When Should You Run A Customer

When Should You Run A Customer Satisfaction Survey?

 By Andy Larkum

Taking the 'pulse' of your customer at regular points can provide invaluable insight into the performance of your business.
Understanding how they're feeling at various stages of their journey through the environment, products or service that you provide, can provide invaluable insight into your performance.
Tracking clients or customers with engaging feedback opportunities through multiple touch-points will gain you fantastic exposure to their service experience.

This 'pulse taking' can be achieved with new technologies that enable customer satisfaction surveys to be run through multiple channels (or input devices) such as touch screen kiosks, touch screen tablets, text messaging surveys or (if the experience or part of the experience is online via a website) online surveys.
Get the timing right for your survey

Another key factor for a successful customer satisfaction survey is timing. When and how you ask someone how they're feeling can result in very different sets of results!
This is because how someone reacts in the heat of the moment may be completely different how they feel having had time to reflect on what happened in the days following - and this is hugely important.

Think about it. You're in a restaurant, and whilst the meal has been amazing, the waiter or waitress serving you was unhelpful, or sloppy, or worse still, rude.
A few days later, you're asked about your experience at the restaurant. There's a good chance that even though the food was amazing, the thing you remember most is the negative experience with the waiter/waitress, and that's what you will report.
Had you been asked at the end of your meal, or on your way out of the door, there's a much better chance you'd congratulate the chef, and chastise the service.

Gartner Research have shown that feedback at the point of your experience can be 40% more accurate than that given in the days following.
Consider this - when you are at home with a coffee and the TV on, your recollections and feelings about the experience you had in ASDA or Tesco a week earlier will be very different from the moment you were "in the heat of the situation".

Conclusion

Timing is everything. Catching the opinions of your customer's in a way that is accessible to them, and comes at a time when the experience is fresh in their mind, will result in far more honest, transparent and useful feedback.