Customer Satisfaction Survey for your Product and Service

What makes a company successful? Because of the diffusion of technology, during the last decade, there has been a profound change in how people choose their products. A provider´s success is, nowadays, determined not only by price and quality but also by the customer´s experience. Customer´s expectations change continuously. Thus, updating data about their level of satisfaction must be done very often.

Why is customer´s approval so important? In order to lead a company to success, you need customers´ approval. If selling a product or service makes you earn a certain amount of money, always remember that you can earn more if your clients are happy with their purchase. Researchers from the Financial Training Services claim that 96% of unsatisfied customers do not complain about their purchase, but 91% of them simply don´t buy the same product anymore.

On the other hand, a remarkable level of customer satisfaction will probably bring to customer loyalty and retention, other than assuring a stronger relation between company and client. A happy customer has a high potential value for your company´s business. An old client is harder to maintain then it is acquiring a new one, but at the same time, fidelity is more valuable. If a client is happy with the service or product they purchased, they tend to buy the same product or other products from the same company, again and again.

Company priorities: Keeping customers happy should be on the top to-do list of every firm. However, this matter is many times underestimated, often resulting in poor business performance. The aim of this article is to make clear what a customer satisfaction survey is, in which case you should use it and why finally explaining how to obtain a good and effective template.

WHAT IS A CUSTOMER SATISFACTION SURVEY?

1. Customer satisfaction is something hard to measure and to take useful data from. Sometimes, companies could just decide not to care about it because it takes time and resources to build an actually effective method. However, those companies should consider that a customer´s opinion could be very important for both internal and external decisions.
2. Customer Satisfaction Survey: A common method to obtain feedback is the Customer Satisfaction Survey. The Customer Satisfaction Survey is the classical approach for data collection of the client´s post-sale opinion. The results will illustrate with a certain precision customer´s expectations about your product and your company, representing an important index of success or potential problems depending on the result of the survey.
3. Understanding the business flow: Sometimes the sales grow, sometimes they fall and it is crucial to understand why. Even when the business is balanced, it might be that ´Product A´ is a good one and ´Product B´ needs, instead, improvement. By surveying, the company can find out details about their situation and make the best out of it. If the results show that ´Product A´ is making clients happy, the producers should focus on that one to keep the success it has. Whereas, if ´Product B´ is not satisfying the customers, it is clear that something has to be changed and, if the survey asks the right questions, it is possible to understand what exactly is not working the right way and then be able to fix it.

WHY SHOULD A COMPANY — USE SURVEYS?

Understand your strength and weakness: Unhappy customers are very unlikely to buy another product or service and even less to suggest the purchase to colleagues. In some cases, they might well also damage your company´s name by simply telling other people about their bad experience. Why should you strive to collect feedback from your customers? Because it helps you individuate both the strength and the weakness of your firm.

Negative feedbacks are as useful as the positive ones. In fact, while the positive ones suggest the successful areas to be reinforced, negative feedback will help you offer better products and services in the future, based on the critiques which directly come from whom had a non-pleasant experience. Once the results are collected, it is up to the company to take measures based on the analysis of the survey. It is not always easy to change what needs change, but surely it is worth the effort, considering that customers (the primary source of income) expect you to take action after they express their unhappiness about one or more aspects of the product or service they purchased. It can be said that there are three crucial phases to obtain customer satisfaction, linked to each other.

1. Firstly, you need to write a template for your survey.
2. Secondly, the survey has to be fulfilled by the customers.
3. Thirdly, the results have to be analyzed.
4. Once the problems are understood, the company should take action and fix them.

As you can see, the precondition of it all is having written an effective template for your survey. If the right questions are asked, the right answers will come out and the analysis will be accurate, leading the company to understand what they should focus on and what they should change in order to grow their business.

HOW DO I WRITE AN EFFECTIVE CUSTOMER SERVICE SURVEY?

Let´s now discuss the features that a Customer Service Survey shall have. There is a simple guideline to follow in order to write an effective one.

1. FEW AND SIMPLE QUESTIONS: A survey is usually composed of a modest number of standard questions (usually 5 to 10) asked with the aim of finding out people´s opinion about a product or service. The questions should be about precise matters, obviously tailored according to the company´s features: the client could be interviewed about the product (or service), its price, the service, the company, the delivery…etc.
2. SURVEYING MODE: Customers should be able to access the survey on handwritten forms, face to face or via phone, email or internet, both via computers and mobile devices. Understandably, every method has its pros and cons. For instance, the face-to-face interviews will let the customer build some kind of rapport with the interviewer and that makes him or her agree to stay longer, but hiring an interviewer has a high cost. At the same time, telephone interviews are low cost but some customers will be hard to get in touch with. Lastly, surveys held via the internet will be accessible by most of the people but low response rates are to be expected.
3. STANDARD RATE SCALE: If asked how happy they are about a product or service, people will use a large variety of words to say whether they are satisfied or not. The interviewer can´t consider every expression since it is hard to put on a scale, for example, ´very satisfied´ and ´absolutely happy´. That is why a Customer Satisfaction Survey should use a standard rate scale (for instance numbers, usually 0-9, 1-10 or 1-5, where the highest number stands for the highest satisfaction level) so that it can be easily understood by everyone. As a result, the data collected will be reliable and effective. The risk of not using a standard rate scale is having incorrect results. Let´s imagine, for instance, having a rating scale up to 100. Many people might find it difficult to express their opinion correctly. Other mistakes could be, in the specific case of surveys conducted via phone, using rate scales containing numbers of more than one digit. If the rating scale is from 1 to 11 and the customer would like to type 11 but is not fast enough for some reason, the answer will be registered as 1, which is the opposite rating.
4. MAKE YOUR POINT IN ADVANCE: Potential interviewees have to understand the purpose of the questionnaire before fulfilling it. Therefore, you should provide a title which clearly describes the purpose of the survey. This is because clients are more likely to be willing to answer the questions if the purpose is clear to them before they start.
5. ORDER YOUR QUESTIONS: In order to carry out the survey completely, the main questions should be asked in advance. As the interview goes deep, it is possible to ask for more detailed and secondary questions. Once an interviewee started answering, it becomes more and more unlikely that he or she will quit the session before the questionnaire is complete. Thus, the first questions should be concise, short and easy to answer to, otherwise, the risk is that the client might decide not to complete the survey.
6. ASK THE RIGHT PEOPLE: A thing to consider doing is to determine exactly to whom the questionnaire is aimed. You should try to reach exactly the right people, people you have an actual relationship with. If you ask to fulfill a questionnaire to your client´s secretary, he or she will simply ignore your request or, anyway, their answers can´t be considered reliable. Instead, if you contact the right person and add a personal touch, for example addressing the customers by name, you will get a higher response rate and more accurate responses.
7. SURVEY TIMING: Another important factor to consider is the timing of the evaluations: they could be one-off or periodic. The first category provides the satisfaction of the customer right after the purchase (or a short period of time after). Whereas, the second one gives an up-to-date opinion on a periodic basis. The second category is particularly important because countermeasures can be taken if the record shows a negative tendency. For instance, if for the first six records the satisfied customers were 85% and the seventh and eighth are only 60%, there must obviously be a problem in the product or in the company.

Thakur International is one of the companies which have experience in the Customer Satisfaction Survey. We create the perfect survey tailoring the questions in order to be effective for your requirements. If you want to take advantage of the customer satisfaction survey, please contact Thakur International, located at Chundevi, Kathmandu, Nepal. Visit our website www.thakurintl.com