Customer Service Tips

Customer Service Training:
Customer Feedback: Using Polls To Understand How Your Customers Think

How can polling be helpful for small businesses?

The era of seat-of-your-pants decision-making is gone. I'm willing to accept the fact that there are some people who just have great instincts, but there is a powerful tool - opinion research, polling - that can either underscore or defy seat-of-the-pants thinking, and give you real customer feedback. And so, if it's available and it's scientific, you use it.

What can small business owners use it for?

You can get customer feedback that will answer questions like: what is your market, and what does your market want? How much are they willing to spend? In customer satisfaction: are you doing a good job or a bad job?

There are two things you should be looking for when you're doing customer satisfaction surveys. You're looking for a score: good job, bad job. But among the clients that say bad or so-so job -- you have to ask, why? This customer feedback is money in the bank.

What's one of the secrets to getting the most out of polling and opinion research?

You can get a 95% positive-experience score either overall or in some specific item. But then when you ask why among the 5% who give negative scores, if there's one person who says, "it was the worst experience of my life, I'll never go back there again," you have to know the reason. You have to find that out. And you only find that out if you ask!

Most customer feedback polling is done by telephone, but the Do-Not-Call Registry limits business owners when considering this venue for its polls. How should business owners reach their customers?

You'll find that even in this era of the Do-Not-Call Registry and people working an average of 50 to 60 hours a week, there are still people willing to answer questions on the telephone. But interactive services is one of fastest growing areas of polling, and very useful and accurate.

Each methodology offers something that another methodology doesn't. The telephone, for example: tell the pollers, don't just give us the yes/no, agree/disagree, the scale 1-5 -- tell me what the customer's tone was. On the telephone, the poller can get the real attitude, the real tone, of the customer feedback. E-mail allows you to ask more questions in more detail.

Are there areas where polling works better than in others, or those that don't work at all?

Always, customer satisfaction. But also, if you're going to do it yourself, you're not going to get accurate information. Why is that? Because sometimes people don't want to tell the actual vendor about negative experiences. They'll tell an independent poller.

Can a business be too small and polling irrelevant to them?

No! Customer feedback is valuable no matter ths size of your business.