Using surveys to find out what your clients really think

Earlier this year The Web Showroom decided to send clients a survey, to find out more about how they used our SEO and web design customer support services and how they rated them. The results were surprising in some ways and as we thought they would be in others.

Our initial thoughts about running a survey would be that only those who had a complaint or had not received great customer service would respond. We were wrong; we received some really positive and glowing feedback about a number of employees and the service they provided. Yes, we received some negative feedback too but the positive commentary about about our [SEO and web design] services far outweighed those.

Generally the response rates for general customer satisfaction surveys is anywhere between 15-30% and we achieved a response rate of 25% which is at the higher end and very pleasing for our first survey.

Surveys can be very useful when looking at the services that you currently offer, in our case Live Chat, email support and Account Management but also to allow you to test the waters as to which services you may offer in the future. We had been looking to extend the hours of our Live Chat and Email support to 9am-7pm EST 7 days a week for a while and the survey confirmed that clients would welcome this change.  We also wanted to know whether our clients would be interested in a more hands on, pro-active Account Management service, the feedback was surprising and gave us food for thought for the future.

You can embed code into the link you send to people to see who said what, you can tailor a survey to a particular type of client and most importantly you can create the questions that you want to ask.

We have been encouraged by the success of our first survey and have started to use them within our customer service offering clients the chance to give us instant feedback on how an individual incident or issue was handled. This is giving us real-time feedback so we can take action immediately if the response is not as we had wanted. We are also looking to send out email surveys on a more regular basis on a variety of subjects including feedback on how the build phase of the website went.

There are a number of companies that specialise in online surveying and are relatively cheap and easy to use, we use http://www.surveymonkey.com but there are lots of other companies out there such as http://websurvey.com.au, http://www.websurveycreator.com, http://www.surveychoiceonline.com . Please note, we don’t recommend any of these companies or have any affiliation with them.

The Web Showroom will continue to survey our web clients to ensure that we are doing everything we can to improve the services and products we provide. It is a quick and easy way to find out what people are thinking and a great way to make decisions based on what people actually want rather than making educated guesses.