Measuring if a customer is satisfied with a brand, product, or service goes beyond asking for their opinion. It is more important to analyze the feedback with best-practice metrics in order to really improve customer retention and loyalty.
Customer satisfaction is market research in its purest form. For this reason, it is in an organization's best interest to avoid collecting customer feedback in-house or through an online survey platform.
The value of partnering with a market research company goes beyond percentages and statistics. Building and fielding custom surveys is just the beginning for a customer satisfaction company, like Drive Research. We can provide context, comparisons, and interpretations of the data for your organization to easily take action with the results.
Our national market research company expects more from our customer surveys – and you should too. Read this blog post to understand the cautions of conducting research in-house or via a survey platform rather than a trusted customer satisfaction partner.
Partnering with a customer satisfaction company goes beyond percentages and statistics. Receive context and interpretations of the data to easily take action with the results.
A Trusted Customer Satisfaction Partner
A customer satisfaction survey (CSAT) comes in many forms. Perhaps it is a formal email inviting customers to complete an online feedback survey. Or, collecting customer feedback can be as simple as a comment card for consumers to fill out after they have finished their meal at a restaurant. Every customer survey is different because every organization is different.
With online survey platforms, you are left to create and field a survey on your own. There is not a trusted partner to help you with each step of the way.
Unfortunately, DIY market research often results in organizations making common mistakes that ruin the survey experience for customers, resulting in poor quality data and feedback.
A customer feedback survey company can help your team build and field a survey that is specific to your objectives, goals, and budget. Based on these factors, Drive Research can recommend what channel to use (online, phone, mail), what customer survey questions to include, on average how long the survey should take, and more.
Together these components allow your organization to start off on the right foot when conducting customer feedback research.
Asking Customers the Right Questions
Regardless of the method for collecting customer feedback, a key component of any survey is what questions are included. If you’re not asking the right questions, or even not phrasing the questions in the right way, the results will likely not align with the objectives and goals you’ve set forth, to begin with.
A customer satisfaction survey company will consider your goals, industry, audience, and methodology when writing your customized survey. They know exactly what does and does not work because they have great experience in this realm.
Survey writing is truly a science. Everyone might think they can create a survey, but it takes a market research professional to do so. By working with a customer satisfaction survey firm rather than executing the research in-house, you can rely on a partner who has a background in survey writing, design, and programming.
Here are 6 common survey writing mistakes that are easy to overlook.
Honest Feedback = High-Quality Data
Customer satisfaction plays an important role in your business. It is a leading indicator of measuring customer loyalty and retention. The feedback collected from customer satisfaction surveys allows organizations to make data-driven decisions regarding many business, operations, and marketing strategies.
However, relying on data to drive business decisions is only effective if the market research data is vetted and trusted. In regards to customer feedback surveys, it is important that respondents be completely and brutally honest when sharing their experiences of working with your organization.
Scenario: Using a DIY customer satisfaction tool
When conducting a customer satisfaction survey in-house or through an online survey platform, the survey is likely sent from a company email and branded with a company logo. In doing so, the feedback received from the survey is already tainted.
People have a hard time being honest or sharing negative commentary for many different reasons. For example, customers often try to be polite or not to over criticize a representative they’ve worked closely with.
Customers fear their name or personal information will be tied to criticism and will impact their future relationship moving forward.
While everyone loves hearing positive feedback, there is a lot an organization can learn and take away from receiving negative feedback in a customer survey.
Scenario: Partnering with a third-party market research company
When conducting a customer satisfaction survey with a market research company, all customer information remains confidential with the third-party firm. Typically there is messaging in both the email invitation and the actual customer survey that speaks to this benefit.
When Drive Research executes a customer satisfaction study (whether it be online, by phone, or by email) respondents never speak directly with the organization seeking customer feedback.
For example, if conducting an online customer survey, respondents will only first receive an email from the client with messaging such as:
“[Company Name] has partnered with Drive Research, an independent market research company in Upstate New York, to conduct an important survey. Within the next week, you may be randomly selected by the market research company to participate in a short 5-minute survey to request feedback on your relationship with our organization.”
The customer survey email invitation is then sent by our enterprise online survey software to be completed. By sending a feedback survey through a third-party, customers are much more likely to provide their honest feedback because their information always remains confidential. Their direct responses are never tied to their names or other identifiable information.
This also gives our clients peace of mind knowing the data collected from our customer research is accurate, high-quality, and reliable – especially when deciding how to improve their customer relationships.
Interpreting Customer Feedback
Building and fielding custom surveys is just the beginning for a customer satisfaction company, like Drive Research. We understand the real value in collecting customer feedback is interpreting the data in a way that makes sense and can easily be taken into action.
Online survey platforms provide high-level results and leave you to make sense of the numbers. If you are looking for more of an in-depth analysis you are either asked to pay for a higher subscription monthly fee or download a third-party app. It doesn’t have to be this complicated.
We expect more from our market research and you should too. Our customer satisfaction survey company provides context, comparisons, and interpretations of the data in a way that is easy to understand.
Drive Research also offers recommendations and next steps for using this data to improve customer loyalty, protect profitability, and grow revenue.
Our market research company also uses industry preferred metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Effort Score (CES), and other key performance indicators. Together, these metrics help benchmark your customer survey results against industry peers and competitors.
Customer satisfaction surveys do not only benefit an organization for understanding the views of their current customers but taking this feedback and strategically using it to grow their book of business. You don’t have to do it alone – Drive Research can help.
Drive Research is a national market research company located in New York. Our customized customer satisfaction surveys provide affordable and actionable insights you need.
Interested in receiving a proposal or estimate for a customer satisfaction study? Reach out through any of the four ways below.
- Message us on our website
- Email us at [email protected]
- Call us at 888-725-DATA
- Text us at 315-303-2040