4 Tips to a Better Customer Satisfaction Survey

Whether we are talking about a small family-operated business, a national company or an international corporation, they all share one priority: satisfied customers! Customer experience management and high customer satisfaction play an important role for the success of a company. 

Not only for turnover reasons you should know your customers and what makes them happy. A satisfied customer does free marketing for you. Their positive word of mouth can emotionally and cognitively affect other potential customers and lead them to prefer your service or product over others. Moreover, a satisfied customer can contribute greatly to the satisfaction and motivation of your employees. This creates a positive circle because only a motivated employee can really satisfy your customer, especially in the service sector. Through measuring customer experience you will get a lot of valuable information in the first place. A significant side effect is that your customer will feel important and worthy because you appreciate their opinion. This can essentially foster their loyalty.

To carry out a successful customer satisfaction survey, make sure you remember the following: 

1. Be clear and specific – Do not let your customers guess what you mean with a question. Tell them in detail. So instead of asking “How was the service?” ask “Was the service on time?” or instead of “good”, use words like “efficient” or “helpful”. Ask only one thing in one question, for instance the question: ”Was the service on time and friendly?” should be divided in two separate questions.
2. Ask enough questions – You will have much greater outcome if you in addition to some general customer satisfaction questions also ask questions about other factors affecting the customer experience. And remember to include enough demographical questions, so that you can compare different customer groups when you analyse the results.
3. Keep it short –Even though it is important to ask enough questions, you should create a layout that makes the customer satisfaction survey questionnaire look short for the respondent. For example use horizontal answer options instead of vertical ones. You can also easily import certain demographical information into Webropol, so that the respondents don’t have to type in information you already know about them.
4. Have an action plan – Have an action plan describing how you are going to use the insights you got through your customer survey to create a better customer experience. That is why it is very important to do continual surveys instead of only once or twice a year. This way you can also control whether your implementations are fruitful or you might need to change your direction.

So far you might have thought that measuring customer satisfaction is a time consuming and complicated task. No! There are some really professional tools on the market that make this process easy, fast and fun to do! Imagine an online software that only needs a few seconds to create illustrative charts of your customers’ feedback and even a PowerPoint presentation for you. All you have to do is put in the questions you would like to ask and send them to your customers.

It is at least worth a thought, if not essential for you to start engaging in online customer satisfaction surveys today. Asking for the opinion of your customer brings along lots of valuable information, free marketing, staff motivation, higher turnover and long term success! 

 
   

Laura Buchholz

MA International Development
Customer Support and Training Manager

Webropol Germany

Quality Management: a powerful transformational philosophy to success

Today, leaders are under pressure to create “super-enterprises” with the ability to react intuitively and where creativity, learning and collaboration are the cornerstones for enhancing the staying power of growth organizations. If today’s leaders are required to be strong, inspiring, and effective then the dilemma, corporations are faced with is, how are tomorrow’s leaders groomed? Focusing on quality seems to gain ground in the significance list in the answer to that question.

The implementation of a quality management system can bring beneficial results to a company; superior financial and non-financial performance, improved competitiveness and effectively realizing business strategies. When properly deployed, a company has productive and relatively happy employees, increased efficiency, on-time deliveries and all sorts of other desirable outcomes.

Quality should be adopted as a mind-set and not as a complex and difficult to understand methodology with many rules. This is why creating and adopting a culture based on quality within the company is the starting point. The target should be the abortion of old way of thinking and focusing on building up new habits based on quality management principles and practices. In a quality based working environment, every organization must address the following 3Ps: purpose, processes and people.

• Purpose: People just do the things that are “given” or they act in a similar way with other employees. They do not realize the reason for doing so or if there is an alternative to what they are doing. So the answer to the question “why is this getting done in this way”, the most probable answer will be “because this is the way we do things around here”. It is essential to match individual values with organizational culture because a culture of “shared meaning or purpose” results in actions that help the organization achieve collective goals. An organization will operate more productively as a whole when key values are shared among the majority of its members and visions and goals are clearly defined and communicated.

• Processes are a set of procedures which are followed within a company and ensure that the deliverables fit with the purpose. Once the purpose is defined the processes are undertaken in order to measure and report the quality of the outcome. Processes need to be clearly specified, even better documented, and continuously monitored and improved.

• People:  The development and deployment of a human resource plan within the organization aims in meeting its goals and achieving excellence through people. Business owners should, by all means, foster and support an environment that encourages and enables people to reach their full potential so as to ensure that their employees are productive and eager to do the best job possible--this is especially true during today's challenging economic times. Yet every industry and every organization has people who simply do not produce work in the quality that they are capable of providing. When it comes to evaluating potential contributors keep in mind these two important things; selecting for attitude and training for skills.

Quality measurement and control is of particular importance to be considered by all managers and ways for the quality to be measured is through customer, employee or evaluation surveys and end-use customers´ complaints so as to ensure the fulfillment of given requirements. At this point, the presence of management control systems (MCS) needs to be stressed out along with their ability to produce the data required for the analysis.  

Athanasia Athanasopoulou  

M.Sc. Total Quality Management

Operations Project Manager/Analyst

Webropol Sweden

Do you know what knowledge work is?

Challenges and even major failures in large knowledge management initiatives prompt us to move the focus on individual level and to ask: What is knowledge work, really?

A master’s thesis was conducted in co-operation with Webropol with the aim at defining what knowledge work is, since that’s imperative for an in-depth and holistic understanding of knowledge economy.

Problem solving at the center
The thesis, done by Mr. Lauri Nurmilaukas at Aalto University School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland, defines problem solving as the most important task for any knowledge worker.

Peter F. Drucker and Fritz Machlup are the two major and influential thinkers who originally coined the term knowledge work in the US back in the 50’s, but conceptual development has been unsatisfactory.

In addition and in line with the basic function of problem solving, knowledge work requires a set of individual skills.

As the amount of information and knowledge has risen dramatically, practitioners have listed tools and ways to control and manage that. But from a more holistic perspective, this tool-driven view is too narrow. Instead, we must craft the skills from a cognitive and social basis.

One interesting concept is crowdsourcing or wisdom of the crowd, where the collective mind is wiser than the individual. There are intriguing studies showing that, for example, sales forecasting is more accurate made by group of independent people instead of conventional forecasting. But to leverage this, company needs both cognitive and social skills but also the right technological tools to make it.

The importance of attitude
Finally, certain attitudes are important to knowledge work and they are the last component of the definition of knowledge work.

In short, it is crucial to both have the attitude to learn, and the attitude to share knowledge. These attitudes are crucial and they should not be neglected as trivial. Especially knowledge sharing is something that we automatically assume to happen even too much, but this misconception is the source of failures of many corporate knowledge management initiatives.

To sum up, knowledge work is about solving problems with acquired and analysed information. A set of cognitive and social skills support in that, and attitudes of learning and sharing are the basis of all knowledge work. If companies are to leverage knowledge properly, they should not forget the most fundamental level of knowledge economy, the knowledge workers themselves.

Full thesis available (in Finnish) at http://hsepubl.lib.hse.fi/FI/ethesis/id/12558.

Five Actions to Achieve Higher Response Rates in Online Research

The importance of a sufficient response rate in surveys cannot be emphasized enough, since it is crucial for the representativeness of your sample and thus affects the generalizability, reliability and validity of the entire survey. Yet researchers are struggling to achieve appropriate response rates in online research, since the amount of various survey invitations and spam e-mails sent to people is constantly increasing. Fortunately, there are several actions a researcher can do to increase the probability of survey recipients to answer a survey.

Action #1: Design a Relevant and Inspiring Invitation Letter

• Provide a short description of the survey topic; the survey description should be long enough to arouse the respondent’s curiosity, whereas a too long invitation letter might prevent the recipient from reading it at all. The more relevant the topic is for the recipient, the more likely he or she is to take the survey.
• Tell the respondent how he or she benefits from taking part in the survey. What will be done based on the research results? Will the survey takers be rewarded with an incentive? Are you going to publish a summary of the survey results for the respondents?
• Inform about respondent anonymity, especially in cases where the research topic is sensitive.
• Don’t forget to mention the survey length in minutes. All respondents are afraid of monstrous surveys that might take an hour to respond to.

Action #2: Provide a Good Incentive

• An incentive is a good and commonly used method to increase the respondents’ motivation to take part in a survey. A generally used incentive is a price draw, where respondents can win products, discount coupons or gift cards. It is also recommendable to tell the respondents where and when the names of lottery winners are published and how the winners are contacted.
• Make sure that the incentive is equally useful for all respondents. To ensure this, you can offer the winners a possibility to choose from several prize alternatives.
• A good incentive can increase the representativeness of your final sample, since it might also motivate neutral respondents to take part in a survey.

Action #3: Design a Short and Simple Questionnaire

• Remember to include a progress bar in your questionnaire; showing how much is left of the survey will minimize the risk of survey takers dropping out of the survey when it starts to feel long.
• Avoid too many matrix questions in a row, since this might exhaust the respondents; instead try to apply a pleasant mix of different question types.
• Don’t design surveys that take more than 20 minutes to answer.
• Create a visually appealing survey, preferably including the company logo and a nice-looking layout.

Action #4: Choose the Publishing Date Carefully

• The response rates will not be optimal if you send out the survey close to a weekend or when people are having their annual leaves. It is also recommendable to avoid sending out invitations in the afternoon when the respondents might be preparing to go home after work.

Action #5: Leave Enough Time for Field Work and Send out Reminders

• Although the majority of respondents tend to respond within a few days, a good minimum length for the field work is one to two weeks. This will ensure that also respondents checking their e-mails more seldom have the possibility to answer.
• It is advisable to send out at least one reminder after 4 field work days. The respondents’ mailboxes might be crowded with other incoming letters, and someone might not have noticed the invitation letter or might not have had time to reply when the invitation was sent out the first time.

Annika Herrgård, M.Sc. Econ (Marketing)

The author has worked in market research for several years and is now working at Webropol as Research Solutions Manager.