Speaking of Business: Survey your customers to measure your success

Q: We need a good assessment tool to help us measure our success while we try to improve our customers’ satisfaction. Do you have any ideas to help us work through this process effectively?

A: The core of any successful business is made up of satisfied, repeat customers. It costs about five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. Loyal, satisfied customers are more apt to recommend your company to others. This word-of-mouth advertising is the most effective and least expensive form of sales promotion. Thus, high customer satisfaction both saves money and increases sales and profits.

Achieving high customer satisfaction is a critical strategic success factor for most companies and organizations. Therefore, conducting customer-satisfaction surveys is key in building a healthy, growing and prosperous organization. High-quality customer service always requires feedback from customers.

Employee attitudes are also an important factor. Research shows that the quality of service climate in an organization can be a strong predictor of the quality of customer satisfaction. For example, in an organization where employees are well-equipped with the proper resources, knowledge and training to deliver customer service — and are on the job long enough to be both proficient and familiar with their customers — they are more apt to be satisfied with their jobs, retained by the company and deliver optimum quality service to customers. Customers served by these experienced service people are generally more satisfied than those served by less experienced, new employees.

When creating a basic and effective baseline customer-satisfaction survey program, you should focus on measuring customer perceptions of how well the company delivers on the critical success factors and dimensions of the business as defined by the customer. The findings of company performance should be analyzed with all customers and by key segments of the customer population.

An effective customer-satisfaction survey will reflect what respondents care about most. Presurvey interviews with customers to surface and identify the dimensions and factors they consider as important assure that the survey questionnaire does not overlook one or more important areas and specific service details. If at all possible, presurvey interviews, especially when developing a customer-satisfaction baseline questionnaire, should be conducted with customers to assure that all important service dimensions are included in the survey.

In today’s highly competitive environment, companies need an extra edge, and many have found that high-quality customer service can make the difference in winning and retaining customers.

By determining which factors produce the highest perceived value by customers, research can provide the knowledge to both correct deficiencies in today’s customer service and assist in building high-value strategic customer-service offerings for the future. Special sets of questions can be built into survey questionnaires to learn about the perceived value of services and how a company stacks up against its primary competitors in delivering on the critical value factors.

The organization of a basic customer-satisfaction survey should include three sections:

” Overall dimension rating questions.

Include an overall rating question for each major customer-service dimension, plus one or two related open-end questions at the end of the dimension’s section.

” Ratings by service dimensions and specific service factors.

Some examples include promptness, courtesy, accuracy and thoroughness. The individual factors’ ratings combine to produce an overall average rating for the dimension.

” Respondent demographics.

These questions provide the ability to analyze results by respondent segments and subsegments. For a customer-service satisfaction survey, demographics may include a variety of variables that would classify customers. Some examples include geography/location, type of business, position title, gender, age range, income range and highest education level.

Greeley resident Russell Disberger is a founding member of Tekquity Ventures LLC, a Louisville-based specialty venture-capital firm. He can be reached at (970) 396-7009, by e-mail at disberger@home.com. His Web site is at www.tekquity.com.

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