subject: How Do You Know What Your Customers Really Think Of You? [print this page] Understanding and knowing the how to's on improving customer service and customer satisfaction levels can be just a few of the biggest issues most business people face.
It is hard to win a customers heart but it is very easy to lose a customer because of some problem you did not know existed because you did not bother to ask properly.
Some stats are frightening.
It costs five to six times more to acquire new customers than to retain existing customers.
65% of why customers leave according to the latest statistics is due to something that the front line is or is not doing.
96% of dissatisfied customers do not complain directly and 90% of them wont buy again according to a TARP Worldwide report. It also revealed that one unhappy customer will report the bad experience to nine other people. What is even more frightening is that at least one of those dissatisfied customers will be telling 20 other people of it!
In a financial services field study, TARP reports showed that among customers who file a complaint, there is a 54-70% who will come back and buy again if their complaints are taken cared of. This figure improves to 95% if the customer feels that the complaint was addressed quickly. And customers whose complaints were happily resolved talk to an average of five people of the good treatment received.
However, 96% of dissatisfied customers don't bother to complain directly.
The big question is, how do you find out which customer is happy and which is not? And importantly, how do you ask? What are the things they like and dislike? And how possibly are they to recommend your business to other people?
Well, you better ask your customers.
But how should that be done? It is discouraging and sometimes too risky if you are not doing it correctly.
Most businesses, I'd say don't survey their customers often enough. Some dont even do it at all. Here are some of the top reasons why:
Procrastination. They put off doing customer surveys because its just too hard.
Not knowing which of your customers you should be assessing.
Struggling to find the right words to make your surveys clear and easy to understand.
Not knowing what needs to be put in your surveys to give them a good impression and get your customers interested enough to participate in the survey.
Creating customer surveys can be so complex that nobody understands them but you.
No sufficient knowledge about available tools online and being afraid you might pick the wrong one resulting in a bad survey or even worse, resulting in your customers being turned off all the more and getting your business embarrassed.
It is important for you to learn how to direct good surveys to get significant answers that you can use to improve your customer service and your business. Running a customer satisfaction survey can be tough and you dont want to mess it up. Your customers are the lifeblood of your business. You also would not want to risk offending them with a poorly asked question in your survey sheet.
To get good answers you must have good questions. And there is always a right way and a wrong way to ask a question. However, there are lots of WRONG ways in asking questions with customer satisfactions surveys, and remember that wrong survey questions get wrong survey answers.
There are many available survey tools online that you can choose, you just need to know which one is best and keep in mind that using trial and error on your own to find which tool works is very risky.
