subject: Identify Problems When You Create Surveys For Customers [print this page] Many business entrepreneurs rely on customer surveys and their feedback to strategize their marketing plan and hence improvise on their service to the market. Their research and development market often does a lot of ground work to understand consumer preferences and desires, so as to cater what they want, rather than giving them what you can afford. This not only leads to customer loyalty, but also growth in the market position. So, surveys form the heart of most marketing projects.
It is here, vital to note that consumer surveys can be most effective only when created and used in the right context. They allow business entrepreneurs an open window into consumers' minds, creating brighter opportunities for providing better products/services to the market and hence uncovering new projects and monopoly.
On the other hand, if you create surveys that are inadaptable to the present market scenario, you could lose out quite a lot. Such surveys can be weak collectors and also become potentially misleading. There are some key problems with customer surveys, which if identified and kept in mind while creating effective surveys, you could be making a good spot in consumers' hearts.
Key problems
One of the biggest problems of customer surveys is that identifying reasons of past consumer behaviors is difficult. With surveys, you could analyze reasons for present behaviors (such as, why are you buying this product or what brand do you prefer). But analyzing reasons for past behaviors (such as, why did you choose this brand or why did you shift brands) is hard with the help of consumer behaviors. Of course, consumers dont intend to lie with such surveys, but it's just pure psychology of consumer behavior that they randomly make decisions, rather than going systematically.
The second problem that arises when you create surveys for customers is that surveys are quite bad at predicting future consumer behavior on the basis of present survey, for markets change, consumer preferences change. This has to do with the survey methodology and design rather than just collecting customer data. So, in this case, you could plan out surveys such that you can make probable alternatives of future behaviors with the help of present surveys. Current surveys could include questions that can instigate responders to answer for future. This, however, requires careful drafting of questionnaire.
Determining how and why consumers take specific decisions is hard to analyze and generalize with customer surveys. These questions are quantifiable, but do not add qualitatively to the purpose of the survey. This is attached to the assumption that most customers don't really undergo a process while decision making for specific brands or changing brands. To solve this, you could create surveys that focus a particular target group or rely on one-to-one customer interviews or email surveys. Understanding these problems and hence strategizing your marketing surveys would be best if you wish to grow in your market!
