Using Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Customer satisfaction surveys are about finding out about your customers’ perceptions of your company, as well as what their needs are and how well they’re being met.

If you don’t know your customers’ views then you can’t hope to give them what they want.

Know your customers

Not taking the time to get feedback from customers and carry out customer satisfaction surveys can cause a number of problems. These include:

• Lost customers and sales
• Bad reputation
• Lack of referrals and negative word of mouth

If you do make an effort to improve and tailor your services based on customer feedback from research such as customer satisfaction surveys, you have a much greater chance of:

• Winning repeat sales
• A good business reputation
• Word-of-mouth referrals from satisfied customers

The Benefits of Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Customer satisfaction surveys allow you to quickly find out what customers think and how you can improve. They also help you identify what your company does well and build on that. They are an excellent and essential tool in building and developing relationships with customers and can help you develop your business and grow your sales.

DIY or call in an expert?

You can solicit customer feedback yourself, for example using a blog, forum or online customer satisfaction survey. However, there are some drawbacks to this and it is worth calling in an independent third party such as a business consultant to carry out the research.

Firstly, customers are more likely to feel comfortable opening up honestly and giving genuine feedback to an independent person than to their suppliers, so using a third party to measure your customer satisfaction often produces better and more useful results.

Additionally, carrying out customer satisfaction surveys in-house pulls staff away from your core business - keeping customers happy in the first place!

Hedley Basford’s skilled and experienced business consultants offer customer satisfaction surveys, as well as other services to improve and develop your business.