Customer surveys: Four-lane highways that can deliver additional revenues

Published in: New England Printer & Publisher, February 2006

Customer surveys, designed, administered, and reported by experienced professionals, can produce a "four-lane highway of information" for improving company market direction and the day-to-day operational issues needing to improve.

A well-designed, administered, and reported survey can deliver which customers:

• have significant, additional business;
• need a source for storage, fulfillment, and distribution;
• need more time with the sponsor's senior management;
• are considering consolidating their suppliers over the next six to 12 months;
• are interested in consolidating their mailing requirements with one of their print suppliers;
• need improved quote responses, invoice promptness (and clarity), and more useful, informative sales calls from their sales representative;
• need a source for variable imaging and personalization; and
• need a source for digital asset management.

These are but a few of the day-to-day and strategic issues we test for clients in customer surveys, and on which you should expect to receive feedback including individual responses of who said what when they offer additional information.

After survey results are in, customers who received a survey should receive a "Report on Customer Survey Results" from the supplier. Additionally, suppliers, and especially financial institutions should be notified how you plan to use customer survey results to improve performance.

In effect, a well-designed, administered, and reported customer survey is a potential four-lane interstate highway for improving company direction, revenues, and margins.

Why survey customers?

Customer surveys, properly designed and administered, should provide the sponsoring organization with a market-based snapshot of their customers' perceptions, evaluations, and actionable follow-up opportunities.

A properly administered survey should provide you with feedback from your primary customer base. From detailed feedback, you should expect to receive not only immediate additional business opportunities, but also "common themes" regarding your organization's performance, performance improvement opportunities, and market position relative to competitors — and customers' performance expectations.

Additionally, customer survey feedback, effectively shared with your entire organization, provides senior management with the rationale to implement changes and improve day-to-day performance.

Equally important, a well-designed survey should provide the sponsor with customer feedback for improving company direction, programs, and long-term value of the company.

Other examples of potentially useful customer feedback your survey should consider includes but is not limited to:

• where there exists immediate, additional business;
• where there are unsettled issues that cost you revenue, and pricing power;
• opportunities to improve communications, and communication systems such as call answering systems, prepress, voicemail, proofing, invoicing, delivery courtesy and timeliness, and e-mail systems;
• perceived quality of a wide range of products, services, and information;
• what customers know and don't know about your company's capabilities;
• how you perform relative to your competition;
• customer service responsiveness, competence, and availability;
• evaluation of operating hours for key customer contact personnel such as prepress and customer service;
• value and frequency of visits by sales representatives;
• how buyers first learned of your organization;
• value and interest in educational programming; and
• what your buyers cherish and want more of as well as what they wish your organization would correct or discontinue.

Additionally, a well-designed customer survey should provide direction regarding follow-up opportunities for elevating your market differentiation, and perceived customer value.

Finally, customer surveys are a relatively unique self-promotion activity for the sponsor. And buyers who have a meaningful relationship with the supplier can be expected to respond with candor, and suggestions for improving performance. Smart, thoughtful buyers recognize that the supplier is making an investment in the working relationship that a response to the survey should also benefit the buyer.

Commitment to survey results

As a global statement, disappointment is too often a bi-product of elevated expectations. Early on in customer survey discussions with clients, we advise that if they aren't committed to following up and addressing issues they want us to test, they would be better served to either not include certain questions, or in extreme cases, not conduct the survey at all.

When survey questions are asked, and buyers invest themselves in candid evaluations and feedback that's potentially critical, there's an unspoken expectation that the buyer will receive some form of feedback regarding what should be different, and that performance should improve.

Follow-up of survey report presentation to senior management includes sharing results with the supplier's entire organization. This step is a preamble to change in organizational performance, and part of our process for improving the value of the company to customers. Such a report and presentation frequently occurs with all office, production, and sales departments in attendance. My bias is that such presentations are welcomed, with attendees — who have a personal interest in improving the company's performance — looking to hear, "What needs to change?" There's also an unspoken expectation from employees that management will follow through from customers' feedback with requested changes.

We also strongly recommend that a "Survey Report to Customers," signed by the president, be issued to all customer survey recipients, whether or not a recipient responded to the survey.

To not commit to improve performance through a "Survey Report to Customers," or to avoid issuing a response to customers (resulting from survey feedback), is to treat the survey and responding customers with neglect. Such reports tend to elevate the supplier's credibility, as well as improve response rates in subsequent customer surveys.

Who to survey?

Our biases include that only customers with recent, meaningful experiences with your organization

should be surveyed. We frequently hear an interest expressed 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, prospects 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, I'm forced to ask, "Why should they reveal such intimate dirty laundry to someone they do not know or trust?"

From surveying target prospects, I won't get much useful information back, and what I do receive probably can't trust. (There are other, more effective ways to get at what's being experienced by target prospects, but customer surveys is not a prudent investment for results you can trust and act on.)

Second, I wouldn't want survey feedback results from current customers, who do know our organization, tainted by feedback from organizations who do not know us.

The value of any survey is ultimately grounded in "truthfulness of responses from positions of influence." The target recipient of your survey should be not just your buyer, but also all positions at your customer organization that are recognized to influence the decision to buy. In other words, some larger 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 of your organization from these positions (sometimes referred to as the "enlarged buying center") — are critical, and need to be known.

When and when not to survey?

Response rates of surveys indicate the strength of the customer-supplier working relationship. With that background, we avoid attaching financial incentives to the survey to "up the response rate." We also try to avoid surveying into holidays, and 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 a client. We advised them to wait until September, to which their president said, "If we're as good as we believe we are, we'll generate a strong response, regardless of when we survey." While certainly we did a lot right in designing and administering the survey, the fundamental issue that the response rate demonstrated was the quality of relationships with customers by the client.

Some organizations prefer to put a survey off until "everything's going well." On occasion I'll hear a senior manager suggest, "Let's wait until we've got more things going better?" To this I ask, "How will you know?" And, "What opportunities will we miss in the meantime?"

If you're committed to being a market-driven company, comprehensive customer surveys should be conducted at least every 18 to 24 months. And there should be additional, significant, ongoing customer feedback systematically captured on a weekly if not daily basis — outside a major customer survey, that's documented and reviewed — at least monthly.

Format, medium and response rates

We've conducted surveys in both electronic and printed formats — successfully, over 17 years. And there are preferred conditions for each.

In a customer culture that is mostly electronic, a printed survey can be expected to unintentionally represent a "lower life-form" from the sponsoring organization. For instance, in a university, insurance company, or sizable software community (where there's an in-plant operation), we might generate better and more useful information by using a survey format that can be transmitted over their Intranet.

However, if on the other hand, most of the customers to be surveyed are in divergent settings and organizations, with widely varying needs, we might prefer to use a printed format and medium.

As an important point, we prefer printed surveys, as electronic surveys tend not to capture nearly as much qualitative information, or volunteered comments, and these are at least as valuable as quantitative evaluations from respondents.

Note that different formats and mediums require different designs, and subtleties of design for generating useful, actionable feedback. If relationships are meaningful, customer contact with the supplier organization frequent, and timing of execution what we term "high season" (September through November, and January through May), you should expect response rates between 25 to 40 percent. (Why that wide a range? Because supplier relationships with customers vary significantly, and buyers prefer not to waste their time with suppliers who are not important to them. Also, please note that response rates can be expected to vary among sales representative/ customer service representative teams, and by customer market.)

Summary

So, why don't more organizations in our great industry conduct major customer surveys for improving performance for customers?

I'm biased. And apparently, so are most of our clients. We recently had a prospective client, who followed up and called all six references we had offered. Part of the reference feedback he shared with us as we were starting up the assignment: "All six references you offered said the customer survey is one of the most productive and valuable activities we could engage. Be sure to do it."

As an opinion, most senior managers know in their stomach that customer surveys and customer feedback require them to hear the truth, face issues, take action, and make changes. And after a certain point in one's professional career, change and confrontation tends to be avoided, or occur at a much preferred slower pace.

However, there's hope, because having a capacity to successfully deal with and engage change is one of the reasons we seem to see a growing list of younger, successful company presidents coming forward in the graphic communications industry.

We currently have three customer surveys in motion as this article is written, and two of the three organizations' senior managers are under the age of 45. What's different about the third? Their senior manager is about 57, and a retired Marine fighter pilot. Everything (and I mean everything) I've experienced from him says he has few problems dealing with confrontation, or issues that need attention.

I'm sometimes reminded of Mark Twain, who as he aged recognized: "Progress I'm in favor of; it's change I'm against."