Pinoy Entrep

You’ve decided to go to the trouble of measuring your customer or employee satisfaction, and now you need to assure that you’re efforts will provide meaningful and significant results. I am well aware that this isn’t an easy proposition, and that in order to be successful you must find an adequate balance between the number of questions and the time needed to respond.

The purpose behind a customer satisfaction measurement system is to improve your business in order to achieve higher levels of customer loyalty. According to Kevin Cacioppo in Quality Digest, a 5% increase in customer loyalty can result in an increase in profits between 25% and 85%. However, your measurement system will only work if customers respond.

A long tedious customer satisfaction questionnaire is a sure fire way to guarantee low response rates. Nobody enjoys filling out a survey, and you need to show respect to your customers and their time.

Finding this balance, until now, has been one the most difficult mechanisms behind any customer satisfaction program. Ideally, the whole survey process shouldn’t require more than two minutes of your customer’s time, from start to finish. Typically however, a paper-based or interview-based system requires at least double that amount of time.

To get a useable amount of information you will almost certainly want to ask two or three general valuation questions, six or seven profile questions and at least thirty specific questions about your business performance. In total most surveys are about 35 or 40 questions long.

However, I’d like to recommend an exciting new management tool called Gustometria which will literally allow you to measure hundreds of different detailed aspects of your business while respecting the two minute rule I mentioned above.

The Gustometria system facilitates customer participation by being quick, efficient and fun. Customers answer short surveys with their fingers using the touch screens on strategically placed “gustometers”. This interaction requires about a minute and a half of your customer’s time and the responses are immediately available for analysis. Moreover, thanks to the variable structure of the surveys you can literally measure hundreds of details about your business without needing to ask any one customer to answer too many.

The built in business intelligence tools included in Gustometria, enable you to contrast all of your valuation questions quickly and easily with your custom profile questions. You can also adapt and change the surveys on the fly whenever you detect a problem area or a new customer need.

The benefits of the Gustometria system are substantial and easy to put into practice, and you can be up and running in less than a week.

Pick up the phone and call Gustometria toll free at 1-877-448-7865.

Are you responsible for customer satisfaction in your company? Are you trying to implement an effective way of improving your customers’ perceptions? One of the key steps you must complete is choosing which questions to include in the survey to achieve meaningful and useful results.

Although I can’t pretend to tell you exactly what to include in your survey, the purpose of this article is to orient you towards the key ingredients. Hopefully you will at least be able to use it to check and see if you’ve left out anything important. At the end, I will also give you a recommendation which will boost significantly the return on your surveying investment.

Every valid customer satisfaction survey should include the following five basic categories of questions:

1. General Evaluation Questions

2. Detailed Departmental Questions

3. Effectiveness Questions

4. Client Experience Questions

5. Customer Profile Questions

It is important to include at least two or three general evaluation questions in your survey. One of the most important results of the process should be the identification of factors which maintain a high correlation con overall satisfaction. These factors are where you should expend the greatest effort. Questions like “What is your overall opinion of our performance?” or “Did we adequately meet your expectations?” permit us to establish these correlations.

Next, we need to get into the heart of your survey contents. Start thinking about the complete experience that your customers experiment when they do business with you. Which parts of your organization come into play? With whom do they have contact? Then build specific questions about each of these functional areas of your business. For example you may need to ask, “Was the food well prepared and presented?” or “Was your car ready when you came in to pick it up?”.

Time is always of an essence. For this reason you should include questions to determine if your team is responding efficiently to your customer’s needs. This shows that you respect his or her time and want guarantee an efficient relationship. For example “Was the checkin process quick and easy?” or “Did you have to wait too long for us to take your order?”

The last type of valuation questions you should include center around your customer’s perception of doing business with you. These questions should clarify the impression that you are causing in your customer’s mind. Optimally they should enjoy working with you and believe that you provide a professional and friendly service. “Did we show interest in solving your problems?” and “Was our staff caring and concerned with your recuperation?” are examples of customer experience questions.

The last type of questions you must include are profile questions. It is very important to build relevant customer profiles that you can contrast with your valuation questions. These questions will obviously depend on what is important for your company. A hotel might need to know if the customer is a man or woman, or if the purpose of the stay was business or pleasure. However, a hospital will want to know the age group and illness being treated.

One of my basic recommendations for designing customer satisfaction surveys is to be as specific as possible. Apart from the general evaluation questions, you should try and measure concrete aspects of your business. Don’t bother to ask questions about things beyond your control like, “Was traffic a problem for getting to our establishment?” (unless you’re very close friends with the mayor). Instead concentrate on details that you can take measures and improve on. For a hotel, “Was the bed comfortable?” is an excellent question.

If you’ve gotten this far, I’d like to thank you for your attention. In fact, I’d like to share with you an innovative new solution which can make measuring your customer satisfaction much easier. Thanks to the patented technologies it uses, this new system will not only reduce your costs, but will elevate enormously your participation levels.

Called Gustometria, this system measures customer and employee satisfaction in realtime. Customers answer short surveys by touching the screens of the “gustometer” while they are waiting for their receipt or invoice. The whole process takes about a minute and the results are available immediately for analysis.

More importantly Gustometria incorporates a very sophisticated business intelligence system which will allow you to extract the maximum value from your survey data. You will be able to contrast your custom profile questions with the results of each valuation question. Gustometria also allows you to adapt your surveys on the fly an to structure your surveys in a way which assures high participation rates.

I am convinced that tracking customer and employee satisfaction, on a daily basis, is a true survival tactic in today’s market. If you agree, you must implement Gustometria this week.

Pick up the phone and call Gustometria toll free at 1-877-448-7865.