In these customer-focused times we often hear of how important it is to know more about our customers. One of the best ways to do this is to conduct a customer satisfaction survey, but it has to be done the right way to get the information you need.

The best way to begin is by identifying the elements in your business that create customer satisfaction. This includes such things as your products, your sales team, your warranty and even your business premises. These things will become the focus of the questions in your survey.

Next, think about what it is you want to do with the answers. What do you want to accomplish with your survey? Be as specific as possible. There’s no point in asking questions that won’t lead to actionable results. Have a targeted use for every bit of information gathered.

Review any information you have from previous surveys. Maintain continuity in your questions from one survey to another so that you can detect trends or attitude shifts.  If you decide to modify the wording of an earlier survey be absolutely certain you’re still getting at the same thing.

Questions should be framed objectively and not lead the respondents towards a particular answer. You’ll need to decide whether the format will be open-ended (‘What do you think about our product range?’) or simply require a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response. Open-ended questions generally take more time to answer so this format restricts the number of questions you’ll be able to ask but can provide a lot of valuable opinion.

Keep questions as short as possible and avoid asking compound questions – ‘Where do you shop and what time of day do you shop?’  Each bit of information you want should be the subject of a separate question. Don’t use industry jargon or slang; it will only confuse respondents and can lead to inaccurate answers.

Now decide on the actual information you’ll need to collect. If you have more than one place of business you’ll need to find out which one a particular customer patronizes to know if their answer to ‘Are you satisfied with our service?’ is related to factors that apply to just one outlet. Depending on your products or services it might be useful to know if there are different views held by male and female customers, or by different age groups. This is why surveys usually start with a few questions to establish the demographics of the respondent.

 When you’ve completed writing your survey questionnaire give it a trial run on people who can give you feedback on such matters as how clear the wording of each question is and whether you’re asking any questions that can’t be answered conclusively.  See how long it actually takes to complete the survey; you’ll probably find that it takes longer than you anticipated, and surveys that take too long often get rushed through or left incomplete.

It’s unlikely that you’ll be surveying every customer unless you have a very small number to work with. Generally a survey is run on just a sample group taken from your total customer base. The number of completed surveys you will need to get a representative opinion depends on several factors but somewhere from 50 to 100 responses can be adequate for a total customer base of from 1,000 to 10,000.  The more you have though, the better.

If you’re going to send out survey forms to be completed and returned by mail then make it easy for them to be returned to you. Use a standard envelope with the postage prepaid; even better is a form that can be folded and sealed so no envelope’s needed at all. Avoid placing any commercial messages on survey forms and envelopes.

If you’re conducting your survey in an email you’ll have to be sure it doesn’t get confused with spam or other unwanted messages. The sender should be clearly identified and the subject line unambiguous – ‘ABC Co. Survey – Please Complete’ for example.

Telephone surveys especially have to be kept brief. Nobody likes being tied up on the telephone answering questions for half an hour and it’s always possible your respondent will be interrupted or called away, thereby leaving your survey incomplete.

It never hurts to offer some sort of incentive to respond to your survey request. A small reward for replying, like a discount off the customer’s next purchase or perhaps an entitlement to be entered in a drawing for a prize, can really increase the response rate.

Confidentiality is becoming increasingly important to many people and this can affect people’s preparedness to respond to surveys. Make it clear that respondents will remain anonymous and don’t have anything that looks like an identifying code on either the questionnaire form or its envelope. Offer a means of contacting your business if they want to verify that the survey is legitimate.

Remember too that people are more likely to give objective answers if they feel they’re talking to a third party instead of someone they’ll be dealing directly with in the future. It might be best to use a firm of survey specialists if the information you want to obtain is sensitive or highly personal.

In the competitive business world of today a successful model is quickly emulated. No sooner does a company develop a ground-breaking product that captures a significant share of an existing market, or better still, opens up a new market, than imitators start launching similar products to cash in on the originator’s achievement.

In fact, most marketing elements of successful products can be copied and quite often are. This goes for the product itself, its advertising, its publicity and its selling strategy.  No marketplace advantage will be safe for very long; unless it’s defended in some way the original product can be supplanted by  me-too, or copycat, products in a surprisingly short time.

For many businesses copycatting is their business model and they actually structure so as to have the capacity for making a rapid response to changes in the marketplace; if another company’s product appears to be a big success they simply bring out their own version and cash in. Copying a product has several obvious advantages over trying to come up with something entirely new; the market has already been developed, the pricing levels are known, and the main selling points have already been communicated. They’re safe!

But not many me-too products become genuine successes. They hang off the coattails of someone else’s efforts and usually survive on the basis of price and not because of any real competitive advantage.  And that’s their vulnerable point.

Worldwide, businesses like Dell and Starbuck’s  not only start up in hotly contested markets like PCs and the humble coffee shop but, once successful,  face a proliferating  number of copycat rivals. How do they manage to survive, and indeed, grow? Basically, they’ve taken a product and turned it into the core of an experience that delights customers, from San Francisco to Sydney and from London to Limerick. This keeps them standing out from all their competitors who have similar products but fail to give the customer an experience while buying them.

Something else – Dell and Starbuck’s have created successful business models that are extremely difficult or impossible to emulate. Their combination of elements is so unique that they have the high ground to themselves and no competitor can take business from them by simply cloning what Dell and Starbuck’s are doing. It’s also true that no competitor could hope to be as profitable. So, how can you avoid the me-too trap? Here are seven pathways to being uniquely successful:

1.    Don’t sell on price. All you get is customers who buy on price and that means they’re trying to keep your profits as low as possible. It’s even better for them if you sell at a loss and when you fold there’s always another supplier out there somewhere.

2.    Set out to be different. Look for what’s not being done rather than trying to copy what’s already happening. Be a leader, not a follower, and make that an essential part of your strategy.

3.    Know what your customers need. If you know what people truly need and want you can create a package that delivers it, and delivers profits to you as well. Get away from a focus on products and think about customer satisfaction.

4.    Make the product attractive. Whatever you are marketing give it visual appeal. This applies to a product or a business premises. People want excellent products in attractive packaging while they shop in pleasant surroundings.

5.    Make individual offerings. People enjoy being able to personalize their possessions, even if that translates into being able to choose from twenty different types of coffee and three sizes of container. The ‘any color you like but only if it’s black’ approach went out with Model T Fords.

6.    Make it easy to buy from you. Have as many ways as possible that a customer can find you and make a purchase. If your product can be bought from a store, from a catalog and from a website you’ve actually catered for three different types of shopper with differing preferences.

7.   Be consistent. Start with high standards and maintain them. Deliver the same delight at every customer touch point and make changes evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but in business you don’t want to be flattered into the red by look-alike competitor products eating into your sales. Look for ways of providing that something extra to your products that will make them harder to imitate.

Many organizations invest heavily in expensive market research to assess customer satisfaction while ignoring a gold mine of customer information that’s already available from their business records. There’s a wealth of customer feedback right in front of their eyes about market trends, product problems and consumer preferences. If they could only evaluate and understand this data they’d have a much better grasp of the needs and concerns of their customers without recourse to market researchers.

Getting new customers is always important, but studies consistently show that it is five to seven times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an old one. Existing customers send a constant flow of information to businesses that can be turned to advantage in retaining them.

Furthermore, if a business knows its existing customers well enough it has a much better chance of creating opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell. The existing customer base is too often overlooked in the haste to sell ‘more of the same’. The most likely purchaser of new products is an existing customer who already knows and trusts you.

So businesses that want to know their customers are beginning to look at how their customers treat them. Think about it. The way a customer responds to the business is the best possible indicator of customer satisfaction.  It is an accurate and honest measurement of their feelings and it should form part of the information your customer relationship system is capturing about your customers.

Begin by mapping your entire organization and identifying every location that contains or gathers customer information.  Where do your customers communicate with you? Where do they interact with your business? Work through every communication channel, and chart the flow of each bit of data, from where it comes into the business to where it is retained or recorded. This includes the usual communications channels such as telephone, emails and incoming mail, and extends to less obvious ones like purchasing data, account payment records and website hits.

Now look at how the data gathered from customers can be integrated into a useful source of management information. What does each source of data tell you and how can it relate to your business strategies?  Think in terms of what data exists where, and how best to organize and process it. Every section of a business will have its own perceptions of which customers are satisfied with what they get from the company. Remember that the individual members of your team will have their own ways of gathering and analyzing data.

The sales force will have no trouble identifying satisfied customers. They’re the ones who return time after time to buy something. The service department will say it’s the people they hardly ever hear from. The accounts department will say it’s the customers who pay their bills on time. All this information helps to build an understanding of the people who buy from the business.

Look at customers’ purchase histories. Has their total spending increased, decreased or stayed the same? Are they buying more of the same items?  Are they buying new items? This also tells a business a lot about whether it’s satisfying its customers and what they really want.