Why Client Satisfaction Surveys Are Out of Date | Sales Management Skills

The client satisfaction survey is one of the most misused marketing tools employed today. Most surveys fail to obtain reliable information. Even worse, many surveys obtain misleading information.

The single most important reason to perform a survey is to determine client intentions. What your clients say doesn’t always equal intentions. A few years ago, in a focus group, Sony Corporation asked teenagers which color of boom box they would prefer? Black or yellow? The overwhelming response was yellow. At the end of the three-hour session, the teens were told they could pick up their choice of a free boom box as a gift for participating in the focus group. The overwhelming choice was black! The key to client intention is not what people say, it’s what they do.

Ask Questions that Deal with Client Intentions

Following are a few ideas to improve your use of client surveys so the information you receive is more reliable and useful:

• “Will you come back to us for your next need?”

• “Have you or will you refer us?”

• “Would you use us for other services?”

Use questions like these to reveal client intentions.

Design a Competent Survey Methodology

Professionals who understand anything at all about statistical sampling realize that a 35% response rate from clients probably does not reflect the true responses of your client base. Were the responses from your best clients or your worst clients? Were the responses completed by decision makers or influencers of your clients?

Use a methodology that will give you reliable feedback on your most important clients. Personal or telephone interviews of your largest clients will receive a much higher percentage response rate than mail surveys. If you insist on using a mail survey, at least send a gift to reward your client for completing the questionnaire for you.

Ask Yourself, “Should We Do a Survey?”

If you do business with a limited number of clients and send them a survey every year, you will create survey burnout. If your clients have a complaint about your service, your people, or your billing methods, many will not want to put it in writing. You may be better off to visit your clients individually and explore their perceptions in-depth. All clients’ comments are not created equal. But in a typical mail survey, a $300 tax return client’s responses receive the same weight as a client who pays you $100,000 per year.

Conclusion

Surveys offer little chance of discovering anything unexpected over and above the topics being queried. The problem with this is that your own thinking contaminates and limits the thinking of your clients.

Surveys can be useful tools to help firms grow and respond competitively to the marketplace. But to gain new information, you must be careful to design a process that will give you useful and reliable information.