Do you really want to know?
Last week, I took a short trip to a client site. Even before I got back. I had three surveys in my in box, one for each of the flights I took and one from the hotel. Lucky me! I had taken the airline survey before, with its multiple screens, and I decided I was too busy to bother responding. The hotel survey promised it would only take ten minutes to complete it. Are they kidding? Who invests ten minutes revealing their deep thoughts about how the towels were folded? Certainly not a busy business traveller.
Are we asking too much from our customers? If we are truly interested in their feedback, we should make it easy for them to provide it. Few people outside support know or care to distinguish between the support engineer’s professionalism and his or her technical knowledge — but they can say whether they are satisfied or not, and they will gladly use a thoughtfully-provided comment field to say why. It takes some effort to read the comments, but why not place the effort on us, the recipient of the feedback goodness, rather than on the customer.
Three cheers for the ten-second survey (and its higher response rate).
How long does it take your customers to respond to your surveys? And have you ever asked yourself that question?
I agree, but I would even go a bit further. In a global organisation you will have different interpretations of the scores. Some countries 8 is good, you never give or get a 10. Scandinavians are happy to give a 5.
So I prefer two short questions:
1) are you happy with the service you received (Yes/No)?
2) if not, is it okay that we give you call (Yes/No)?
There are two common traps I have seen many people fall into when running surveys. The first is using them as a direct employee evaluation tool (was the engineer knowledgeable / professional / courteous / etc.). The second is using the comments section as the most important input from the survey, which usually happens when there is either insufficient sample to draw any conclusions from or lack of analytical ability or time, but usually leads to focusing on the extremes rather than provide an accurate picture of the silent majority.
I agree that surveys should be short, easy to respond to, and for global companies ideally in the customer’s own language. My favorite survey template (originally Esteban Kolsky’s idea – his blog is well worth reading) has three questions, each with a scale:
– Did you receive the solution you needed?
– In the time you expected?
– In the form you expected?
Additionally, I’d add a space for free-form comments and a check box if the customer wants to talk to a manager about the case surveyed or anything at all.
With that said, the questionnaire is only the first part of the survey. Without rigorous analysis, accountability and corrective actions it is close to useless.