Using Surveys to Solicit Feedback From Customers By Frank Lucer At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

For those who are tasked with the job of designing customer feedback surveys, the process can seem deceptively simple. In truth, they can be difficult to execute effectively without proper planning. Creating questions that yield useful, measurable data and selecting a representative sample depend heavily on actions that are taken before those steps.

In today's article, I'll provide a step-by-step plan for designing and executing surveys to solicit feedback from your customers. We'll start with acquiring the necessary buy-in and finish with analyzing your sample's responses.

Laying The Groundwork

Before you and your team can begin developing your questionnaire, you'll need to first gather the appropriate resources and support. Neglecting to do either can doom your efforts down the road.

One of the most commonly overlooked factors to a successful launch is the involvement of others within the project. If your job is to execute a broad-reaching customer feedback survey, you'll benefit greatly from the cooperation of your company's staff at every level. Informing them of your project and involving them in its development encourages that cooperation. It's also important to secure the commitment of your company's President and CEO. Their buy-in makes it far more likely that other employees will support - even contribute - to your efforts.

This is also the time to develop and share your plan for using customers' feedback. If employees know that their cooperation can help spur some type of change, they'll be more inspired to help. The more details you provide them, the better.

Development And Launch

After you have gathered the necessary support and resources, the next step is to begin designing your feedback survey. Your questionnaire will be usually be most effective if it focuses upon a single product, service, or brand. Otherwise, you'll risk diluting the value of your respondents' answers. Shorter questionnaires are usually better, but they also need to be complete.

Prior to launching your survey, establish a follow-up plan through which certain employees will respond to customer complaints (which are unavoidable when deploying this type of questionnaire). The people whom you designate to follow up may or may not be on your surveying team; it will depend upon the resources you have available.

The last step before launching is to notify key personnel. Not only does this ensure that everyone is in the loop regarding your efforts, but helps further cement their support during the process.

Data Collection And Analysis

After deploying your customer feedback survey, you won't be able to relax and wait for the responses to gather. Instead, you'll need to perform preliminary analysis of the results. That will help you identify recurring complaints that need a quick response as well as trends that suggest a problem exists within the design of your questionnaire.

As responses continue to collect, review the plan that you developed for following up with participants. Often, employees will neglect this task as other responsibilities are given higher priority. Take the time to encourage those individuals to whom the job of following up was delegated.

Taking Action

Whether you're doing so manually or with the help of software, you'll need to start analyzing the responses from your survey. Software is extremely helpful and can remove much of the burden of identifying trends and measuring the results. That said, measuring your customers' responses in the context of taking action on them can still prove challenging. If approached haphazardly, the actions taken can do more harm than doing nothing at all.

Surveying customers can be a fantastic way to solicit feedback that might otherwise be left unspoken. But, doing so effectively in a manner that lays the groundwork for using that feedback requires following a carefully designed plan.

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