If someone walked into your store, claimed they were a mind reader and could tell you what your customers thought of your business would you take him up on it? What do you think they would tell you?
Luckily you don’t need to hire a mind reader to do this for you. All you need to do is conduct a survey of your customers.
I’ve never conducted a survey before!
If you’ve ever taken a survey before you know they can be complicated and long. Responses are collected from thousands of people and the results are poured over by analysts from market research firms. You do not have time for this and that’s ok. You can still take advantage of surveys to learn more about your customers and find your Champions.
I’m going to show you step by step how to create a simple survey that is easy for your customers to take and easy for you to analyze.
Identify Your Goals
Your survey is going to accomplish a few goals:
- Identify how your customers feel about your company
- Identify areas that your customers think you do well with
- Identify areas that your customers think you should improve
- Identify your Champions.
This seems like a lot but we can accomplish this with only a few questions.
How do your customers feel about your company?
As we said before asking your customers if they will recommend you to their friends or colleagues is a great way to find out if they like your company. Our entire survey is going to be based around this question. The additional questions will just zero in on specific areas.
Question #1
How likely are you to recommend Business Name to a friend or a relative?
You’re going to ask your customers to give you a response from 0 to 10, with 0 meaning not likely and 10 meaning very likely.
This question will establish how your customers feel about your company.
For questions two and three you need to identify specific areas of your business that your customers interact with. Each company has different goals. Here are some examples.
A restaurant may want to look at the following areas:
- Quality of the service
- Quality of the food
- Atmosphere in the restaurant
While a contractor has an entirely different set of goals:
- Quality of the work
- Professionalism
- Price
Take some time now to identify the areas in your business that you want to measure. You are going to use these results in the next two questions.
Question #2
Please let us know which area you would recommend most?
The answers to this question are the areas that you just identified.
Question #3
Please let us know which area should have the highest priority for us to improve?
Again, you will use the answers that you just identified.
Finally, you are going to want to give your customers an opportunity to tell you exactly why they answered the questions the way they did.
Question #4
Do you have any other comments you would like to leave about your experience with business name?
Summary
In order to understand your customers you need to ask them about their experience. With surveys you can ask a few simple questions to learn more about your customers.
With these simple questions, we can build a powerful online survey which will propel your business past your competitors.
In my next post, I’m going to show you how you can begin collecting responses from your customers using online survey software.