3 Things to remember when creating customer satisfaction surveys

As a business that relies on the support received from your customer base, ensuring that your customers remain satisfied and loyal is your main task. Measuring their satisfaction with the use of surveys will always be a strong source of customer feedback that you can use in improving your services. With an effective strategy, your customer satisfaction survey program can shape your business into an ideal customer-centric company with a strong customer foothold.

If you or your outsourced call center in the Philippines are currently implementing a customer satisfaction survey program, but you think it s not giving you enough basis for measurable changes, now is the time to re-build your program and come up with better customer satisfaction surveys. Here are some tips that you can use in improving your survey program:

1. Establish objectives

Before you start making changes in your survey program, step back and reflect on what you really want to measure and why it’s important to your business. A survey program without any clear purpose will lack direction in terms of content. You must also set attainable and comprehensive objectives. What do you want to learn from the questions you formulate? How can the data be of value to your services? Most surveys aim to gather evaluative data related to the following areas:

•   Overall customer experience

•   Specific products or services

•   Customer service

•   Sales support

•   Order or membership cancellation

2. Be proactive

Don’t wait for undesirable customer experiences to happen before you start implementing your survey program. Instead of being reactive, your surveys must allow you to anticipate possible areas of concern and act on them as early as possible.

Your survey results must enable you to set benchmarks on how customers should realistically rate your service areas. This allows you to be sensitive to customer opinions that deviate from the normal customer response. Surveys must therefore be done on a regular or ongoing basis rather than as just a reaction to problems that you encounter.

3. Follow a survey schedule

Since surveying must be done on a regular basis, setting a schedule for it is a good way of ensuring that your business sticks to it. Your survey forms must therefore be crafted ahead of time so that they can be tested to a sample group and modified accordingly.

Your survey schedule must depend on your business operations and how often your service areas are explored by customers. Some businesses conduct surveys monthly, while others do it more often or just during new product launches. Nevertheless, the schedule must be based on your company s calendar of activities and must coincide with your business improvement events and programs.

You must keep in mind that your customers will always have opinions. Are you doing something to listen to them? The feedback you gain from them can guide your business in becoming better over time. After all, the time and effort you allot in developing and maintaining a customer satisfaction program can guarantee you valuable insights from the same people who keep your brand alive.