By John Hlavac
Are you caught by surprise at customer hot-buttons or find
yourself behind the curve when it comes to accurately validating your company’s
performance on customer satisfaction? Telephone surveys of
customers can help you take proactive customer contact to a new level while
simultaneously obtaining important strategic and tactical customer information. In my experience they are more effective than any other type of survey.
Simple telephone surveys can help you validate particular needs
and activities, identify current customer desires and confirm you are “hitting
the mark” with your overall customer base.
Sure, there are other ways to collect customer data, each
with its own benefits and risks. But my clients consistently tell me that they find
telephone surveys a cost-effective way to capture real-time actionable
information that they can implement quickly and easily. Telephone surveys can
work for you, too.
Telephone surveys can be easily adjusted or modified to
control cost, provide an open dialog with each customer contacted to make them
feel appreciated, quickly capture customer input, validate satisfaction and
future business possibilities, identify product concerns, clarify service
improvements and confirm sales preferences. Are any of those factors important
for you or your business?
Response rates are often higher using a telephone survey than
other survey methodologies which also mitigates non-response bias (i.e.
allowing you to obtain feedback from all types of customers, not just the
people who love you or hate you). In addition, data from telephone surveys can usually
be analyzed quickly.
A technology solution provider client of mine wanted to
survey a random sample of their entire customer base on a monthly basis while
simultaneously making each customer contacted feel appreciated. I recommended a
short (2-3 minute, 10-15 question) telephone survey process for this particular
engagement. The client first validated the customer data on file at the
beginning of the survey and then included 12 questions with most answers being either
simple “yes/no” or “scaled” responses. They also included a couple multiple
choice questions and one open-ended question. The open-ended question was used
to identify one action the solution provider might do to improve their service
in the next three months.
My client was thrilled with the results almost immediately. This
telephone survey provided the solution provider with a cost-effective process
to collect regular and reliable data for making sound management decisions,
enhanced their overall customer satisfaction ratings because of the additional proactive
contact, provided additional leads from new client referrals and helped
identify several new product and service enhancement ideas. My client has
maintained this telephone survey program in place to reach out to even more customers,
to keep refining their on-going processes and consistently demonstrate their
customer commitment to new prospects.
Other effective uses for telephone surveys could be to
maximize penetration or contact within a particular customer data base. I’ve
helped clients implement MAX telephone campaigns to ensure and validate as many
people as possible receive their message or offer. Some examples for MAX
campaigns include event or training awareness and registrations, product releases,
quality or service recall announcements, charitable fundraisers and even political
solicitations.
Another client of mine was having a difficult time
attracting both prospects and existing clients to attend regional product
showcases and training events. I suggested they use a MAX penetration telephone
campaign into a targeted database within the specific territories. The survey
was very short (only a few questions) and the person conducting the survey made
sure they immediately verified they were talking with the correct individual.
Then they provided key information about the event, encouraged the contacts to
register on the spot and provided each contact with help to register online.
My
client also adopted another of my recommendations to provide all registered
contacts with a second follow up call or voicemail reminder the day before the
event. After implementing this telephone activity, my client started to enjoy
vastly improved attendance and even had to add additional events in some
locations because of the increased demand. Proactive customer contact counts.
Two
Specific Telephone Survey Cautions:
- Specific federal, state and local regulations (like
do-not-call lists) often apply to any type of telephone survey, especially for
mass customer contact programs. Please check your respective authorities for
details on how these regulations may apply to your program. - A lengthy telephone survey with multiple answer options or
numerous open-ended questions could be expensive, tedious to perform, hard to
analyze and cause additional customer dissatisfaction.
(Tip
for this situation: Web-based (internet) or paper (mail) surveys might be
preferred survey methods to consider when conducting long or time-consuming
detailed surveys with many variables.)
Telephone surveys work. When are you going to start
surveying your customers by telephone?
John Hlavac is a resident expert
at The ASCII Group which provides coaching
and consulting to its MSP/VAR Community. Hlavac has spent over 25 years as a
sales and service executive and advocate in the high-tech community and was
inducted into the IT Hall of Fame with the class of 2010 in April 2011. John is
currently the president of JLH &
Associates LLC, a coaching, consulting and training company aimed at
helping IT providers and other sales and service executives grow their
businesses by refining, implementing and delivering effective and efficient
management activities to solidify sales and service.