Filed under: Surveys | Tags: employee surveys, internal surveys, staff satisfaction
As a business owner, your first concern is customer satisfaction. To make sure your services are up to your guests’ high standards, you have undoubtedly sought honest, thorough feedback from your clients and customers. While customers can share their individual responses and reactions, there is another audience with lots to say. External clients are not the only people with questions, comments, and complaints: many times, the best ideas for innovation and increased accountability come from within. But how can you encourage candid, timely commentary from your staff?
Show your staff that you are serious about guest satisfaction by asking them for feedback about you and your management team. Take the time to ask them for feedback on critical business issues and then review the feedback with them and brainstorm solutions to the issues they have identified.
Just like your external audiences, often times your staff needs to be asked targeted questions to know what issues are of interest to your business. Taking the time to request feedback on critical business issues lets your employees know that management is interested in their ideas and feedback. As new proposals and suggestions emerge, you have the opportunity to form groups around common themes, construct brainstorming sessions, and work collaboratively across of levels of business operations to find solutions.
Employees in influential roles may be more open to share their opinions than rank and file staff. Whether it is concern about potentially jeopardizing future opportunities for advancement or simply being more accustomed to speaking their minds, officers and managers tend to have more to say in public, recorded gatherings. Giving employees the option of anonymity allows them to reflect on internal problems, share issues with management, and communicate more frankly than they might in a public forum. It also allows employees to report to individuals other than their own supervisors, alleviating concerns about disappointing one’s immediate boss.
Having survey tools available for easy deployment also allows a business to get immediate feedback on pressing issues. After a company-wide meeting, employees could return to their desktops to find a survey in their email box asking for their first impressions of breaking news and for evaluations of the communications methods used to deliver that news. Sending surveys that employees can respond to on their smartphones allows them to take surveys when it is most convenient to them, wherever they are.
As with surveys for external audiences, using current technology can make collecting employee satisfaction and other business feedback a manageable task for your business. Just as with external audiences, seeking input has benefits beyond increased data collection. Bringing the latest technology to your internal audiences to encourage feedback can spark new ideas and alliances and can also lead employees to feel they are playing a greater role in the growth of the company. A dedicated employee, like a loyal customer, can go a long way in ensuring the success of your business.
Filed under: Surveys | Tags: customer service surveys, ipad surveys, iPhone surveys, ipod surveys, mobile surveys, real-time survey reporting, Survey On The Spot
There is a tendency among businesses that collect customer feedback to not properly take advantage of the information. Many businesses collect comment cards, but when it comes time to enter the data into a system, there isn’t the budget to pay the administrative staff to do data entry. The only thing worse than not mining your customers for insights is going through the heavy lifting of getting them to complete a survey and then not doing anything with it.
Being able to obtain complete customer participation in experience surveys will not help at all if you never read what your clients have to say. If you are not using your customer feedback to the fullest, you can take some comfort in knowing that you are not alone. Unfortunately, getting data from comment cards is a resource-intensive process that does not always make it to the top of the priorities list in a busy workplace.
The obstacles to analysis of customer comment cards are many, even after your clients have shared their opinions. The cards, once distributed, completed, and collected, must then be reviewed and input by administrative staff. This data entry, though elementary, is a tedious task that uses valuable administrative time. Administrative tasks like data entry also leave ample opportunity for human error, potentially skewing results and negating the value of the survey. Double-checking data entry is another time-consuming task. Depending on your software programs, you may find yourself reviewing the data input manually to extrapolate themes and trends from your data.
Composing the perfect survey takes time and effort. Making the survey accessible to customers and then convincing them to complete it takes time, money, and creative thinking. If you are putting in the resources to develop and promote your survey, why would you want to waste it all on a lack of follow-through? The only thing worse than not mining your customers for insights is failing to take timely action on the learning that is at your fingertips.
Is there an easier approach? Of course there is! Businesses can put aside the pencils and note cards and fast-forward their survey materials to the 21st century. Consider using iPad or iPod touch portable devices so your customers can input survey data in real time. This allows your business to identify specific time frames for responses, pick up on trends, and stay abreast of customer satisfaction as it happens. This method eliminates much of the human error associated with data entry and also cuts down on wasted time for your employees. Allowing your staff to serve customers instead of being hidden away copying responses into a computer means more one-on-one customer service, a better client experience, and happier customers. Meanwhile, you reap the profits.
Filed under: Surveys | Tags: customer feedback, ipad surveys, iPhone surveys, mobile surveys, restaurant surveys
Mobile surveys are for more than just your clients or customers. You may find that your staff can use mobile survey tools to do their jobs more accurately and efficiently.
In retail and distribution services, field data collection is central to staying on top of operations outside of company headquarters. Traditional methods of collecting field data suffer under the financial and time costs of collection, processing and analyzing data without the convenience of automation. Bringing this technology to your staff cuts overhead and allows for more efficient production and processing of data.
Not all company data is purely quantitative. A pen and pencil cannot show some data. Using mobile survey tools, staff can share both the most accurate data and the most appropriate: this can include qualitative data, photos, video, and sound, recorded on a mobile device. This gives managers a holistic view of the situation outside of your company headquarters.
Keep your surveyors moving by working toward faster survey completion. Digital survey tools far surpass traditional record keeping through logic and skip patterns. Questions can be tailored to your respondents without the added costs of multiple printings or the simple time inconvenience of skipping through irrelevant questions.
Some industries may find that their surveyors need more communication between each other. Strengthen communication between staff on different sites by allowing them to monitor others’ data-collection in real-time. This allows staff and management to identify hyper-local trends, emerging issues, and other detail-based concerns that may arise during field data collection.
Of course, the convenience breaks down barriers at the survey site and back at headquarters. Forgoing the clipboard allows for immediate processing and analysis: there is no delay for human data entry. In fact, wireless networking allows for instant uploading to your main site for large-scale processing and analysis and quick turnaround.
Is this right for your business?
Consider the example of Monarch Beverages, an Indiana-based beer and wine distributor operating nearly 80 routes per day. Monarch Beverages uses Survey On The Spot to validate retail performance to support various beverage promotions. Monarch Beverages staff call on Survey On The Spot when visiting locations like bars and restaurants to improve accuracy and speed of making sure their products are being correctly displayed and promoted.
Staff can keep quick and clear records of bars and restaurants’ use of their promotional products for future reports. Photographs and documentation of product display visibility can be stored, promotional pricing can be checked and confirmed, and even appropriate handles for beers on tap can be double-checked and recorded.
