact moment you need to evaluate.
Key customer surveys, as the name suggests, target ultra-valuable customers.
Like all things related to customer satisfaction, there is some debate over what constitutes a “key customer.”
For our purposes here, let’s make it simple and define a key customer as any customer that, if lost, would measurably impact your business in a negative way.
This may not even be your most directly profitable customer.
It could be a sizeable customer that significantly underpins your buying power, making your pool of smaller customers more profitable.
And your number of key customers may not be that significant.
Often, even among Fortune 500 companies, the number of truly vital customers is not as large as one might think.
More than one customer satisfaction expert has advised companies struggling to identify key customers to simply pick their 10 largest customers.
Key customer surveys, in essence, give customers the VIP treatment.
You check in with them often (such as hand-delivering their bill every month) and ask them if their needs are being met and you cater – within reason – to their needs in ways that you would not do for other customers.
If you’re thinking this sounds like it doubles as a customer service tool, you’re right.
These are customers whose outsized impact on company revenues and cost structures justifies the costs of making exceptions to operational norms and making special accommodations just for them.
One of the greatest challenges in customer satisfaction efforts is getting management buy-in, particularly when it comes to responding to survey findings.
Executives often have their own views of how a company is performing.
Here are three proven tips for helping to get executive buy-in on customer-retention efforts.
Let executives hear customers in their own words. Handing an executive a half-hour audio file of customers answering surveys can be a powerful tool in getting executives at all levels of the company to discard their own perceptions in favor of what customers are experiencing. Especially with lost customer surveys—there’s nothing like hearing why your customer left you and why they chose your competitor to get an executive team to wake up and smell the coffee.
Make the intangible tangible. Take your average revenues and profits by customer and apply them to your current attrition rate. Show your executive team what an even modest reduction in customer retention can generate in profits over the next three years.
Put key customers in context. An old but effective tool leading customer-retention experts use to get executives to understand the value of key customers is to take the revenues of each customer and multiply it by 10 to show the impact of that customer on revenues and operating costs if you can hold on to that customer for 10 years. This context helps business owners and managers quickly understand why it’s a worthwhile investment to cater to these customers. Bonus tip: Remind management that these are the customers your competitors are pursuing most aggressively and the more unique needs you meet for your key clients, the tougher it is for competitors to steal them away.
One of the greatest challenges in customer satisfaction efforts is getting management buy-in, particularly when it comes to responding to survey findings.
Executives often have their own views of how a company is performing.
Here are three proven tips for helping to get executive buy-in on customer-retention efforts.
Let executives hear customers in their own words. Handing an executive a half-hour audio file of customers answering surveys can be a powerful tool in getting executives at all levels of the company to discard their own perceptions in favor of what customers are experiencing. Especially with lost customer surveys—there’s nothing like hearing why your customer left you and why they chose your competitor to get an executive team to wake up and smell the coffee.
Make the intangible tangible. Take your average revenues and profits by customer and apply them to your current attrition rate. Show your executive team what an even modest reduction in customer retention can generate in profits over the next three years.
Put key customers in context. An old but effective tool leading customer-retention experts use to get executives to understand the value of key customers is to take the revenues of each customer and multiply it by 10 to show the impact of that customer on revenues and operating costs if you can hold on to that customer for 10 years. This context helps business owners and managers quickly understand why it’s a worthwhile investment to cater to these customers. Bonus tip: Remind management that these are the customers your competitors are pursuing most aggressively and the more unique needs you meet for your key clients, the tougher it is for competitors to steal them away.
In a world dominated by Net Promoter scores, it’s easy to forget there are other types of customer satisfaction surveys that, if performed and acted up on correctly, will drive up your Net Promoter scores.
The key to meaningful customer satisfaction surveys is to gain actionable information as you are gathering their opinions.
These five survey methods achieve this objective.
Khali Henderson is senior partner and Casey Freymuth is managing partner with BuzzTheory Strategies, a marketing and strategy consulting firm specializing in the channel.
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