How to Research Customer Service Satisfaction

You get the occasional email praising or complaining about your service. Perhaps some customers leave feedback at your site. But do you really know how satisfied the majority of your customers are with your service?

If your sales are steady or increasing, those sales numbers are an indication of some degree of customer satisfaction. If a large percentage of those customers are repeat customers, that's even better. They like your products or services, and they may have developed a loyalty to your brand. But look also at the number of customers who bought from you once and never returned. Some of them probably needed your products or services only once, but others may be shopping elsewhere now.

It costs far more to acquire new customers than it does to retain existing ones. It's worth our time and money to find out what works and doesn't work to retain the customers we already have.

The usefulness of research into customer service satisfaction depends on these factors:

• The percentage of your customers who are part of the research
• The types of questions you ask your customers
• The ability to measure and use research results

What you can find out about customer satisfaction online

Many people write their opinions about companies, products, and services online. With Google Alerts, you can create alerts to be sent for you for the search terms you specify. You can set alerts for the Web, news, blogs, groups, or comprehensive (all of the above). Enter your company and product names, and you'll be notified whenever someone is talking about them online.

An advantage of doing this is that you may find out what a variety of people think. That is, if people are talking about your company. A disadvantage is that that variety, if it exists, is a small sampling of customers. Only one percent of people who visit online communities post regularly. And while the Web has (as of July 2006) over 50 million blogs, fewer than one percent of bloggers post daily. In addition, people who are unhappy about something are more likely to voice (or publish) their opinions than people who are happy, and the results aren't easily measurable.

What you can learn from talking to people

If your business is a bricks-and-mortar business as well as an online business, you have the opportunity to talk to customers in person. If you offer customer service by phone, you have another way to talk to customers. While you're processing orders or discussing products or services, take the time to ask your customers what they think about your products, pricing, speed of delivery, any problems, or whatever you want to find out.

One-on-one conversations let you provide a personal touch for your customers. Also, the responses you get may have more information than set survey response choices do. On the other hand, each conversation is different. As with researching online commentary, the results aren't easy to measure.

How to use customer satisfaction surveys

Customer satisfaction surveys allow you to choose the questions and possible answers and to ask all participants the same questions. You can easily measure and interpret the results. But for the survey to be useful, you need to have useful questions, of course.

Figure out what you really need to know, and focus on that. Keep the questions simple.

According to research, the most important question to ask customers isn't about their opinions but about their behavior: would they recommend the company to a friend? The answer to this question answers a number of questions at once. Customers will recommend a company only if they are satisfied with it enough to put their own reputations on the line.

Beyond that question, choose survey questions that assess not just whether you're as good as the competition, but ways that you're trying to stand out from them. How do your customers perceive your brand? Do they plan to buy from you again? Why or why not? Whatever your specific aims are, find out if your customers think that you've reached your aims.

While a space for optional comments is useful, most questions should be multiple-choice questions, such as ratings on a scale of one to five or choices from a list. You'll be able to measure these results and see how each response compares to other people's responses. If you use the questions again in a future survey, you'll be able to compare results.

How to maximize survey response rates

A long survey means that fewer people will complete it. How many questions do you really need to ask?

If your survey will take customers more than a minute or so to complete, consider breaking the questions into different surveys and having the different surveys rotate. That way, each customer will have only a few questions, and you'll get responses to all the questions but from different people.

Offer an incentive for customers to complete your survey, such as entry into a prize draw. It's human nature to be more willing to give when you get something in return.

Do a survey yourself or go professional

If you can set up an online survey or know someone who can, you can create a customer service satisfaction survey yourself. Alternatively, you could hire professionals to create and manage the survey for you. An online search for search terms such as "customer satisfaction research" and "customer satisfaction survey" produces links to companies that handle customer satisfaction surveys.

Related blog articles

To learn more about meeting the needs of customers, see these blog entries:

• How Behavioral Targeting Can Work for You
• How Important is Website Usability?
• Test Your Website's Usability