Customers Have Changed - Designing A Survey Your Customers Will Complete!

We have exciting news!  Our new book, Wired and Dangerous: How Your Customers Have Changed and What to Do About It will be in bookstores in May.  We invite you to log on to www.wiredanddangerous.com for a sneak preview.  Our editor thinks it is easily the best business book ever written.  John’s mother feels the same.  So, there you have it…two completely unbiased critics! 

Customers have changed.  Today they are picky, fickle, vocal and “all about me” vain.  They are also wired--edgy and connected!   When singer-songwriter Dave Carroll had an unresolved issue with United Airlines over the damage their baggage crew did to his guitar on the tarmac while changing planes in Chicago, he wrote a clever little song and put it on YouTube.com.  It has been watched by over 9 million people.  The Economists blog claims it may have cost United $180M.  Is that dangerous or what?  You can read in the book more about such wired and dangerous incidents--and how to prevent them.  Incidentally, Dave Carroll wrote a really great endorsement to the new book!  

 Designing a Survey Your Customers Will Actually Complete

1. Use a personal connection to alert customers that a survey is on its way and is important
2. Ask for your customers’ help in the opening communication.
3. Use a stamp for mailed surveys
4. Keep the number of questions fewer than twelve…ten if possible!
5. Make questions sound like a conversation
6. Surveys need to have emotional attraction...make yours interesting and appealing
7. Make the survey and envelope look unique and intriguing
8. Let respondents know why the survey and what will happen with the results
9. Make the survey matter to them
10. Make the survey matter, period!

 One more thought:  Regardless of the scientific gobbledygook that you are likely to get from the folks down in market research, asking your customers to rate their service experience from “unsatisfied” to “very satisfied” is like asking them to give you no grade higher than a C!  

 As we earlier described, satisfied means “met my needs,” was “adequate” or “sufficient.”  It also means “finished, done, no more for me.”  Look it up in the dictionary!   If you asked a 10 year old to evaluate his or her weekend at Disneyworld, you are not likely to hear “I was very satisfied.”  Service is emotional.  Use the language that fits it!  

Comments

[John Patterson]

Thanks for your comment! We try to communicate with customers in a language that is comfortable and familiar for them. After all what we are looking for is a way to really understand their view.

Chip and John

[Virtual Agent]

Great suggestions. Speaking as a customer, every so often when faced with a survey and the language is all technical, I always end up giving them a grade in the range of moderate to substandard.