Give people what they want. Survey them.
“Give people what they want”. It’s the title of a 1981 Kinks album, a well used business expression and phrase further popularised by Oscar award-winning actor Kevin Spacey in his recent speech at Edinburgh Television Festival. But unless you know what people want or don’t want, it’s fair to say you can’t really meet their needs. That said, surveys can be a great way to get closer to your customers and to find out what they really think. Taking the form of online surveys, telephone and in-person interviews and less commonly today, mail feedback, here are five ways online surveys can help you give people what they want.
#1 To establish performance
It’s vital to know what people think about your business and just as importantly, what they say. Finding out your customers’ groans and gripes is especially necessary in today’s competitive marketplace, given that social media has promoted the customer voice to centre stage. Seeing things from your customer’s perspective also helps you evaluate the things that work within your business, the things that don’t and the things that might – see launch new products/services. For added online exposure and customer feedback, surveys can be embedded on websites and optimized for all devices.
#2 To maintain service standards
Maintaining high standards of service means showing you’re on top of any problems as and when they arise. In-built surveys can be triggered when, for example, episodes of website downtime occur, enabling customers to alert vendors if there is a false positive or false alert. The Site24x7 website monitoring tool goes that extra mile by allowing webmasters to mark an alert as false so that we can learn from the feedback and improve our systems. This is in addition to our enhanced false alert protection based on real browsers taking screenshots.
#3 To launch new products
Product launches can be nail-biting times but there are many ways to reduce risk. Surveys and their subsequent data play a pivotal role in testing new products on customers before they’re rolled out, helping to avoid costly mistakes. Increasingly, many businesses are taking this a step further by using their customers to invent new products. Walkers achieve this by inviting consumers to come up with new flavour ideas, turning the axiom “if you build it, they will come” on its head. Such campaigns stem from getting close enough to the customer to understand their behaviour through both qualitative and quantitative research.
#4 For good PR campaign
Journalists love data. In addition to the strategic role customer data plays, surveys can also reveal interesting statistics that can be useful for PR. A drinks company for instance may find that 85% of its customers drink more tea on a Friday than any other day. A manufacturer of cleaning products may discover that men are twice as likely to clean the house listening to music than women. Data that reveals interesting facts (though this does depend on the questions asked in the survey) can be turned into stories that increase engagement across interactive digital touchpoints.
#5 To keep customers happy
Amazon do it. Apple do it. Every proactive business should do it. I’m referring of course to customer feedback on a product a customer they’ve purchased. Such insight doesn’t just reveal valuable insight into how your products or services can improve. It shows you care. And this in itself helps strengthen customer relationships and loyalty and supercharge sales.