Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Customer satisfaction surveys are a great way to stay in touch with your customers, make sure you are meeting their needs and remind them of your business.

If this is your first time visiting the thirty-day Make Money without Spending a Dime Challenge - Welcome! If you want to start from the beginning, you'll find the first posting here, and a list of all of the challenges to date here. Also, don't forget to join in the discussions.

One of the most important aspects of marketing your business venture is keeping the customers you already have - because we all know already that it's much harder to win one back that has left upset or disallusioned.

An easy and extremely inexpensive way to do this is by creating an online customer satisfaction survey. Why online instead of cold calling them and asking them directly?

• Your spiel will be the same with every customer satisfaction survey each and every time.
• It's very easy to get a large number of responses quickly.
• Online customer satisfaction surveys tabulate themselves, with no need to chart or analyze any satistical information yourself.
• Offers yet another way to interact with your clients without lifting a finger.
• For those with websites already, it's free to set up other than approximately an hour of your web developers' time (or less).
• Online customer satisfaction surveys are non-instrusive.
• Provides anonymity to your clients to they can be truthful about the positives and negatives of your business operations.
• Convience - your customers can answer questions whenever they feel like it, not when you happened to call.
• How long would it take you to call fifteen customers? Conversely, how long do you think it would take for fifteen customers to fill out an online customer satisfaction survey?

So without further ado, I'm going to discuss how to find customer satisfaction surveys to model your own after, how to write a customer satisfaction survey, and what to do with the results.

Step One: Clarify Your Objectives

Why are you undertaking a customer satisfaction survey in the first place? Do you want more information about how your products or services are viewed in the marketplace? Do you want to let your clients know you care about their opinions? Are you looking for new ways to stay in touch without being in their face constantly? Anything in between?

No matter what your reasons, find clarity in your purpose.

Step Two: Who is Going to Perform the Customer Satisfaction Survey?

Yes, you can create and run a customer satisfaction survey yourself, or you can outsource to one of the many companies that provide these services - it's up to you. Some online versions to review in your search:

• EZ Survey - for those with a website already, $400+
• Zoomerang - free trial, no website required
• PollCat - free and paid versions, with or without a website
• SurveyMonkey - free (10 questions & 100 respondents), or paid ($19.95/month)

Step Three: Simple and Sweet Finds Success

Since you are asking your clients to do you a favor by filling out a customer satisfaction survey, be kind with their time. Don't ask more than ten questions unless you absolutely MUST, and make the whole process so quick and easy that they don't even remember it the next day.

Get your staff or family members to try it out, first, just to see how easy it is. If there is a glitch - fix it. Because the easier it is to finish, the more responses you'll receive.

Step Four: Provide Variety with Your Questions

Most online customer satisfaction surveys allow for several different question types, such as:

• multiple choice
• choose one or more from a list
• fill in the blank(s)
• rate on a 1-5 (or similar) scale
• open-ended questions with a fill-in text box

Try and offer some questions in all of the categories if you can, without focusing too much on one or another.

Step Five: Send It!

Your mailout list, staff, a purchased opt-in list of subscribers... whatever it is, just send it.

Step Six: Correct and Update

From the first day or so you'll get usable feedback with which to update and correct problems in your survey or the way you run your business. As soon as you see a trend - change it. Again, back to step #3 - any bugs or snaggly bits will impede your process. Remove them at all costs.

Step Seven: Analyze Your Results

Once you've given it a week or two for all of the answers to come in, review the results. What do they tell you? Focus on more than just the statistical information (although this it very important as well). Rather, how do the open ended questions "feel"? What is your gut saying? Don't ignore any of these results, concrete or otherwise.

Step Eight: Make Changes

Nobody's perfect, and neither is your business. Take stock of your customer satsifaction survey and change as much as possible. Of course, test any massive changes before rolling them out on a large scale.

Step Nine: Take Your Results and Monetize Them

Other businesses want the kind of information you've collected - and they'll pay you for it. Hire a freelance copywriter to review, rehash and report the results of your survey. Then you can offer it as a thank you to your clients, as a special report to a business journal or to the internet populace as a whole.

Step Ten: Do It Again

Using some of the survey mechanisms listed above, you can get a survey done for next to nothing or free. Although overburdening your clients and asking them too often for their opinions isn't a great idea either, try and touch base with how you are meeting their needs at least twice a year.

All in all, customer satisfaction surveys are an excellent way to increase your business sales by staying close to what's important to your customer, no matter what the results show.

Ready for more suggestions on how to make money without spending a dime?