Ten Reasons To Send Customer Surveys

Sending customer surveys can deliver vital insights that improve the effectiveness of sales, marketing, and customer service reps as well as overall business performance.

True customer insight comes from constant feedback. To demonstrate the range of benefits feedback can deliver as well as the value of collecting and monitoring input continuously, here are ten reasons to send customer surveys:

1. Get an accurate read on customer satisfaction

Many managers wonder how frequently they should conduct customer satisfaction surveys. The answer depends on the size of the customer base and the purpose of the research. There are two key types of surveys, and they serve very different purposes:

Measuring customer satisfaction is one of the most popular uses of surveys. Annual, semiannual, or quarterly customer satisfaction surveys can give you the hard data you need to improve customer relationships, expand business opportunities, refine practices, reward top performers, improve marketing activities, and even recruit new talent to the sales, marketing, and customer service teams.

In addition, tracking customer satisfaction levels continuously over periods of time allows you to compare yourself against the industry, specific competitors, or your own goals and expectations.

2. Know why you won (or lost)

Survey responses can help you understand what works with customers, what doesn’t, and why, so you can focus your selling, marketing, and service strategies and refine your product development roadmaps. Armed with good data, you can allocate resources more efficiently; align offerings more closely with customer requirements; and increase customer loyalty, revenue, and profitability.

3. “Scorecard” your prospects and customers

When you use surveys to gather key information about customer attitudes, opinions, and intentions, you can map that data to score and rank customers by their expected purchases, their expected revenue contributions, or their overall profitability. You can also determine who your best prospects are, as well as which customers might be at risk and what it would cost to lose them. Our Net Promoter® Score (NPS) question is ideal for this sort of situation.

4. Evaluate sales and service reps

Surveys can help you determine which sales and service representatives are performing well from the customer’s perspective, providing a basis for rewards or incentives as part of the total compensation package. Knowing what types of sales and service practices resonate best with customers also allows you to create and share best practices among your teams.

5. Get ideas for new products, services, and promotions

Everyone has ideas. Your customers. Your employees. Your vendors. But how do you identify the ideas that have real market potential, or that will lead to an effective advertising campaign or promotion? Surveys can help you generate ideas, determine which ideas to get into the development funnel, and transform big ideas into business breakthroughs.

6. Measure the effectiveness of marketing activities

If you want to know how customers will respond to an ad, a promotional offer, or a change in your brand identity, you can guess and take your chances – or you can send out a survey. Sending a survey to your customers and prospects gives you visibility into whether different messaging resonates better with specific target groups, and helps you tailor your marketing for optimal results before you execute the campaign. It arms you to send the right message to the right people.

7. Gauge employee satisfaction

Online surveys are the ideal mechanism for soliciting employee feedback, since they provide the anonymity that is so essential to candid feedback when sent via web deployment. Many companies use online surveys to conduct management evaluations, or to ask for feedback on training requests, benefit offerings, professional development, or even events to be held at a company picnic or retreat. You can use surveys to screen prospective employees as well, polling them on the number of miles they’re willing to commute, whether they will travel, and other data you may wish to collect.

8. Plan or evaluate an event

A survey is an easy way to collect multiple data points from a large group of people, so it can be a useful tool in planning and evaluating an event. For example, you could use an online survey to ask customers about their planned arrival times to a trade show or their meal preferences; and after the event you could send a separate survey to ask for their opinions about the value of the trade show, their overall satisfaction with the show or whether they plan to attend your next event.

9. Get specific customer information

It’s easy for customer records to become outdated, and contact/prospect lists are often incomplete. Through online surveys, you can quickly fill in the gaps in your customer records and update customer information.

10. Share best practices

Surveys are a quick and efficient way to gather wisdom and insights you can’t find elsewhere. For example, a survey question about how to handle a sensitive customer issue or business question can generate a wide range of responses and useful advice that can be put directly into practice.

We here at SurveyRock know how important surveying your customers is to your success so be sure to view our five design principals for your customer satisfaction surveys.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score and NPS are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.