CEOs of businesses who have a small or no marketing team can still (and should) aspire to understand their customer’s level of satisfaction that his/her products and services. But you’re not quite big enough yet to have dedicated marketing or administrative resources to create, implement and analyze a customer satisfaction survey. What to do?
Today, I’d like to introduce you to an easy and effective methodology that any CEO can implement and immediately start to measure customer satisfaction. The premise for this methodology is that even having a “minimalist” measurement of customer satisfaction is better than none. But even a simple program can yield impactful, actionable information.
Here’s the process in just a few easy steps:
- Customer emails. You need them. If you don’t have them, start collecting them now.
- Create a survey with the following questions:
How likely are you to CONTINUE to be a customer with [your company name] for another year?
- Kind of goes to the heart of things right away doesn’t it? This question is about RETENTION and will give you a pulse check from your customer base real fast.
Over the coming year, do you expect your business with [your company name] to increase, stay the same or decrease?
- This question is obviously related to the preceding retention question but now we start to peel back the onion to better understand specific INTENTION to spend and trend thereof. One could also view this as a measurement of share of wallet.
How likely are you to recommend [your company name] to others?
I love this question. It’s a way to measure degree of ENGAGEMENT with, or loyalty to, your company. Who wouldn’t want a current customer to make a recommendation. Now, ask and measure it.
What is your overall customer satisfaction level with [your company name]?
- Now that you’ve “forced” your customers to think a little bit about retention, intention and engagement, you now ask them to sum things up with their overall SATISFACTION level.
Please provide any comments, feedback or suggestions regarding any aspect of your dealings with [your company name]. If you would like to be contacted, please provide your name and phone number or email.
- This is a completely open ended, free form section, where you invite any and all comments also known as verbatims. This is the qualitative information within a quantitative structure and will provide added insight to the survey.
- Use an online survey tool and copy & paste these questions into it. A good online option which is free and widely used is SurveyMonkey. To help you visualize these questions, I created this survey in SurveyMonkey.
- With your list of customer emails, you now send out an invitation to complete this survey. I recommend that the invitation come from the company CEO as this shows a high level commitment to listening to customers. Sales reps should also be encouraged forward a link to the survey to their customers as a way to drive up responses rates. Also, as a result of this initiative, the CEO should be prepared to get calls from customers …and there’s nothing wrong with that at all.
A comment about frequency: Your first survey will provide your baseline results. All subsequent survey results will be measured against each other including the all important first one. I recommend doing this survey at least twice a year. Customers may get fatigued if they are asked for their feedback more frequently. However, if your customer base is big enough, you could do a quarterly survey, but send it to different customer segments each time. The more frequently you do surveys, the more current your information will be and trending patterns will emerge more quickly.
That’s it! You’re on your way. Remember the old saying about “You can’t manage what you don’t measure”? Well, this can be your start by “measuring” customer satisfaction.
