Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Would you and your organisation like to;

• Improve Customer loyalty?
• Reduce churn?
• Increase sales?
• Benchmark one division's range of products against another?
• Encourage best practice?
• Be recognised for delivering excellent customer service?
• Become more customer centric?
• Create a dynamic change focus?

Without doubt the most realistic and successful way to do this is to simply survey the customer on how effective you are at satisfying their needs and make changes to the business based on the response.

Easier said than done. There have until now been four commonly used methods for finding out what business-customers think of their suppliers. Each method has its own merits and problems.

1. Mobilise the sales force.

Survey the customer face to face by your in house staff. Information gets filtered and is therefore unreliable. For example the last time you had a bad meal/service in a restaurant and you were asked "Everything OK"? Did you reply "Yes, Thank you".Did you go back given the situation.

Psychologically this method just does not work. Even with exceptionally well trained representatives, one cannot remove the element of saving face when answering direct and sometimes embarrassing questions. At worst case this method can lead you into a false sense of security as the answers tend toward the "everything is OK" response.

2. Hand the project over to a call centre.

Get a response rate of 20-40%. Risk having the interview "led" by the interviewer. Ask only a few questions as time is an issue. Client becomes frustrated as the interview takes longer than anticipated. Answers are directed at completion in a rapind manner rather than accurate and valuable feedback.

3. Use some kind of "emerging" technology (WAP, e-mail, sms or web-based).

Convenient, cheap. Get less than 8% response. Spam filters get in the way etc. Can be boring and repetitive.

4. Send out a paper-based questionnaire.

Get a 5-15% response. Half of those will be delighted to endorse your firm. The other half are giving you one last chance to get everything right. The silent majority remain silent. Questions on validity need to be addressed.

There is an alternative

Paramount Learning utilise a novel and fun way of engaging clients to actually respond to a customer satisfaction survey with an accurate reflection of their perception of your organisation as a supplier. Fun, easy and taking less than five minutes to complete our survey ensures a high response rate and excellent data aquisition upon which one can develop a program to increase sales and reduce customer churn.

Not only is this probably the most clinical method available for capturing opinions, it has also been described as the most cost-effective, dynamic and actionable business-to-business customer satisfaction survey available, with an average response rate of 72%. This high response rate is based on posing between 36 and 60 relevant questions and statements to decision makers, coupled with an option to gather further written comments to a number of open questions.

In today's competitive marketplace, understanding how your client rates your performance as a supplier is invaluable in creating true competitive advantage. Studies have consistently shown that a "Totally Satisfied" customer is as much as ten times more likely to buy again than a customer who is merely "Somewhat Satisfied." Consequently, many companies have resorted to some kind of customer satisfaction survey to find out what their customers really want and need.

The dilemma is how can a company open up lines of communication and obtain vital commercial knowledge without annoying its customers and undermining the business relationship? Paramount Learning make this possible. Imagine customers commenting on how easy it was to engage in your survey and this is further confirmed by a response rate in excess of 70%. With our customer satisfaction survey you will prevent churn by being proactive in your relationships with your customers and most importantly take action on those attention areas in the confidence that it will impact positively on your sales performance. We facilitate a workshop clearly defined at creating a list of follow up actions that are implemented as part of the program.

Our Customer Satisfaction Survey was created in 1989 to help companies increase sales and customer loyalty by making them aware of previously unknown, but correctable areas of customer dissatisfaction. By December 2006 over 82,000 customer satisfaction surveys had been delivered in 59 countries using 21 languages. We now have sufficient data to be able to benchmark the results against the norm providing you with a clear indication of where you rank against other organisations.

Let Paramount Learning help you achieve excellence in customer satisfaction. Contact us now to find out more. We are so confident that we can help improve customer satisfaction and sales that we offer a money back guarantee on our programs.

Download example customer satisfaction survey 2.6MB

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