Top Five Reasons to Survey Your Customers

Aug

2011

by G. Michael Howard

When it comes to customer-business relationships, it's no big secret that the power ultimately lies with the customer. Knowing what your customers truly think is critical to retaining your customers, and to your company's success.

Through customer service review surveys you can identify the needs, wants, and expectations of your customers, which will in turn help you to maximize customer satisfaction and retention. The valuable information provided in a customer service review survey will help to ensure your hard-earned customers do not go elsewhere! Here are five compelling reasons you should survey your clients...

Reason #1: Customer Satisfaction - An on line customer service review survey gives you a means to effectively learn more about your customers and will in turn provide the opportunity to better serve your customers' needs and expectations. The survey is an excellent tool for letting your customers communicate, openly, and without interruption.

Reason #2: Unfiltered, Authentic Feedback - Customer service review surveys allow companies an opportunity to gather authentic, unfiltered impressions, whether positive or not-so-positive, about their experience with your company. This information is vital to improving and enhancing products and services. It will also help leverage a better understanding of your customers and their changing needs and perceptions.

Reason #3: Customer Loyalty Can Not Be Understated - Understanding the likes and dislikes your client has about your product or service and knowing what keeps them coming back over and over again is the secret to your success. You know you have loyalty when your customers start talking about you and referring business.

Reason #4: An Effective Communication Tool - By welcoming customers to communicate feedback with you through a cleverly designed review survey, you can point out things such as products or services the customers may not be aware exists. It's a great way to remind customers of your offerings, too, because customers tend to read surveys more carefully than most other communication you send them.

Reason #5: Spotting Trends - Beyond insight as to how to keep your customers satisfied and what drives customer loyalty, customer service review surveys allow you to benefit from the wisdom of the masses for staying abreast of patterns and trends, which could provide an advantage to your competition.

As we are always looking for ways to improve our products and services to provide our clients with the best service possible, we recently invited our customers to communicate how they feel about us through a customer service rating and review survey...soon to be available on our website. We asked our clients to share feedback to various relevant questions about their experience as an American Executive Centers' client. Clients are given complete anonymity for participation to ensure we receive honest and open feedback.

The customer feedback is of great value for two reasons, specifically...1) to help business professionals visiting our website make better informed decisions about whether American Executive Centers is the right arrangement for their business, and 2) to learn how we might enhance or make improvements to our products and services with the goal of helping our clients succeed and grow.

It was great that the bulk of our clients participated in the survey...and we are pleased to say that most of the feedback was very positive about our staff, customer service and support - we work very hard to ensure we go above and beyond for our clients. But, what was most valuable to us was the constructive criticism we received. Breaking it down into four categories, here's what we learned -

Communication: We need to be more effective with communicating all of our offerings to clients, as some of our clients asked that we provide specific services that we already have in place.
Simple Fixes: Some of the negative feedback is easy enough to fix, relatively quickly and we are acting on those suggestions as quickly as we can.
Long-Term Adjustments: Some of the requests require more time and a significant investment, which we are working towards resolving. We are giving these suggestions careful consideration and will be acting on many of them as well.
Inherited Conditions: Simply put, there are just some things you can't fix that come with the building and space and you do your best to work with it.

We are extremely grateful to our clients for participating in our customer service review survey. Again, this feedback will allow us to continue to better serve the needs of our clients so they can succeed and grow their businesses. The customer service rating and review survey will be on-going, so all new clients will be invited to complete the survey.

Here are a couple of web sites to explore if you are interested in creating an on line customer service review survey: