A Gold Mine Requires Someone to Mine It!
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Customer surveys should provide a market based, comprehensive snapshot of customers' perceptions and actionable follow-up issues.
Why Survey Customers?
Commitment to Customer Survey Results
Who to Survey?
Survey Format, Medium & Response Rates
Just Do It!
Customer surveys should provide a market based, comprehensive snapshot of customers' perceptions and actionable follow-up issues.
What would it be worth to you if I could tell you — for at least 30 percent of your customers — what additional products and services they are interested in buying that they are not buying from you at this time?
What would it be worth to you if I could tell you which customers are interested in changing their storage, fulfillment, and distribution supplier?
What would it be worth to you if I could tell you which customers want variable imaging and personalization on future work? Or what would it be worth if I could tell you where there's a totally new business you should move into, and which customers would probably support that move?
And, what would it be worth to you if I could tell you which customers are interested in — even already planning — to consolidate their current suppliers in the next six to twelve months?
Those are only a few of the issues we test in client surveys, and on which you should expect to receive feedback — including, "who said what." Customer surveys are a gold mine of information if you take the time to carefully develop and implement the survey and then act on the findings.
Why Survey Customers?
Customer surveys, properly designed and administered, should provide you with a market-based, comprehensive snapshot of customers' perceptions as well as actionable follow-up issues. And in a profound way, though we may receive feedback from hundreds of customers' positions, we should expect to receive undeniable "common themes" regarding our organization's performance.
Customer Surveys for graphic communication organizations, properly designed and administered, should deliver a gold mine of useful, immediately actionable information. Such information, properly shared with your entire organization, should allow you to improve day-to-day performance from numerous customer contact and support positions as well as provide you with improved strategies for elevating the longer-term value of your company in the marketplace.
Such survey feedback should provide you with multiple opportunities for: improving your value as a supplier; enhancing your offerings in terms of products and services; and obtaining desirable information that is not only useful to your customer, but which also draws your customer closer to your organization.
Examples of useful survey feedback include but are not limited to:
- Where there is immediate additional business;
- Where there are unsettled issues that cost you money every month;
- Opportunities to improve communication;
- Perceived quality of a wide range of products and services;
- What customers know and don't know about your company's capabilities;
- How you perform relative to your competition; and
- What your buyers cherish and want more of — as well as what they wish your organization would correct — or totally discontinue.
Customer surveys are a gold mine of information if you take the time to carefully develop and implement the survey and then act on the findings.
Additionally, a well-designed customer survey should provide you with direction regarding how buyers are first learning of your organization, as well as numerous follow-up opportunities for elevating your market differentiation, and perceived customer value.
Commitment to Customer Survey Results
Disappointment is too often a by-product of elevated expectations. Early on in a client's customer survey discussions, we advise the client that if they aren't willing to follow-up and address issues that are tested they would be better served to either not include a certain question or, in extreme cases, better to not conduct the survey.
When questions are asked, and buyers invest themselves in candid evaluations and feedback that's potentially critical, there's an unspoken expectation that something should improve. The specter of improved performance, resulting from an investment of time by the buyer to provide feedback — has occurred. To not improve performance, or to avoid issuing a response resulting from survey feedback, is to treat the survey respondent with additional, counterproductive neglect.
USEFUL CUSTOMER FEEDBACK
Beneficial customer survey feedback should provide, but is not limited to, the following information:
- Where there is immediate additional business;
- Where there are unsettled issues that cost you money every month;
- Opportunities to improve communication;
- Perceived quality of a wide range of products and services;
- What customers know and don't know about your company's capabilities;
- How you perform relative to your competition; and .What your buyers cherish and want more of — as well as what they wish your organization would correct — or totally discontinue.
Who to Survey?
Our biases include that only customers with meaningful, recent experiences with your organization should be surveyed. We frequently hear an interest from clients about surveying target prospects and even customers who haven't bought for some period of time, such as a year or two.
Such questions raise several issues. First, potential customers who have not experienced your organization have no firsthand knowledge of your organization's performance. If your questions focus on what they are experiencing with their current supplier or what they're really interested in from an unknown supplier, you have to face the fact that they have little reason to be candid or truthful. If the issues tested deal with poor performance from a current supplier, I'm forced to ask, "Why should they reveal such intimate dirty laundry to someone they do not know or trust?"
Thus, you won't get much useful information back, and you probably cannot trust what you do receive.
Second, you wouldn't want to commingle survey feedback results from current customers, who do know your organization, with feedback from organizations who do not know you. This is particularly true if part of the survey target has no experience with the supplier organization and little reason to be truthful.
The value of any survey is ultimately grounded in "truthfulness of responses from positions of influence." To improve your organization's performance, focus on generating survey feedback from who has that information. The target from such a profile quickly becomes "current customers, of a certain size and of recent experience."
Note: The target recipient of your survey should be not just your buyer but also all contacts at your customer organization who are recognized as influencing the decision to buy. In other words, some customer organizations may receive as many as a dozen or more surveys, because, in the process of selecting and awarding work, the opinions and knowledge in those in positions of influence are critical and need to be known.
Survey Format, Medium & Response Rates
We have conducted surveys in both electronic and printed formats — successfully — for more than 17 years, and there are conditions in which one is preferred over the other. For example, in a culture that is mostly — if not exclusively — electronic, a printed survey can be expected to convey and misrepresent a "lower life-form" from the sponsoring organization. For instance, in a university or sizable software community, we might generate better and more useful information by using an electronic survey format designed to be transmitted over their intranet.
On the other hand, if most of the customers to be surveyed are in widely divergent settings, with widely varying needs, we might prefer to use a printed format and medium.
Please note that different formats and media require different designs and subtleties of design for generating useful and actionable feedback. If relationships are meaningful, contact is frequent, design and format of the survey is appropriate, and timing of execution is thoughtful, you should expect response rates that range between 25 percent to more than 40 percent. Why that wide of a range? Because supplier relationships with customers vary significantly, and buyers prefer not to waste their time.
That said, the American Marketing Association is on record as saying that response rates more than 25 percent are relatively rare. I would agree with this if the survey project manager isn't skillful in the design and execution of the survey; and if the client for whom the survey is being administered does not have meaningful working relationships with its customers.
Certain fundamentals on this issue may, in retrospect, appear obvious. We try to avoid surveying during the holidays, and during periods that are prone to be used for family vacations.
That said, there are exceptions to almost everything. We recently generated a 37 percent response rate during prime-time summer vacation months for one of our clients. We advised the client to wait until September to do the survey. and the president responded, "If we're as good as we believe we are, we will generate a strong response."
While certainly we did a lot right in designing and administering the customer survey, the fundamental issue that the response rate demonstrated was the quality of relationships with customers by the client.
Some organizations prefer to survey when everything's going well. With a frequency I consider almost embarrassing, I hear many senior managers comment, "Let's wait until we've got a lot of things going better."
To this response, I ask, in my simplistic way, "How will you know?" And I add, "What opportunities will we miss in the meantime?"
Just Do It!
I'm biased — and apparently, so are our clients. We recently had a prospective client, who followed-up on six references we offered, tell us that all six said words to the effect, "The customer survey is one of the most productive and impactful activities you can engage. Be sure to do it."
So, what's the problem with organizations in the graphic communication industry not conducting major customer surveys?
I'm repeatedly drawn to the Mark Twain quote, "Progress I'm in favor of, it's change I'm against."
Most folks know survey feedback requires them to take action, to face issues, and to change. However, it seems after a certain point in ones career, one tends to avoid change. This may be one of the reasons we seem to see a growing list of younger successful company presidents in our great industry.