Customer Surveys – Bridging the Expectation Gap between Consumers and Suppliers

Note: The term consumers and suppliers can be interchanged with business and clients.

To explain it in simple terms, an expectation gap occurs when there is a difference between what your clients expect from you and what they actually get. Although widely used as an auditing concept – in general terms, an expectation gap can be explained with the help of the following scenarios:

• An employee expecting a pay raise and promotion but not getting it
• A customer expecting high quality products, but ending up with sub-standard goods
• An investor expecting a certain return on investment, but not receiving it

For any business to prosper, bridging this gap is essential. This allows better customer relationship management. It also facilitates the drafting of employee-related policies, marketing, and other business-customer oriented strategies.

For both small-scale and medium-sized industries, understanding their clients is essential. In particular for a service industry, customer and employee satisfaction is the key to growth.

Research has established that it costs five times more to bring a new customer to your business. At the same time, a satisfied customer bringing in more customers can substantially reduce your marketing and advertisement expenditure.

So how do you bridge the expectation gap and ensure client satisfaction and retention?

Through conducting research and surveys! To understand why the gap was created in the first place, a suitable survey can be used. This survey, once filled and returned, will allow you to analyze why your customers are complaining. What don’t they like? Why aren’t your employees happy? What more can you do to improve your products and services?

The problem does not end here. Designing a survey can be a daunting task in itself. The cost involved, the procedures needed, the compilation and the analysis are some of the challenges you will face. Furthermore, will your survey truly reflect the views and opinions of your audience? Will they be sufficient and appropriate to bridge the gap?

Online surveys provide a simple and effective solution to all these issues. These surveys are cost-effective and easy to design and distribute. The surveys can be customized not only to meet the requirements of your organization, but also to be easily understandable by your target audience.

Lastly, your survey need not be public. For example, you might consider circulating an employee questionnaire to one particular department or hierarchical level (based on their knowledge and expertise). By distributing the unique survey link to a specific groups of people, you can restrict your audience.

To know more about the benefits of online surveys and how it helps bridging the expectation gap between you and your customers, please visit SurveyRock.