How and When to Survey your Customers

You tell me that your clients love you, but how do you know for sure?  Yesterday, we discussed why it’s important to survey your customers.  Today, we’ll review how and when to survey.  Tomorrow, we’ll discuss what sorts of questions to ask.

When to Survey

Before we go over the different ways to collect information from your customers, let’s talk about when to survey them.  The when of surveying will impact the likelihood of getting the survey back.  And, this largely depends on your business and what service or product you sell.  For example, if you are a wedding planner, you may not ever see a completed paper survey if you give it to them the day before the wedding.

For me, I include a little paper survey (and self-addressed stamped envelope) with their wedding invites.  My team and I had discussed the possibility of sending this to them later, via email or snail-mail.  We didn’t think that they would return the survey long after receiving their invites.  We also felt that while they are going through the instructions on assembling their invites, it would be natural for them to see a survey.  We receive ~70% of our surveys back from our clients because it works with the timing of our relationship.

So, when should YOU send your survey?  In the wedding industry, I think it’s good to get feedback on performance when you are done servicing the client.

• Do you deliver any goods to your clients?  Get feedback when you deliver the order.
• Do you provide your clients with a service?  Do so the day following the service.  (If this happens to fall the day after the wedding, I recommend you wait until a month after the wedding.)

How to Survey

Here are three of my favorite ways to survey customers:

Good Old Paper and Envelope

• How: Create a survey, print out multiple copies, have them ready to go with SASE envelopes
• Pros: Easy to get to the client when they pick up goods from you, No extra step required of you or your team, Gives client something tangible to fill out, More personal
• Cons: Cost of postage, Not convenient for some clients who prefer electronic communications, No automatic tabulation of results

Survey Monkey

• How: Create a survey online, email it to them
• Pros: Easy to get to the client via email, Easy to tabulate results, Sometimes quicker for the client to fill out than paper
• Cons: Clients can easily disregard (delete!), Requires an added step from you or your team (emailing the survey request after the job is done), $19.95 for version which allows you to receive tabulated results (reports)

Google Forms

• How: Create a survey online, email it to them
• Pros: Extremely EASY to make, Easy to get to the client via email, FREE, tabulates results in a google spreadsheet, Single survey page (easy / less intimidating for the client)
• Cons: Not useful for more complex (lengthy) surveys, Clients can easily disregard (delete!), Requires an added step from you or your team (emailing the survey request after the job is done)

Of these three, the Paper & Envelope is still the best method for my wedding invite business.  However, I LOVE the Google Forms for gathering information for Sage Wedding Pros and Get Hitched Give Hope.

So… now what?  What to ask your customer?  On to that tomorrow!