Do you regularly carry out customer surveys?
We do them a couple of times a year & find them a great way to find things out like:
- Is our team friendly & help-full
- Do we understand our products?
- How quickly we respond to queries
- Do we deliver in a timely manner?
- Is our response time to service requests quick enough?
- Are we competitive against the market?
- Do we provide quality solutions?
- Are our print technology solutions fit for purpose?
- Would you recommend us to others?
- What other products & services should we provide?
- Do we live up to our Simple Honest Service tag line?
There’s a whole host of things you can find out in customer surveys & in our opinion, the bad stuff is even more important than the good stuff.
Sometimes it’s hard to see what might be going wrong from the inside & it takes someone on the outside to show you. Allowing you to identify what’s happening & to develop a process to fix it.
We’ve been carrying out customer surveys for a while & an important thing we’ve learned. Is to allow your customers to respond incognito.
We’ve found. If you want customers names, you get a poor response. The answers you do get are nice & woolly. You never find out what’s really going on (good or bad).
When customers respond incognito many complete the survey. They can be themselves. They let loose. They tell you how things really are. Warts & all. Which is what you really need to know.
You can choose many different vehicles to deliver the survey too. Things like phone, email, online & post. Either doing it yourself or outsourcing it to a 3rd party to do it for you.
Also, you can measure the results in lots of different ways too. We’ve used a 1 – 10 rating (10 being the best) & percentage ratings in the past.
In our latest mail chimp customer survey, we’ve simply used Strongly Agree, Agree, Neither Agree nor Disagree & Disagree for each of 5 questions. Leaving room for a comment as to why.
To help you & give you a few ideas, here’s the questions & results with a snapshot of some of the comments that we received:
Q1 – My Total Office Solutions team members are friendly, courteous and helpful
Out of 100%. 87% Strongly Agreed & 13% Agree saying things like…
- Everyone I have dealt with has been so professional and nice – it is a joy to have them as our office supply company.
- Always happy to go the extra mile, from the person who answers the phone to the delivery man.
- Great customer service on the phone when rang with a query, via email when needed to update address details and in person when engineer came to fix machine
- Everyone is always pleasant and helpful
- Always have time to answer queries/questions relating to any products/services. Very helpful and honest advice given
- Lovely friendly people, always first-class service & the price is right. Keep it up please, takes the stress out of ink purchases, at least for me anyway, being of senior years.
Q2 – My Total Office Solutions team members are knowledgeable on all products and services offered
Out of 100%. 87% Strongly Agreed & 13% Agree saying things like…
- Even on obscure questions they bring good advice
- When I came to buy a screen from you, I was advised on which options would be best and the benefits to each, making it easier to make the right purchase for my business.
- Each time I have asked for information it has been forthcoming.
- Appreciate the honest advice and suggestions
- I can just send a vague email and they will come up with just what it is I am looking for
- Definitely – as proved repeatedly when asked re printer cartridges, devices, etc.
- Always keen to understand what you’re looking for and find good solutions from an extensive pool of knowledge
- I can ask them anything and they know the answer near enough straight away
Q3 – My Total Office Solutions are competitively priced
Out of 100%. 60% Strongly Agreed & 40% Agree saying things like…
- Generally, we find that prices are competitive
- Great offers from MY Total Office, especially via your email newsletters.
- They keep up with market prices and values and try to remain below them.
- I rave about your printer with inks deal
- They do their best to give a reasonable and competitive price to all orders
- Well priced, competitive
- Generally, I get good prices
Q4 – My Total Office Solutions meets all my requirements
Out of 100%. 64% Strongly Agreed, 32% Agree & 4% Disagree saying things like…
- Only on one occasion have they not been able to supply what I was looking for
- The whole team are great and one of the best companies I have ever dealt with.
- Please can you consider providing a printing service?
- Great service I even buy craft materials for the Nursery as well as the office stationery.
- I have never been let down by anyone in all the time I have been a customer
- Never had any problems with any product ordered
- Usually have a product I’m looking for & able to get it quickly
- I am only a small buyer, but still treated like Microsoft
Interestingly, we had a couple of customers who disagreed & wanted us to start providing in house printing for them. It just so happens it’s a service we don’t advertise but provide for a couple of customers already. So, we phoned them up & offered the service to them too.
Q5 – I would recommend My Total Office Solutions to family, friends and associates
Out of 100%. 87% Strongly Agreed, 10% Agree & 3% Neither Agree nor Disagree saying things like…
- I have already done this & the outcomes have been good
- I have recommended MY Total Office to several of my business contacts.
- Already have recommended them to others.
- Without a doubt
- I am forever recommending you
- I have already recommended them and will continue to do so
- I have already recommended them with good outcomes in every case
Hopefully, you can see how powerful regular customer surveys can be for your business. Not only do they allow you to identify & fix any issues, they also provide you with an opportunity to develop new services & build closer relationships with your customers.
Please will you share your experiences around customer surveys, as I’m sure they’ll be even more things we can all learn from them too?
