Ask yourself these questions. Would you be willing to invest less than $100 and a few hours of your time – I don’t know how many, maybe 3, or 4 at most – if the return on that investment was a measurably better understanding of what your customers wanted from you? If you could come up with a few simple, but specific things to do that would raise the impression your customers have about you a couple of notches and make them want to buy more from you, wouldn’t you do that? If you could easily find out what customers were really thinking, wouldn’t you make the effort to do it?
Sometimes it’s hard to know the “hot buttons” that customers have. They’re usually patient, or at least polite. They walk away with their expectations having been met (kind of). They might come back and purchase from you again, if they don’t have to go too far out of their way. But, perhaps you didn’t knock the ball out of the park with that last interaction and are asking yourself how you can make it better next time, or at least have a little better feeling about what your customer was thinking.
Using online surveys can give you the answers you want to the questions above. You’ll need to be willing to invest a little time and effort in the process, but it’s inexpensive, there are several good sites out there that will make the process easy, both for you and your customers, and the dividends from doing it can be huge. You’ll have much better information about what your customers think of you, how they perceive your products, service, and process, and what they want to see you do in the future.
There are many web sites for surveying customers that can do just about anything that you want them to accomplish – I’ll compare a couple of them here, but reviewing all of these sites is far beyond the scope of this article. The costs of the ones I looked at range from $19.95 a month to thousands of dollars. Some allow you to use their process free for limited surveys (although, these may be sufficient for many things.) Some have sales and customer service reps available to help you; others limit their assistance to e-mail responses to your questions. Some require a software download, while you do everything online with others. Some are just simple online survey services, while others want to sell you consulting and other services.
Two of the sites I would encourage you to look at are Survey Monkey (“Intelligent survey software for serious primates of all species”) and Zoomerang. Survey Monkey charges $19.95 a month or $200 for a one year subscription and will let you use the site free for surveys limited to 10 questions and 100 responses. They collect and display responses to your survey that can be viewed online at any time, but their customer service is limited to e-mail communications. To get a quick overview of how their process works, I’d recommend doing the following. On the Home Page, look at the Survey Example, Report Example, and the Types Of Questions that you can ask. Then log in (they require a very minimum amount of information). Finally, go to New Survey on the menu bar at the top of the home page and set up a two, or three question survey to see how it works. (It won’t cost you anything.) You’ll want to look a little further, if you decide to use the service, but this will give you a good overview and will only take ten, or fifteen minutes.
Zoomerang charges $599 per year, but has its own free version for surveys limited to 10 days and 100 responses. (When I asked, I also found you can purchase the service for 1 month for $75.) They provide reporting that is similar to Survey Monkey’s, but have telephone customer support available for customers (which, presumably is why they charge more). Similar to Survey Monkey, you can look at several examples from the Home Page, but you’ll want to log in and create a survey to really see how it works; and, again, it’s a free process and won’t take that much time.
Online surveys can help you answer a variety of different questions – the only significant limitations are your imagination in figuring out what to use them for and the number of times you can ask any group (customers, suppliers, employees, etc.) to involve themselves. What did your customers think of their last interaction with you? Will they purchase from you again? What do they want you to do for them in the future? What are their perceptions of the products, or services that you provide and the service you give them? What can you do differently to improve the customer experience they have? How do they compare you to your competitors? The list is virtually endless.
Developing the actual survey questions will probably be the most challenging part of the process; there is both art and science to this and there is a whole industry built around conducting surveys and analyzing the results. But, if you know what you want to accomplish and you’re prepared to act on the information you get, a simple, very short survey can get you what you need to have. People are not going to be willing to spend more than 10 minutes completing a survey anyway and, if you limit the survey to between 10 and 20 questions, you can obtain information that you need to have without being obtrusive and asking people to spend a lot of their time doing it.
Too often businesses rely on their “gut feel” of what customers think of them. If you mean what you inevitably say about trying to provide value to your customers, you have to ask what it means to them! The key to creating value is not what you think it means, it’s finding out how customers define it. Using online surveys is not hard to do. You will have to invest a little of your time thinking through and setting up the process, but, when you do, you’ll have a feedback channel that customers will find easy to use and that will help you take some of the steps to increase your sales and provide genuinely better service to your customers.
About The Author:
Jim Deyo is the President of Business Advisor Online, an internet based service that provides small businesses with the ideas they need to grow and the resources they require to make the right decisions. As a former Sr. Vice President with a major banking institution, Jim worked extensively with small and medium sized companies and has over 30 years experience in commercial and consumer lending, accounting, finance, marketing, and strategic planning. Visit the website at http://www.businessadvisoronline.com and sign up for a six week free trial of the service, or e-mail Jim at jimdeyo@businessadvisoronline.com.
