Satisfaction Survey

Your customers will have perceptions, impressions, and ideas about your business. What they think about your business can only come from one source and that is their experience of dealing with you. The information they have about your business is very important and it doesn't matter what sort of business you have, the perceptions of your customers deserve to be recognized. Customers can give you direction and ideas about improving their perceptions through better service, better appearance, inventory range, staff training, speed of service, accuracy of service and so on. Without this information you are, at best, guessing what they want.

One of the ways of getting this information so you can apply it to your business, is to conduct a survey. Unfortunately, a lot of the recent surveys that are carried out, have an inherent flaw. The questions, whilst important, can never drill down to the right place. This is because that when you ask a question, the answer often requires another question and it is impossible to anticipate the subsequent question. This means that a written survey form will always fall short in comparison to a verbal discussion with the customer. You can compromise by asking prepared questions and then posing subsequent questions to clarify or to amplify the answers.

Another reason why asking questions face-to-face is more likely to reveal important information is very simple. 85 to 90% of all communication is nonverbal. This means that the written questionnaire or survey form will never pick up this missing communication. The written survey form is used because it is more efficient in gathering a lot of information in a short space of time. However, as you can see, it is severely limited. Interpreting the results of a written survey on customer satisfaction is mainly guesswork or statistical. Either way, the outcome will be of limited value and may be, you should hesitate to make major decisions on the strength of a written survey.

Typical questions in written surveys tend to follow a predictable pattern and include assessments such as, "Please rate the helpfulness of our staff." The writer then has to circle and number between one and five to indicate their rating. "Please tell us how easy it was to find items in our store." And again the customer has to indicate their perception on a scale of 1 to 5.

However, the number one question to ask during a customer satisfaction survey is this, "If you had a magic wand what would you change in this store?" You can imagine that this would create the need for a lot of subsequent questions. Furthermore, this question is best asked face-to-face because of the potential information that can be gathered at this time. It has been suggested that this question should be asked frequently by the manager to people who are leaving the store having completed their purchasing. As you can imagine, it wouldn't take too long to compile a picture of how your customers perceive your business by asking this particular question.