If there’s one key lesson a mystery shopping company can teach a business, it’s that customer loyalty isn’t something you earn once — it’s something you earn again and again, every day. And knowing what your customers think about your business isn’t simply a luxury; it’s a necessity to make that happen.
Satisfaction surveys allow your business to gather widespread opinions, to do a kind of barometer check on how you’re doing at any given moment. While it’s not as targeted as a mystery shop audit, surveys can identify big picture trends that might otherwise go unnoticed.
Satisfaction surveys typically fall into two families: named and anonymous. There are certainly advantages and disadvantages to both: named surveys’ biggest advantage is that they allow you to follow up with customers who’ve had uniquely good or bad experiences. But the disadvantage is that customers might not be as honest or even as likely to take that survey if they know their names are on them. Compare this to anonymous surveys, which are more likely to glean larger sample sizes and more honest opinions, though they lack that follow-up ability.
While paper and phone surveys still exist, most are done online now. Not only is this considerably less expensive than alternatives, online surveys are far more dynamic. Not just in the sense that you can alter, add, or subtract questions at will, but also that you can create conditional questions based on customer answers. When someone indicates that he’s unhappy with your showroom, say, you can ask him why that is. Satisfaction surveys can help your business identify issues before they swell into real problems, or let you know if your most recent initiatives are working as well as you hoped. You can even probe your customers’ opinions on new ideas before you invest time and money in them.
Customer satisfaction surveys ultimately help build customer loyalty because it shows customers you care, that you want to know all the things they love about you, as well as all the things they wish they could change. When you have this knowledge, you can put that data into action and be confident that it will grow your business.
For customer satisfaction surveys that get you the feedback that you need to run a profitable business, call us at The Brandt Group for more information.
