If it’s been a while – or if you’ve never surveyed your clients or customers – it’s time to put that right.

Wondering why you should survey your customers? Here are four good reasons:

1. To better understand where you are: What do your customers REALLY think about your products or services? You won’t know if you don’t ask. The feedback you get about different aspects of your business will help you set future goals, make more informed business decisions and determine where you can improve.
2. To better understand your competition: Your customers probably know who your competitors are and they’re also probably familiar with their products and services. Find out what they like or don’t like about them and how or why they choose what to buy.
3. To build loyalty:  Customers like being asked for their opinions. Plus, if a customer has a problem and you don’t know about it, a survey gives you a chance to learn about the issue and fix it (or at least address it). Nothing builds loyalty like making an effort to resolve problems for your customers.
4. To get ideas: Your customers may have ideas that would improve or add to your current products or services. Is there something new they’d like you to offer? You just might get an idea that could bring in additional revenue from existing customers or expand offerings to attract new ones.

“Sure,” you may be saying, “I understand why customer surveys are valuable, but I don’t have the time or the budget to create and mail out a survey to all my customers.”

Good news: There are many free online survey tools available such as SurveyMonkey, QuestionPro and Zoomerang, so you can create a customer survey quickly and easily to email out to your list. (Don’t have a good customer email list? Contact us about ways to build one.)

Of course, you can also create, print and mail a survey to customers (or send a postcard with a link to an online survey), but this definitely costs more money. Asking customers to mail, email or fax their results back to you requires more time and effort on their part, which may reduce your response rate. If you do decide to use a print version, consider sending it along with monthly invoices or other mailings to reduce overall cost.

Suggestions for surveys

If you use one of the popular online survey tools, you can take advantage of their research and test results to help guide your questions. Here are a few tips to help you design your questionnaire:

• Determine your goals before you write your questions. What do you most want to learn?
• Make your questions specific and direct. If you can, ask questions that give you information on how to improve. Also be sure to include at least one ‘open-ended’ question so customers can write about their thoughts, ideas or experiences. In general, it’s best to keep your survey short. Customers are usually willing to spend 5-10 minutes on a survey, but seeing a huge list of questions will turn many people off.
• Consider offering an incentive for completing the survey, such as having a prize draw for participants, etc. Customers are more likely to respond when there’s something in it for them, so your overall response rate will improve.

Need help setting up an online survey for your customers? Want some assistance in analysing results and putting an action plan in place? Contact us!

Image courtesy of LeadPro