How do you measure customer satisfaction and loyalty with surveys?

Often, a survey may include several of these types of questions. For example, both a Net Promoter and a Customer Satisfaction may be included. Equally important to these types of questions is a follow-up question asking for reasons why a particular answer was selected.

Gathering feedback from your internal team can help garnish more micro honed questions. It also gives your front line team the chance to be apart of a process/implementation to hopefully improve something that might impact their daily work.

You want your questions to be specific. Generalized questions or questions that are too open-ended about your service or product are often unhelpful in aiding to truly improve your business. Make it easier on your customer to feel comfortable with providing honest feedback by asking better questions.

Also consider where in the customer journey you send out this survey. If too much time passes by after they have completed the service or used the product they may not give true feedback.

Another valuable way of utilizing survey results is to look at participation patterns. There can be some very useful insights that can be drawn from analyzing simple participation in your survey. Was there elevated participation due to some new positive or negative events or product release? Are certain types of recurring issues more likely to cause participation even though the number of individuals impacted is low? Are there certain agents that somehow convince greater positive survey participation, and you want to learn what best practices can be gleaned from them? Analyzing participation trends can be just as helpful as looking at the contents of the survey answers.

Its important not to view results in a vacuum or worse rose colored glasses ! How do your results compare to how the rest of the industry is doing ? How do they compare to other segments of your industry or other industries with which you at least partially compete ? What are your customers saying when you speak to them directly. What do the members of your team say the customers are telling them ? You need feedback from multiple channels to compensate for the inevitable margin of error in any one channel. Intelligence from all channels need to then be considered against each other.

I feel it is critical to weigh current trends such as: Last 6 Weeks, Last Full Month In addition to: National Brand Benchmark comparisons As well as: Year of Year property comparisons. I want my staff to know how well they perform where others struggle and where they struggle where others succeed. Including how well we historically performed. I also want my staff to know their trends of improvement over time. If there's a spectacular score I enjoy researching my location's place among the brand for that judged category using the Ranker feature. For those competitive minded staff it helps knowing how many properties are out performing us.

The hardest part about surveys is when the metrics are used to judge a store or team in specific and the feedback is not actually used to improve the customer experience. We are told to specifically ask customers to give us a "10" on the survey so that way we always stay in the green instead of trying to make sure the customer's needs were met. This can skew the results. I have seen plenty of surveys where the customer's comments are definitely negative but they gave us a "10" overall anyways. On top of that many of the surveys are taken by customers that are in the store quite frequently. This allows them to repeatedly fill out surveys to help out the cashiers who are under pressure to ask for those "10".