Four Myths of Customer Surveys

Marketing consultant Amber Burton offers a new approach to customer surveys and intelligence gathering - ideal for smaller enterprises

United Kingdom

Read the ‘Four Myths of Customer Surveys’ and see if you can afford to miss the opportunity they offer to you and your business

Myth 1 – Customer surveys are a luxury meant for big businesses

False

As a business owner, you know that protecting your customer base – and finding new customers – has to one of the most important goals of any business. And yet, smaller enterprises just don’t have the time or resources to track customer feedback or monitor their levels of customer satisfaction.

Exclusive to topenterprise and free to members, the Customer Survey Toolkit provides you with everything you need to get your hands on information which you thought only big businesses could afford.

Myth 2 – Customer surveys tell you what you already know

False

A well thought-out survey, available in this toolkit, can provide you information about:

Who your customers are and what makes them ‘tick’

What else they buy, and who from

Why they chose you, and why they might change their minds next time

What makes you different from the competition

When your customers are likely to buy, and buy again

Where your customers want to buy – on the Internet? Face-to-face?

How your customers experience the products and services you offer.

It is very easy to make assumptions about customers and what is going on in the marketplace. The Customer Survey Toolkit helps you to get real facts about what customers are thinking, and ways that you can attract more of them and more sales too.

Myth 3 – Customer surveys are expensive and time consuming

True and False

Conducting a large-scale market research campaign can be very expensive. Implementing a small-scale telephone survey with your existing customers can be easy, cheap and immediate, by using the ideas in the Toolkit.

Actually this information can be right at your fingertips. It need not cost a fortune or create more workload.

You can set up the survey yourself and run it as a one-off, or month by month, or a few times a year, and so build up a complete picture.

You can see where your advertising is working, or where a busy period has pushed down service levels.

Most importantly, you will have a fact-based measure of how you are doing in your marketplace.
How much does it cost?

One mail order company runs a regular survey of 60 new customers each month and spends only £125 to gather this information. A great investment by any standards.

Myth 4 – Customer surveys produce reports, not results

False

Past case studies of using the Customer Survey Toolkit show these real benefits:

An IT services company successfully tested a new automated call centre, receiving direct feedback to improve customer service over the phone.

Sales increased as a direct result by over 12 per cent in a month and customer satisfaction levels continue to rise.

A mail order company used the Customer Survey Toolkit to find out that although their customers rated the products very highly, there was a significant percentage of customers unhappy with delivery.

Over 10 per cent of customers in a month complained of late deliveries, or packages arriving badly damaged. The company was outsourcing delivery and handling to a courier company and would not have known about the complaints had they not conducted the survey.

A campaign to offer free delivery for orders over £35 has seen a marked rise in sales and customer satisfaction.

A training organisation used the Customer Survey Toolkit to look at why customers failed to return to make repeat purchases.

Going back over 3 years of history and comparing past client experience with new client experience, the survey quickly showed that evaluation forms and feedback were not being acted on.

The organisation has addressed this and re-positioned services for past trainees. Repeat business is now up by 45 per cent.

A website design agency used the Customer Survey Toolkit to check customer perception of 5 different factors, ranging from pricing to location.

The results astonished the managers, who found that their biggest ‘negative’ was the sales process which forced potential buyers through too many steps. This has been simplified and the agency is now enjoying improved levels of converted sales.

This approach also illustrates how the Customer Survey Toolkit can be used to check your assumptions about how your business differs from its competitors and to make the distinctions clearer for your customers.

Ready to get started?

The toolkit is in five easy steps, with guides and checklists to help you all the way:
Customer Survey Too lkit (for members of topenterprise)

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