Six Ways To Get The Most Out Of Client Satisfaction Surveys

Editor's Note:  The following is a guest Marketing Mulligans post written by Caty Germon, managing director of  PUBLICeye, a leading online survey technology company headquartered in the United Kingdom and with offices around the world. This article, which originally appeared on Ragan's PR Daily, discusses how businesses can poll their clients to improve operations, relationships, and most importantly, the bottom line. You can follow PUBLICeye on Twitter at @mypubliceye.

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A client satisfaction survey can help you find out, but it’s not something that you can rush. Get the survey right, and you will gain insights to help you expand your business; get it wrong, and you will, at best, be completely ignored or, at worst, annoy your clients and seriously damage the reputation of your brand and business.

The stakes are high, but the rewards can be great. With that mind, here are six simple steps for getting the most out of your client satisfaction survey.

1. Identify Your Objectives

Before you start, it’s important to understand what you want to get out of your survey. In which areas are you specifically looking for feedback? What information is really going to help you compete in your marketplace? How will this help your business?

Having a clear set of objectives enables you to understand the questions you need to ask as opposed to what you’d like to know. It will also help avoid “death by data” when you start poring over the results.

2. Avoid Leading Questions...

This is crucial. Although asking leading questions can be tempting—everyone wants to hear great things about their business—it will waste your time, because you won’t glean any useful insights. Worse, you’ll waste your clients’ time. Your survey needs to come from a neutral space and allow respondents to form their own opinions.

3. ...And Don't Try to Get Away with Leading Answers, Either

Make sure that wherever your answers are on a scale that they’re evenly weighted, rather than presenting more positive options than negative, or vice versa. There should also be a midpoint so users can answer “neither agree nor disagree” or “no opinion either way.”

When you have a list of answers, watch the order in which you give each answer. If the top answers in the list are always the ones how you’d like people to choose, you’ll end up with skewed — and useless — results. Avoid this fate by choosing a survey platform that can make the answers random.

4. Write in the Tone and Language of Your Audience 

We all know what’s like: You start a survey that asks long-winded questions full of business-speak, and your brain feels like it’s wading through mud. Nobody wants that. Make sure you set your tone and language to the audience that will receive the survey. Remember that they’re giving up their time to help you; the survey should be as pleasant an experience as possible.

5. Don’t Forget the Branding

So many companies send surveys without giving even a fleeting thought to how it looks and how it fits with their branding. This is a big mistake. Your surveys should be given the same attention in terms of design and branding as any other element of marketing. If you don’t, it could damage people’s perception of your brand.

6. Before You Go Live, Make Sure You Test, Test, and Test Again

Imagine this scenario: You’ve got your captive audience; they’re halfway through the survey, and then the page jams, or a question has no responses, or the logic doesn’t work, and they can’t proceed. A survey that doesn’t work, for whatever reason, can destroy all the hard work you’ve put into it; that’s why it is crucial to test with a selected group of people.

Also, when you receive your test results, run reports and analyze them as if they were the real thing. This way you can see whether the questions you asked give you exactly the kind of information you need. Plus, you can make any necessary adjustments before going live.

© Copyright 2012 Ragan Communications, Inc.

Post-Sale Marketing: 10 Ways To Continue Customer Conversations

Editor's Note: The following is a guest Marketing Mulligans post written by Eric Groves, senior vice president of Constant Contact, which first appeared on AmEx OPEN Forum. Constant Contact helps small organizations grow their businesses by building stronger customer relationships via easy-to-use, affordable communications tools that engage casual customers, members, prospects, and passionate customers. In this excellent piece, Groves explains several important ways for firms to enhance their relationships with their respective customers AFTER the sale is over — an often-overlooked, but critical, component of the marketing process.
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For too many small business owners, once a customer leaves your shop or your service is completed, the conversation ends. But it doesn’t need to stop there. If you can continue those threads of dialogue online through e-mail, newsletters, and social media, you have a better chance of building stronger ties to your customer base. This, of course, will lead to repeat business.

The trick is to find the balance between providing your customers with relevant information, while not abusing your online access to them by trying to sell them more “stuff.”

Whether you have infrequent in-person contact with customers or you see them every week — or even every day — the No. 1 rule in moving in-person conversations online is to consistently provide relevant information to the customer that will improve at least one aspect of their lives.

So just how do you connect with those customers and engage them in both the real and virtual worlds? First, you need to get their permission to contact them via e-mail; do that by asking at the point of sale, on your website, on social media, at events -- wherever you interact. Then create content that will engage and help your customers, allowing you to be seen as a partner, not just a vendor.

Engaging customers in more meaningful dialogue that’s focused on them will inevitably lead to longer-term, more profitable customer relationships. If you’re committed to turning today’s business transactions into actually connecting with customers, here are 10 things to keep in mind.

1. Treat the receipt of an e-mail address like a customer pact where you agree that it will never be abused, shared, or taken for granted.

2. Never send unsolicited communications.

3. Always provide free expert advice in your newsletter.

4. Never use the communication as a substitution for advertising.

5. Don’t overstay your welcome: Be brief, be relevant, and be gone.

6. Use compelling, yet not misleading, subject lines to prompt subscribers to open the communication or to follow the online stream.

7. Start a conversation that begins and ends with your customers. Think ‘you, you, you’ and not ‘me, me, me.’ Then point them to an online destination where they can share their thoughts and opinions.

8. Strike a balance in your frequency of communications to gently remind customers of your products and/or services, yet allow enough time in between to actually be missed.

9. Track the readership using tools that provide insight into opt-outs, unopened e-mails and the like to assess the interest of your customers.

10. Provide information that illustrates your expertise that your subscribers don’t already know and can’t easily find elsewhere.

Remember: If you focus on the relationship and engaging customers in meaningful ways, the sales will automatically follow.

© 2011 American Express Company. All rights reserved.

The Art...And Subtle Science...Of Customer Acquisition

So I was in a lengthy meeting with a hot prospect the other day, and I heard the most fascinating story which provides some cautionary customer acquisition lessons for any business owner.

During our conversation, this gentleman spun me a wild, but unbelievably true, yarn as to how he landed in his new office space, which he's occupied for just three short weeks. As the story goes, he was initially interested in a 25% larger suite in a beautiful commercial building just up the road. This particular space was ideal for this business owner, who is in the professional services sector. The exterior of the building is elegantly appointed, with lush, well-attended landscaping, plentiful parking, and easy access from the main road. The unit's interior is spacious, with ample natural lighting, large 40-foot windows on either side that afford gorgeous mountain views, and sufficient space for multiple associates to have their own individual private offices. And the rate per square foot was well below market value for this area. A real find, right?

Not quite. The previous tenant, with the property owner's permission, had used the suite as an industrial space to repair cars and motorcycles. As a result, the suite is overwhelmed with exhaust fumes and the pervasive odor of motor oil; the carpet is destroyed and must be replaced; and the lighting is not optimal. Other issues, too many to list here, exist as well. In his negotiations with the landlord, my contact offered to make the necessary improvements to the space prior to moving in, at his own expense. The conditions? The landlord had to agree to reimburse him, interest free, on a monthly basis over the term of the five-year lease, and knock down the monthly rent a little bit. Without hesitation, the property owner refused to negotiate further and curtly turned down the offer, even though there was virtually no risk on his end. Rather than make a counteroffer, he killed the deal outright and forced my contact to go elsewhere. Most importantly, the space in question still remains vacant, leaving the landlord without a long-term tenant, AND without all the cash flow that comes along with that arrangement. And as detective Peter Falk in "Colombo" used to say, "Oh, yeah...and one more thing:" the landlord is also stuck with an unrenovated, unusable suite that no one will EVER rent until the aforementioned issues are rectified...at his OWN cost.

So what are the lessons learned here when it comes to customer acquisition? Let's review:

1. Always be willing to negotiate.
Negotiations are a critical component of most business transactions, and they're an every-day fact of life in the business world. If you're not willing to negotiate, or to improve your negotiation skills, then you probably shouldn't be in business. In this case, the property owner could still have negotiated a very favorable deal with my contact...if he had just been willing to entertain alternative contract terms. Instead, he lost a valuable customer.

2. Remain flexible.
This is related to Lesson #1. There's nothing worse than working with business professionals who are rigid and unwilling to bend...even a little bit. It's a surefire indicator of other issues, and oftentimes a lack of flexibility can be a deal breaker, as it was in this case. As we all know, the customer is not always right, but we should still act like it (at least most of the time). It's part of a creating and maintaining an excellent customer-centric approach, which usually leads to improved reputation, more leads, and greater sales down the road. And, here's the kicker: customers like working with companies that are flexible and service-oriented.

3. Keep your reputation in mind.
Speaking of reputation, it won't be long before word about this property owner's business practices gets around. The unwillingness to negotiate and be flexible could very well impact his ability to secure new tenants, now and in the future. That's no good, especially if you're in the property management business, and when your livelihood is directly tied to collecting lease payments each month. And just to be clear, there's nothing wrong with having a reputation for being a tough negotiator, as long as one is fair. Obviously, this is certainly more preferable than being known for not negotiating at all.

4. Remember the time value of money.
The time value of money dictates that, all things being equal, it is better to have money now rather than later. Why? You can do much more with the money if you have it now because over time you can earn more interest on your money. And that is what this property owner should have considered. It's far better to have a loyal, contractually-obligated paying tenant now than to wait 6, 12, or 18 months to secure another another one for the same space. Simply put, the landlord blew it.

Acquiring new customers or clients is difficult enough without throwing these monkey wrenches into the works. Customer acquisition is both an art and subtle science, but if you recognize this delicate balance, you can take the steps necessary to appropriately manage leads and then convert those into loyal customers.