How should I approach Customer Satisfaction Surveys?

On February 3rd, 2011, posted in: CSM Articles by Oakleigh

Tags: Customer Satisfaction, Customer Satisfaction Survey, Customer Service, Research Agency

Customer satisfaction surveys are an often overlooked tool organisations can use to uncover the insight they need to visualise, measure and improve the intangible factors that are associated with influencing customer satisfaction delivered by an organisation.

Moreover, one of the biggest benefits associated with running a customer satisfaction programme is that it can give your organisation reliable, accurate and actionable statistics to show to directors, managers and decision makers to measure how your organisation performs on satisfying your customers. More importantly however, it identify areas that you are performing well at and help you shape training programmes to create a winning culture of success across customer interactions and touch points.

For example, in a call centre, you may want to measure the customer service request rate along with the call resolution rate identify how your agents are performing over time and reward your best employees appropriately. On the other hand, in public sector organisations, you may want to measure local crime rates and measure how the public perceive the resolution of these issues.

It’s all about the Detail…

As customer satisfaction surveys are completed by the customer, the responses and results synthesised are less subjective and produce better reflection of how your organisation is perceived by your key customer groups.

Determining the most effective channel of communication to reach your customer groups is something that CSM can help you find. It is important that channel, of delivery method for your customer satisfaction survey is important as it will help your organisation determine the business case for your customer satisfaction programme internally within your organisation and enable you to reach your customers, increase the likelihood of a higher response rate and reach your customer groups on a level they are comfortable with.

You could be public sector organisation, a call centre, sell services or a consumer retail outlet, a customer satisfaction programme for one organisation is never the same as one in another and it is important to realise that methods used for each programme will need to account on how best to reach your customer groups or if other alternative approaches need to be taken to yield higher results.

Data Collection Methods

Below is a list of data collection methods we use to reach your customer groups:

Online surveys can be both quantitative and qualitative depending on the type of questioning you use. One of the biggest benefits of using this approach is its cost savings compared to higher tech solutions. Furthermore, due to its online nature, the surveys is extremely scalable, connectable to KPI dashboards and target multiple customer tiers making it a viable option for most type of organisations. Tell me more —->

Similar to Online Surveys in terms of its geographic reach and quant/qual questioning techniques. However, there are several drawbacks of using this method that including its high operational costs in mailing and production. Couple this with the manual process of decoding the customer feedback can turn into a lengthy and resource hungry process. Although, this technique can serve as an intimate technique to engage with your customers, many respondents do identify this as junk mail impacting on the response rate. Tell me more —->

This method is great for busy call centres where there are many agents dealing with a high volume of enquires where improving customer satisfaction is key. This technology enables operators to flick a person on hold onto a voice interactive survey where long term savings can be gained by drilling down into individual agent performance and the ability for IVR to automate several calls at the same time.

However, a downside to this is that the process can be very complex to navigate as they are generally designed in a series of nested menu options and can prove to be very impersonal as it is machine. However, if you are in a call centre, this can be one of the most long term cost effective solutions to gauge the satisfaction being delivered by your organisation. Tell me more —->

In contrast to IVR, outbound telephone interviews are great for gain qualitative data from a wide geographical audience. The process itself can be time consuming due to the moderator having to call each number but this method does achieve high results as once a respondent is on the phone, they will generally agree to a short survey.

However, it has to be stressed that as the customer interaction is over the phone, more care has to be taken by the moderator to ensure that the responses are recorded appropriately and that the conversation stays on track to achieve the goals of the customer satisfaction survey. Tell me more —->

CSM’s approach weaves together a strategic analysis with practical steps and recommendations to help managers and decision makers gain insight into their employees, customers, processes and service delivery mechanisms.

Are your management teams struggling to hear your customers? Do you want to shake up your organisation through insight? Or just want to have an informal chat with us about how best to solve your business challenges? Give us a call on 0800 970 9940 or start an email conversation with us here.

Call us 0117 230 6370