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Customer Satisfaction Surveys: Are They Still Relevant?

You may wonder that in the age of online reviews, does a business really need to conduct customer satisfaction surveys. Between Google Reviews, Yelp, and Social Media Reviews, many companies have ditched the surveys.

Conducting customer satisfaction surveys is an effective way to understand your customers’ perceptions and experiences with your product or service. It goes way beyond an online review and when done correctly, can provide you with deeper customer insights.

Steps in Creating an Effective Customer Satisfaction Survey

  1. Define your objectives: The first step is to determine the purpose of the survey. What do you want to achieve? Are you looking to identify areas where you can improve your product or service, or are you simply looking to gauge overall satisfaction? Having a clear objective will help you create effective survey questions and analyze the results.
  2. Determine the survey method: You can conduct surveys through various methods, including email, phone, online surveys, or in-person surveys. Choose the method that best suits your audience and budget.
  3. Create effective survey questions: Your survey questions should be clear, concise, and relevant to your objectives. Avoid leading questions that may influence the response. Use a mix of open-ended and close-ended questions to gather both quantitative and qualitative data.
  4. Test the survey: Before sending out the survey, test it with a small group of customers to ensure that the questions are clear, and the survey is easy to complete.
  5. Send out the survey: Once you have finalized the survey, it’s time to send it out to your target audience. Make sure to communicate the purpose of the survey and the expected timeframe for completion.
  6. Analyze the results: Once you have collected the responses, analyze the data to identify trends and patterns. Look for areas where you can make improvements and areas where you are performing well.
  7. Share the results: Share the results with your team and stakeholders to keep everyone informed about the customer satisfaction levels. Use the insights gained from the survey to make informed decisions about product or service improvements.
  8. Take action: Finally, take action on the feedback received. Implement changes based on the feedback to improve customer satisfaction levels and retain customer loyalty.

Over the last 25 years, we have conducted a variety of customer satisfaction surveys for our clients. Contact us if you would like to learn more.

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Competitive Intelligence Advantages

When a client calls us looking to do a competitive mystery shopping project, most of the time their focus is on pricing. Once we get into the project however, they tend to learn much more about their competitors than they originally thought.

Sales Prevention

When we launch a mystery shopping project, we develop a survey with specific questions designed to gather ALL types of intelligence not just pricing. Here is a great example:

The question is “Did the representative attempt to “win” your business by asking for your business today?” For this particular program 70% of the time they did not. So our client can take a look at exactly which companies did not ask for the business. Lost opportunity? It certainly is and our client now has a better understanding of their sales process or lack thereof.

Another great sales question is, “Did the representative inquire if you are also calling for quotes from other businesses?” Using the same project as an example, this was rated negatively 100% of the time.

Poor Customer Service

How good is my competitor’s customer service? This is almost as important as getting their marketing materials and pricing. “Did the representative attempt to establish rapport with you (i.e. were they friendly, attempted to make conversation, get to know you) ?”

Along with the quantitative part of the survey, we also leave room for the mystery shopper to leave details about their experience. Here are a few examples:

I didn’t get the impression that she cared about my business or what my needs were.

I received the quote two business days after I placed the call. The prices in the written quote were different than those that I was quoted by telephone whereby I might or might not do business with this company.

The employee didn’t discuss too much due to her busy schedule. The employee said she would email me the quote.

This is an example of a B2B mystery shopping project. You can see just by looking at the data, that not all companies value customer service. Additionally, pricing quotes came in wrong, calls needed to be made to get clarification. Great information for a business!

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Audits- Brand, Legal Compliance, Reveal, Price and Merchandising

Audits are an effective observation tool for evaluating everything from product displays and use of marketing materials, to brand exclusivity, franchise compliance, and even adherence to detailed company standards. During periodic visits, auditors openly evaluate the physical and visual aspects of the site according to your customized checklist.

Brand Audit

Brand audits are designed to protect brand image in the context of the physical sales environment. Auditors record location details (which may include digital photographs and embedded video) to confirm that the sales environment mirrors corporate expectations.

These specialized audits help:

  1. Provide visual confirmation of brand presentation and representation
  2. Document that brand integrity is maintained
  3. Appropriately confirm, realign, or reconsider relationships with sales parters.

Legal Compliance Audit

Legal Compliance audits help ensure employees are observing and enforcing the laws and regulations governing your business. Auditors perform specific scenarios to test employee compliance and may take instantly alert the company of the infractions via the Instant Feedback Results feature so that immediate can taken if necessary.

These specialized audits help

  1. Ensure employees understand the importance of industry regulations and the severity of infractions
  2. Protect your company from the repercussions of negligence
  3. Maintain corporate integrity

What is a Retail Audit?

Industry Today explains it as follows. “Fundamentally, a retail audit evaluates the condition of your retail location using hard data. Vendors, employees or a third-party scrutinise your store or pop-up shop to gather information on what’s selling well and what isn’t.

Often, retailers use profits as their main method of measuring success, but when you carry out frequent store audits, you have a lot of extra analytics that provide a broader picture of what state your business is in. There are a wide range of areas an audit can focus on including, but not limited to, merchandising audits, competitor pricing audits, inventory loss audits etc.

During a retail audit, you’ll uncover insights such as:

  • Damaged products
  • Stock levels (including stock on your shelves and stock out the back)
  • Sales volume
  • An outline on what your competitors are doing
  • Calculations on visual retailing and in-store presentations
  • Position of shelves, quantity of frontings, amount of SKUs available, misplaced/incorrect shelf tags
  • An insight into your pricing scheme
  • Where the products are positioned in store

Bear in mind you’ll also have to select the kind of audit that harmonises with your requirements most.”

Keep in mind that with all of this comes the opportunity to evaluate the customer experience.

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