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.

__________________________________________________

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.

How To Restore Confidence In Your Customers When You’ve Failed

Editor's Note: The following is another guest Marketing Mulligans post written by Mickie Kennedy, founder and president of eReleases, a cost-effective electronic press release distribution service, and a widely-regarded and well-respected PR professional who maintains the company's popular PR Fuel blog. How do you recover when you've made a mistake of some sort that has obviously angered your customers? It's a very important question that few businesses know how to address effectively. Find out here.

__________________________________________________

But is there any coming back from a huge faux pas like the one you’ve committed? Your customers are likely cursing your name and are unlikely to forgive you anytime soon. How do you go about restoring confidence in your company and brand?Well, you goofed. Big time. The Twitterverse is ablaze with anger, your Facebook feed is filled with seething rage, and the national news has even given the story airtime. Your face is red and soon your profit margins will be, too! Unless you do something.

Time

For one, it’s best to remember that “anytime soon” mentioned above. Just because they may not be willing to give you a second (or third) chance right now, this may change in the future. So don’t lose your mind trying to bring them back over as soon as possible.

Right now, what you should be focusing on is getting your name back into good standing. This involves buckling down and getting to work figuring out ways to build goodwill. One way to get about this is to take into consideration what went wrong in the first place.

Was your big mistake lying to your customers? Then you need to find ways to show the world that you’re actually honest. Make sure to take the full blame for the lie first of all then go about orchestrating a campaign around “keeping promises.”

Did your product cause harm to some of your customers? Go out of your way to fix the situation, and then find some nonprofits to align yourself with to show you’re concerned with human interests.

Next Steps

When you feel the world has calmed down enough about your big goof (and it may not take long…the world moves fast these days), it’s time to start winning your old customers back. Assuming you’ve done everything in the previous step, your company’s name should be losing its tarnish.

Those old customers will remember when they were wronged, though. This won’t just go away with time. This is especially true if a rival company has already snatched them up. You’ll need something special to win those folks back.

One way to do this, depending on the age of your company, is to instill a feeling of “nostalgia” in those former customers. Remind them all the good things about your business and what you can do for them. Also, tell them what the plan is for your business in the future if they switch over.

The main thing, though, is to let everyone know that your big error will never happen again! Above all else they want to feel like you have their best interests in mind. At all times keep in mind they may be looking for ways you’re messing up again – don’t give them that reason. Mind everything you do and every word you say and you may just be able to win most of your formerly offended customers back into your confidence.

How would you go about restoring your customers’ confidence during a crisis?

© 1998-2011 eReleases® (MEK Enterprises LLC) All Rights Reserved.