Dash for questions

By Marty Carroll

You know how it is: some bright spark realises there’s something strange going on in the sales patterns, and two days later you’re running a survey on the website. The questions are hastily thrown together, and when the answers arrive they’re almost meaningless.

One reason internet users distrust surveys is that they rarely see a response to their feedback. Sometimes the survey design stops them from making their most important complaints, and often they never get a reply to their questions and never see a change in the website either. When a customer has spent their time completing your forms, it feels like a slap in the face when their work is ignored.

For a survey to succeed, it needs to gather actionable data and feed that into a process that does action it.

There’s an art to writing questions that deliver meaningful answers. Research shows that even customers who would score their satisfaction at ten out of ten often defect shortly afterwards. To find out how they really feel, you have to dig deeper. If you ask them whether they would recommend you to their friends, you’re asking them to stake their reputation on your business. That’s much more revealing, and correlates closely with business growth. If you can engage customers with thought-provoking and unbiased questions that demonstrate you’re interested in their views, you’ll receive honest feedback.

Asking questions is easy. Putting the answers to work is much harder. Before you even draft the questions, you should have an idea of how you’ll use the answers. There needs to be a process in place to respond to individual concerns and action improvements across the business. Gathering numbers for their own sake is a waste of time and money.

Significantly, you need to be able to measure changes over time. Absolute figures rarely mean anything: what matters is whether you’re getting better or worse. That means ensuring the answers to questions are comparable, and conducting surveys at comparable times. Trends in the data can be revealing.

The most important thing is that you show customers their effort is appreciated: respond to their concerns individually where appropriate, and tell them when changes are being instigated as a result of customer feedback. Surveys are part of a dialogue. It’s rude to ask a question and then not listen to the answer.