Have you ever met a marketer who didn’t just love surveys, feedback forms, focus groups and stuff like that? We love this stuff because it validates our often questionable contribution to the grander scheme and because it gives us reams of data we can stare at for months without actually doing anything.
W hat’s very interesting about surveys (and this applies equally to employee satisfaction and other internal stuff) is what we don’t ask. How many times have you consciously removed a question from your list because you really didn’t want to know the answer? Admit it, you’ve nuked those questions or diluted them to the point where the answers can, at worst, be neutral. Maybe you’ve even avoided surveying a particularly Porcupinish bit of your customer base just so you “don’t skew the results” (stop me if you’ve heard this).
I once worked for a company that actually cancelled its employee satisfaction survey for a year because it knew it hadn’t come close to addressing the considerable issues raised the year before.
So what I propose is this: Let customers ask and answer their own questions. Give them a scale of sucky to awesome and leave the questions blank. I’m fairly certain they won’t fill in the Pablum you would normally ask of them such as
- Acme products deliver good value for money;
- I feel good about my decision to purchase a copier from this company;
- XYZ Corp really cares about the environment.
I can’t speak for your customers but based on some recent transactions with my suppliers, questions I might ask and answer would include:
- Number of times I had to call my account manager before he called me back (sucky)
- Number of times I had to call our project manager before she called me back (awesome)
- Degree to which I believe you will still be in business in six months (sucky)
- Number of cheap shots from sales I endured because you dropped the ball (really sucky)
- Extent to which you made me look much better than I would have executing this project on my own (rather awesome).
Let’s look at the first two questions above. On most customer surveys the question would be something like “Responsiveness of account team”. Which means that I have to balance the wonderfully responsive project manager against the catatonic account manager and rate the whole thing average. Not a particularly accurate picture and since the rating wouldn’t hit either of the top two or bottom two boxes, it would be ignored.
The third question, while harsh, is the real answer to the baby cereal version which would read something like: “How likely are you to renew your contract?”
The fourth and fifth questions are the things most marketers really want to know about customer experience but can’t figure out how to ask in a written survey. Don’t you want to know who you humiliated? Who you elevated? One of them is going to give you a nice testimonial; the other will let the bitterness fester until they can get even in their blog. And a standard survey question such as: “I feel good about my decision to hire this company”, regardless of the answer, will not give you what you need.
While the Hand-Wringers and proper researchers would never take these self-made surveys as anything statistically valid, there should, at the end of it all, be some clues about where your strengths and weaknesses are and maybe suggest the types of questions you should use in the future. And think how much you could save on survey preparation.
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BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter
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