By CustomerSat Professional Services

1. Design and manage all surveys as an integrated system.  

Doing so will:

• Optimize and preserve one of your organization’s key assets:
  your customers’ goodwill and willingness to provide feedback

• Deliver the great mileage out of the feedback gathered.

Here are four techniques:

First, use event-driven and relationship surveys to optimum advantage. Event-driven surveys gather feedback while experiences are still fresh in customers’ minds and let you respond to that feedback immediately. Use these surveys for detailed performance measures of customer service and technical support, product installations, onsite service visits, e-commerce transactions, and other recurring events.   Periodic relationship surveys cover overall customer experiences over quarterly, annual, or other time intervals. Use these to gauge overall perceptions and competitive positioning.   Designing event-driven and relationship surveys together lets you shorten both types of surveys and increase their response rates.  

Second, coordinate invitations across surveys.   “Touch rules” control how frequently any customer receive survey requests from across your organization.   The longer a survey, the longer you should wait before asking a respondent to complete another.

Third, include even one-time research surveys in your overall design.   These surveys consume a portion of customers’ total response capacity, and consequently affect the number of customers that event-driven and relationship surveys can invite (or the frequency with which those surveys can invite customers). Consequently, one-time surveys that will likely need to be conducted over the next twelve months should be projected and the volume of responses they require incorporated into touch rules.

Fourth, consolidate results across surveys.   Key performance indices can come from different surveys or be composites of rating scores across surveys.   

(For more details, see Designing Enterprise-wide Real-time Feedback Systems.)  

2. Order questions to reflect users’ experiences.

Within each survey and each set of questions, performance metrics should be ordered as customers experience them.   In a typical customer lifecycle, sales touches customers first, so sales-related metrics (such as “responsiveness of your account executive” or “availability of the call center to take your order”) should come first.   If installation or implementation comes next, so should metrics for these events. After that, customers experience products or services directly. In some cases, there is ongoing account management. Customers may have to call customer or technical support if they have questions or problems, or a customer service center or web site for billing questions. Putting the metrics in the same order in which customers experience them helps respondents “re-live” the experience and increases the quality of feedback.

3.   Choose a rating scale and stick with it through throughout.

The advantages of any particular scale are outweighed by the advantages of using a single scale consistently, both throughout a survey and across surveys.  Respondents must use time and mental effort to acclimate to changes in rating scales, time and effort that would be better used thinking about their responses to questions.

CustomerSat generally recommends using a 10-point rating scale, where 10 is outstanding and 1 is unacceptable.  One exception to this rule of thumb is loyalty surveys where we recommend a 4-point survey consisting of the following options: definitely will, probably will, probably won't and definitely won't. The 4-point loyalty scale has the effect of making the responses more concrete in the eyes of the respondents.

4. Use demographics to full advantage – be creative!

Demographic questions define the customer segments for which you can track and compare customer attitudes and intentions and your organization’s performance.   Surveys should include any demographic categories along which you can take targeted action and for which you either know or believe there are significant differences in customer attitudes, perceptions, and intentions.  

If your business sells to other businesses (B2B), you probably already use such demographic categories for the businesses and executives you sell to as geographical location, vertical market, revenue range, and title.   If your business sells to consumers (B2C), you may be using categories such as gender, age range, household income, zip code, magazines read, interests and hobbies.   Now be creative: if your business is B2B, ask yourself if any categories normally used by B2C – or any other categories – might provide new insights about your business.   And vice versa. You may be surprised to discover new ways of segmenting and managing your business and growing your revenues.  

For example, if you are a B2B business, knowing what magazines your customers read, and knowing that those who read Fortune are more loyal to your business than those who read BusinessWeek , could help you target advertising and messaging.    If a significant percentage of your B2B customers are age 50+ and satisfaction with your website is significantly lower for this age category than for others, you may consider such changes as using larger fonts on your site.

To conserve respondents' time, never ask a demographic question to which you already know the answer unless you need to confirm that the information you have on record is correct.