One big mistake many companies make is trying to construct a survey that is all things for all people. They call it a customer satisfaction survey, and in many cases, that’s where it all begins. But then strange and mysterious things begin to happen.

It all starts innocently enough. A survey is commissioned. Strategy and mission statements are considered and factored in. A basic framework of questions is assembled. The focus is on company performance as it relates to customer touch points. All is going well. And then –

- someone in marketing decides that since a survey is being conducted anyway, it might make sense to pose a few questions having to do with brand equity and awareness. Get a little bigger bang for the buck.

- then someone in customer service, not about to be outdone by the weenies in marketing, suggests the survey also be used to contact some former customers – lost accounts – in an effort to discover why they took their business elsewhere.

- then sales checks in and says “wait a minute, we’ve got a bunch of prospects in the pipeline that we haven’t been able to close. This would be a great time to find out why, or to at least try to determine what it would take to get their business”.

- at which point someone in the quality department says, “well, if we’re going that far, I’d really be interested in a measurement of how we fare head to head against our key competitors….say, a direct comparison against four or five companies on five to ten performance points. And maybe we could throw in a few questions about that new assembly machine we’re designing, see if we forgot anything. And while we’re at it…..”

And so on and so on.

A few weeks ago we wrote about the need to entice customer participation in the survey with a pledge that you are seeking ways to improve service to them, and that you intend to share your plans for addressing issues that the survey brings to light. Between the promise (or at least hope) of improved service, wrapped around feedback that closes the communication loop, two tangible benefits are offered that are usually adequate to stimulate interest in the process.

BUT, the minute you begin to dilute the initial pledge by asking questions that have little or nothing to do with seeking ways to improve service, you start losing your audience. Several things contribute to the loss.

First, you’ve probably added enough questions that your customers no longer see a survey; it’s begun to look more like an endurance test. That’s a problem, because when you attempt to intrude on someone’s schedule for more than ten, maybe fifteen minutes, the resistance factor grows exponentially.

Second, your motives, and with it, your credibility, take a slam. Think about it.

Instead of question topics that might make your customer’s lives easier, customers instead find a survey asking if you are better or worse than a company on the west coast, whether the recognition quotient of your brand is worth a 20% price premium, and if you could offer suggestions for a product that doesn’t even exist yet, what would it be? To the customer, the first two questions are by no means performance related, and the third smacks of a guerilla sales effort. Misdirection. Ulterior motive. Hidden agenda.

The result? Your response rate plummets. You not only fail to get the amount of feedback you’d hoped for, but you probably ticked off a few customers along the way. Except for the lost accounts, whom you alienated a long time ago and who have no reason to invest time in any survey, there’s a feeling of bait and switch among many of the rest.

If you want your business partners to take a customer satisfaction survey seriously, keep the focus on actionable, performance related attributes. There is nothing wrong with brand equity research, or lost sales surveys, or product development inquiries, but you need to always remember that those kinds of surveys require different approaches, different types of questions, and often an entirely different audience. Trying to homogenize them into a single effort is rather like an archer trying to hit four different targets with a single shot. It might work in the movies, but good luck ever seeing it happen in real life.

Ten years ago we were commissioned to conduct a customer satisfaction survey for a company that sold manufactured goods to healthcare providers.  To carry out the agreed upon scope of the survey, we asked for names and contact information on the company’s top 400 national accounts.  Piece of cake, right?  Not so fast. 

This client, unbeknownst to top management, did not have a centralized customer database.  The accounting department had something approximating a customer list, but it was populated with what the bookkeepers cared about……bill-to and ship-to addresses.  The existence of any decision makers was both coincidental and extremely rare. 

It turns out the company had over 100 sales reps, each of whom kept their own records for their own territory.  The lifeblood of their business was scattered in small pieces from coast to coast. 

After a bit of teeth gnashing and navel gazing, memos were issued.  Emails were sent out.   Calls were made.  The message in all them was, send us a list of your top accounts, and send it immediately. 

Wonderful sentiment, but those messages failed to take into account two of the vagaries of sales people.  First, sales reps, by their nature, view their contact list as a closely held secret, and sharing it is roughly akin to sharing their personal bank accounts with strangers.  Second, sales reps see themselves as getting paid for making sales, not devoting time to routine administrative tasks.  So, the requests went out, and just as quickly fell through cracks all over the country.  Cracks the size of the Grand Canyon. 

Six painful months went by during which information begrudgingly trickled in.  Putting aside any commentary about the tail wagging the dog in this company, a list was finally assembled, delivered and put into play.  Sadly, we quickly discovered that most of the entries were woefully outdated.  Of just over 400 entries, a staggering 83% required updating and correction.

There was a litany of misspelled names, bad addresses, wrong titles and disconnected or wrong phone numbers.  We went looking for customers that no one had ever heard of; for customers who had retired as many as ten years earlier; and for two people who were found to be deceased, one of them for over six years.  Even when we were able to locate a living, breathing person, we found an impressive number of alleged customers who claimed they had never heard of our client, or (maybe) heard of them but did not recall ever having done business with them.   Strangely, they did not feel qualified to participate in a survey.  Big surprise. 

The moral of the story is, Customer Satisfaction Surveys are a classic example of the old adage – garbage in, garbage out.  In order to provide quality information on the front end that will produce quality output on the back end, clients need to be constantly cautioned to avoid these pitfalls:

1)  Everything starts with an up to date customer contact list.  We tell all of our clients the same thing – you can go into some internal system and “pull” a customer list, usually from an outdated and poorly maintained informational dumping ground, or you can take the time to “build” a list.  Companies that are truly interested in getting a return on their research dollars take the time to assemble one.

2)  The target audience for a quality survey should be limited to those customers who “make or significantly influence the decision to buy from your company”.  Those are the people who determine your current and future revenues; those are the people you need to hear from.  Yet against that criterion, we’ve been given names of (among others) Administrative Assistants, Receptionists, Human Resource Assistants, Marketing Coordinators, Maintenance Supervisors and even a few outside Board Members.  Take my word for it folks, I love those positions, but the people who hold them are not making buying decisions that will affect your company.  Limit participation to decision-makers and –influencers.  

As John Coldwell in one of our UK offices once advised a client who was agonizing over who to include in a survey, “it’s Christmas time.  You have a few cases of scotch to give away as presents.  Who gets the bottles?  That’s your customer list.”        

3)  Make sure you select only current customers.  Over and over again, sales people get their hands on a customer list and are unable to resist the urge to infiltrate it with Prospects and Lost Accounts.  Their motives are pure – they hope that responses to a survey may generate some insights into how to win the former or resurrect the latter.  The problem is that Prospects have no frame of reference with which to provide meaningful feedback on a company’s performance, and Lost Accounts, unless they have something left over to vent, have already cast their vote and taken their money somewhere else.  Neither has an incentive to participate in or respond to a survey. 

4)  And finally, keep your marketing people at bay.  Customer Satisfaction Surveys promise to try to deliver improved performance, which is a potential payback that will help drive customer interest.  But, if you dilute the focus with questions on things like brand equity, comparisons to competitors, future market trends or other interests that have nothing to do with how well you are serving the customer, participant interest will erode and so will your response rate.  Focus on actionable (versus merely interesting) results, and keep it focused on customer needs.  If you do, both you and your customers will enjoy a far better return on investment.     

Last note – to the sales and marketing people against whose egos I may have brushed, fear not.  I’m not saying you can’t (or shouldn’t) conduct lost account or market research surveys.  Both can be beneficial, useful and fully justified.  All I’m saying is don’t tack them on to a Customer Satisfaction Survey.  Everyone, including the customer, will get less than they hope for if you do.

The average response rate to paper surveys is around 8%.  For web-based surveys, it’s a bit under 20% and declining as do-it-yourself remedies continue to flood the cyber highways.  For phone surveys the going rate is a bit under 50%, but that’s only if it’s a very short survey.  Response rates fall off dramatically if the time requirement is more than five minutes, or maybe 8-10 questions. 

While logic would stipulate that putting a customer satisfaction survey in front of someone should be viewed as a positive thing, why is it then that so many people view them as irritants; held in roughly the same esteem as a trip to the dentist; something to be avoided if at all possible?  With paper surveys commonly associated with junk mail, web surveys with Spam and phone surveys with telemarketing, the motives behind each may be pure, but they are received with the same enthusiasm as a politician’s promises a week before election day.      

Part of the problem is the general sense of boredom most people attach to the conventional and decidedly tired methodologies of the day, but I think there’s a far bigger issue that most companies and market research firms far too often overlook.  Namely, when trying to recruit someone’s participation in a survey, the age-old human need of “what’s in it for me?” typically does not have an answer. 

Think about it.  Your time is limited, and hence valuable.  A third party wants you to give them some of that time, but implicit in the request for something of value is the presumption of getting something in return.  Yet history says that IF you take the time to respond to most surveys, your efforts will flow off into some informational black hole, never to be seen or heard from again.      

There are some who think that a small bribe will turn the tide.  We’ve all received surveys with a dollar bill or two inside, or maybe a pen, key chain, small gift certificate, or some other type of token of nominal value.  Whatever the “inducement” may be, the hope is that, if nothing else, by pocketing the gift a sense of guilt will propel you to respond to the survey.  For most people I’ve talked to, the prevailing view is that if someone is dumb enough to send me a dollar bill I didn’t ask for, then shame on them if they think I’m not going to pocket it.  Maybe I’ll respond to the survey, maybe not.  Probably not. 

Alas, unless you’re offering measurable odds on winning a Maserati, the impact on response rates of offering inducements are pretty close to nil.  An act of desperation more than a productive strategy.  

We have a different approach.  Today we live in an informational age, and while trinkets and gadgets and token sums of money aren’t enough to float anyone’s boat, information is.   We learned years ago, somewhat by accident, that constructing a survey around closed-loop communication is, all by itself, enough to stimulate interest in the process. 

The approach is pretty simple.  We advise all of our clients to make an up-front commitment to all prospective participants to the effect that,  “when the survey is complete we intend to share with you the relevant results of the survey, along with our plans for addressing issues identified by the survey”.   That’s all there is to it. 

Best of all, when the survey is completed, our clients find themselves with a de facto standing invitation to come back later and meet with each client.  Because they will be armed with a detailed view of what each customer thinks, closing the communication loop in this manner sets the table for not only the delivery of solutions, but it doubles as a great relationship-building exercise as well.  And it’s worth a good 10-15 points of additional response rate.  Everybody wins.

 Now don’t get me wrong.  The reader needs to understand that we already had the highest average response rate in the world when we stumbled onto this approach, so while the increase pulled us even further away from the pack, for everyone else, it’s just one small thing that will help get your customer’s attention.  Just bear in mind, at the end of the day, a paper survey is still a paper survey and a web survey is still a web survey, and no matter what you do, the world at large is still going to hate phone surveys.

Still, even if you can’t spin a silk purse from a sow’s ear, even coming up with a polyester purse is probably more than you have now.