Using surveys to promote good customer service.

If you are running a business you may find it helpful to carry out customer surveys occasionally. This will help give you a clear picture of how your customers view your service/product, and how satisfied they are with the current level of service provided. It may possibly even give you a view of the market/industry as a whole, including your competitors.

Planning your survey:

One of the first principles of quality business management is listening to your customers. Customer surveys are an essential listening tool that can highlight information about customer expectations, satisfaction and strategies for improvement.

Well conducted surveys are built on two types of expertise: Your business knowledge plus a survey specialist's technical knowledge. As a business person, you are responsible for several of the steps that greatly affect the scope, style and quality of any survey carried out.

Good survey design is largely common sense. By considering your survey design, you can boost the odds of gathering useful, timely and accurate customer information, whether you conduct them yourself or work with a survey research specialist.

When developing and implementing an effective survey you need to be sure to establish goals and objectives.

Establishing a goal for your survey:

First things first!

While many novice survey designers begin by writing questions or determining the scale of the survey, these activities should occur later. The most important, and often most challenging, part of survey construction is clarifying your intent. This is where your personal business knowledge is essential.

Step one should be determining the survey purpose. The most critical part of survey design is a clearly defined statement of purpose and a well-structured view of what you will do with your newly acquired information. Surveys are decision-making tools. They have little value if you are not clear on the decisions your survey will support. Completing the following phrases will help you formalise your intent:

• I want to do a survey because....
• I intend to use the information I am obtaining by...
• The information to be gathered will let me decide...
• I am prepared to implement change as a result of this survey as...

Your responses provide guidance to keep your project focused. Obviously, one of the worst outcomes is collecting information that is never used/taken into consideration.