Filed under: Surveys | Tags: customer feedback, customer satisfaction score, customer service surveys, real-time survey reporting
Customer experience is important to you. You make that clear by how you run your operations. Are you moving your customer satisfaction scores in the right direction?
At your business, complaints are handled quickly and professionally. You offer your customers ample opportunity to express their concerns through customer experience surveys. You have a means of logging that information, following up quickly, and making changes where necessary, with a near-immediacy thanks to real-time survey tools. But what do you do with surveys in the long run?
Real-time reporting allows you to look at individual surveys and aggregated data for immediate review or a broad overview, as necessary. Take advantage of your reporting tools to look at customer experience reports for a fuller analysis. For example, Survey On The Spot allows you to look at trends in your customers’ reviews to track your progress. Look at results for specific days or employee shifts or take a longer view, seeing how your customers’ experiences get better or worse as you try to make changes to adjust your workflow. Survey On The Spot data is easily viewed online and can also be exported as a spreadsheet or pdf.
The best part of having your survey data available and easily manipulated in spreadsheets is the tracking tool. You can highlight positive trends and try to replicate successes. Your employees who receive the best feedback can be recognized and rewarded for their services. New employees’ impact on clients can be shown through customer experience surveys completed for visits during their working shifts. Eliminating menu items, changing administrative check-in procedures, or reorganizing a showroom all can have an impact on your clients’ feelings about your business. You do not even have to include specific questions about those changes to be able to see in the surveys how they play out for clients.
You can also learn more about what you haven’t been asking your clients. Seeing the feedback over time may make you realize follow-up questions that are worth asking. Adding in those inquiries may also change your customers’ perceptions of you: something else you can learn from analyzing your survey trends!
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.
Filed under: Restaurants, Surveys | Tags: clean restrooms, cleanliness, customer feedback, customer service surveys, QSR Magazine
Want a one-word answer to ensure customer satisfaction?
Hygiene.
A recent survey by Cintas Corporation in QSR Magazine showed that customers do not simply expect clean restrooms, they require them: a survey polling 1,000 U.S. residents ages 18 and older found that 94 percent of U.S. adults would avoid patronizing a business at which they experienced a dirty restroom. A single unhappy customer doesn’t just take his business elsewhere: word of mouth (and Twitter) spreads quickly and can cost many future visits by existing and potential customers. As a result, an unclean restroom gone unnoticed could turn off multiple customers in one day. While some will inform a member of the staff, not all customers feel comfortable directly reporting uncleanliness in a restaurant, retail outlet, or business. Meanwhile, although clean restrooms are a priority for most businesses, it is difficult — if not impossible — to set aside staff for hyper-frequent bathroom checkups.
Think that just because you aren’t operating a restaurant, this doesn’t apply to your company? Not so. The same survey asked respondents what specific types of businesses they would avoid due to dirty restrooms. Leading the list and tied for first are restaurants and hotels: 79 percent of respondents would avoid these business because of the state of their facilities. Similarly, 77 percent of respondents would be turned off by unclean restrooms in healthcare facilities. Also on the list were supermarkets (50 percent of respondents), retail stores (45 percent of respondents), gas stations (45 percent of respondents), and even car dealerships (39 percent of respondents).
Of course, this doesn’t mean every business in America needs to hire an around-the-clock restroom attendant. Instead, make it more convenient and less awkward for customers to report cleanliness complaints or comments to management. Real-time satisfaction surveys can provide you with customer feedback about cleanliness and other service issues instantly. You might even consider a survey kiosk to get the most timely and accurate responses.
Faster than the old-fashioned pencil and comment card, internet-connected surveys can even send alerts to management to inform about particular cleanliness issues. Historically, you would have to wait til the end of a guest’s hotel stay or visit to your business site to be informed of their unhappiness. With immediate notification, you can be on the move to ameliorate the situation in an instant. If there is a larger issue, you can get respond promptly to customers to let them know you’re working to fix the situation.
Providing customers with an anonymous, instant opportunity to share their opinions, issues, and concerns about your restrooms and public areas sends the message that your business is concerned about their input. Furthermore, knowing their voices will be heard encourages the customers to provide that input.
While a survey won’t mop the floors, it can let you know when you may need to bring out the bucket. Responding promptly to customer complaints about cleanliness can be the difference between a one-time guest and a regular client.
Filed under: Surveys | Tags: customer service surveys, iPhone surveys, mobile restaurant surveys, mobile surveys, restaurant surveys
QR Code for Survey On The Spot Survey
As smartphone ownership and use expands globally, QR codes are becoming an increasingly powerful tool for businesses to share their products with clients. The success of QR codes as a marketing tool for products can be carried over to implementing business and consumer surveys as well, creating opportunities to capitalize on emerging technology and appeal to clientele in trend-conscious market areas.
What are QR codes? Short for “Quick Response codes,” QR codes are are matrix barcodes readable by dedicated barcode readers and smartphones. Also known as “mobile tagging,” QR codes are two-dimensional squares connecting offline media to online content. QR codes eliminate the need for clients to remember and type in a complex URL; a simple smartphone photo will deliver clients directly to the necessary website. Quick and easy for your clients, QR codes are a growing trend and have gained popularity with smartphone users.
Sodexo Leisure, an integrated facilities management services company with locations internationally, found survey success using QR codes to share guest satisfaction surveys with their clients in 22 locations across the United States. Clients are able to scan the code with their smartphones, enabled by QR code reader apps, to access the survey website, and evaluate their experience in real-time.
How can your business replicate Sodexo Leisure’s success?
To encourage your clients to take your survey, it is crucial that you make the survey as accessible as possible: your QR code strategy can be a major element of this accessibility for mobile users. Placing QR codes on signage, merchandising materials, business cards, or other communication vehicles allows customers to scan the code and be linked straight to your business’ survey site. If your client base is not likely to be familiar with QR code technology, provide them with some basic instructions on how to use their smartphone to access the survey. For fans of creative design, QR codes function with up to 30% of the barcode deteriorated, so consider altering your QR code to reflect a basic company icon. QR codes may not replace basic website URLs, but they can be a fast, easy, customer-friendly instrument to get your survey to your clients.
Filed under: Surveys | Tags: customer service surveys, mobile restaurant surveys, mobile surveys, restaurant survey app, restaurant surveys
Often, businesses seek to better understand their clients without ensuring that the clients understand the business. When you survey your clients, do they know what you are asking? Evaluating your clients’ satisfaction via a survey only works when your clients understand what you are asking. Don’t let language be a barrier between your services and your clients’ needs.
One Massachusetts organization recognized the diversity of its clients and used that knowledge to its advantage. The city of New Bedford is home to a population estimated to be over 10% Hispanic or Latino. Over 35% of the city is of Portuguese descent. When seeking to evaluate client experience, the Greater New Bedford Community Health Center met a common obstacle: to reach the greatest number of users. The challenge – in what language should they offer the survey? The choice was simple: not one, but three languages! The Center provides an iPad kiosk offering the survey in three languages: English, Spanish, or Portuguese; allowing nearly all clientele to provide immediate, accurate responses about their experience.
Challenges
Crafting a survey for use in multiple languages is not without challenges. A direct language translation may be technically correct but fail to convey the same message as the original survey. The perspective of a fluent or native speaker can be vital to producing consistent survey questions across languages. Consistent questions will provide your business with the most accurate results.
Choosing the appropriate languages also requires a business to be tuned in to the demographic makeup of its clientele. The Greater New Bedford Community Health Center could expect Spanish and Portuguese to commonly-used languages among their clients, but your business may serve a very different audience. Working to create a survey in Spanish will be of little value if your survey-takers are all native speakers of French or English. Similarly, be aware of different language dialects.
The effort required to properly create multiple-language surveys should not be overlooked, but the reward is great. Being able to speak directly to your clients, in their own language, can help them understand your business and your survey.
Filed under: Surveys | Tags: customer service surveys, mobile restaurant surveys, mobile surveys, restaurant surveys
In our last post we talked about some of the difficulties surrounding reputation management in the world of social media. We now want to highlight some ways to support reputation management through guest satisfaction surveys.
Social media outlets in themselves are efficient tools for providing general feedback on experience, but they don’t provide all of the important details that are invaluable for a business to address customer satisfaction opportunities on a proactive basis. For example, a customer with a problem may want to blast it out to a social network, but if you have a comprehensive guest satisfaction measurement system in place, you are creating your own ‘early warning system’ for potential problems a customer might encounter. In addition, using a feedback solution that gives your customers an easy and immediate way to provide feedback may preclude them from feeling the need to shout their dissatisfaction to the world.
With the growth and advancement of technology, customers are changing the way they interact with businesses. People are accessing the internet through their mobile devices at faster rates than they access it from their laptop computers. In addition, customers are also increasing the time they spend on social media websites due to the greater accessibility to apps through mobile devices. This change creates a more urgent need for businesses to stay on top of guest satisfaction metrics to help proactively manage their reputation and to respond to any critical feedback that surfaces through social media channels in a prompt and effective manner. This combination of approaches helps build a stronger relationship with the customer and insures that issues can be resolved quickly and efficiently, maintaining your positive reputation.
Filed under: Surveys | Tags: customer service surveys, mobile surveys, restaurant surveys
Having a good reputation is essential for maintaining a solid customer base and generating new customers on a regular basis. A good reputation is built by consistently delivering excellent service and promptly resolving the occasional inevitable mistake. Social media outlets have made it easier for customers to share their discontent with thousands of people instantly. Mobile survey technology enables businesses to learn about a negative customer experience before they leave the building.
Businesses can connect with customers quicker than ever with websites, social media profiles, e-mail, and text messaging. This makes it easier for companies to hear about any negative experiences customers have had with them, and reach out and resolve the issue in a prompt manner to stay in good standing with the customer. The downside of technology advancements is that your company’s reputation can take a hit before you even get a chance to solve the problem. Word of mouth reviews have gone from groups of friends to having mass impact on Twitter and Facebook where it can be viewed by thousands of people in just seconds.
One of the most important ways to uphold a good reputation is by reaching out to customers who have had negative experiences andcorrecting them as quickly as possible. The best way to address a negative experience is by delivering more than your customer would expect to be compensated for. Ideally, this would be in the form of bringing them back to your place of business to have a positive experience or in the best case, addressing it before they walk out the door. This can be a free meal, a free night’s stay at a hotel, further discounts, etc.
Filed under: Surveys | Tags: customer feedback, customer service surveys, mobile restaurant surveys, mobile surveys, restaurant surveys
The distribution of a survey can make all the difference in how the customer might respond to it. Guests who have had distinctive experiences are willing to go out of their way to fill out a survey using different mediums, however, the type of system they use to take a survey could ipact their participation. You have to think about what is most convenient for them and what your customers will respond to. The options for survey distributions are far beyond traditional paper handouts, however that doesn’t mean paper surveys should be ignored entirely.
It is a common practice in hotels for a survey card to be left out on the desk to fill out at the end of the visit. In a restaurant, servers may leave a survey card with the bill at the end of the meal. Each of these methods are effective for receiving quick responses, but it’s unlikely that at the end of a stay a guest would go into too much detail about their experience. A customer might complete a survey on their phone as they are walking out to their car instead of feeling rushed to awkwardly fill out the card after they have already paid the bill.
Kiosks offer another method to fill out surveys, yet risk being more tedious and less effective depending on the environment. Kiosks offer just one survey at a
time and have difficulty accommodating every customer, whereas mobile and internet surveys can be accessed by many people at once with no problem. A setting where guests are one-on-one with staff for a specific period of time, such as a hotel checkout setting, is an environment where Kiosks may be more effective. Situations like this give staff the opportunity to direct the customer as they check-out to a nearby kiosk, as well as giving them an opportunity to add an incentive fill out the survey.
Online and mobile surveys, while more effective for gathering intelligence from many people at once, have their own set of drawbacks as well. While the ease and familiarity with web surveys is very high, there is a risk of them being put off until well after the experience. This can cause inaccurate feedback or the elimination of important details needed to properly assess how the business is performing. You need to gauge the environment and customer behavior within this environment to determine which surveying methods are most effective as you implement you guest satisfaction measurement program.
