Five steps to get started with your Customer Satisfaction Survey

If surveys are to make sense, there must be a clear purpose to the survey.  
 
Therefore, before starting your Customer Satisfaction Survey, you must first clarify: 

• What is the purpose of the Customer Satisfaction Survey and what parameters should it use? 
   
• What exactly do you need to know? 

Once you have agreed on the purpose internally within the organization, it will be easier to formulate the questions and simpler to keep the question framework short and precise. Some days it is more difficult to find motivation than others. That’s how it is for everyone, no matter what job you’re in – whether it’s your dream job or not. 

It is important to clarify who is the decision-maker and who is influential when it comes to purchasing your products and/or services. Surveys show, for example, that women often wear the trousers when it comes to buying cars. Bearing this in mind, car dealers must not therefore direct communications and questionnaires exclusively at men, as it is often the woman in the relationship who is the real decision-maker. 

It takes resources and will to effectively follow-up a Customer Satisfaction Survey, and management must be prepared for this. The organization must know what to use the results for. This means that, in preparation for a Customer Satisfaction Survey, you must have an established action plan for how the results will be processed. It is not just a question of surveying and finding a number, but also of processing data correctly and making the figures usable knowledge for the entire organization. Even before setting up your survey, you should consider the following: 

• Who will have access to the data generated by the survey? 
• Can you process data however you want and make different parts of the survey available to those parts of the organization that need the results? 
• How should the results be presented? 
  
  

There can be no successful Customer Satisfaction Survey without responses. 

Therefore, you should consider which channels can give you as many answers as possible. 
 
The questionnaire should be set up so that it is readable on all devices, including mobile phones, so that customers can also answer questions on the go. You must make sure you remove all barriers so that you have the best possible chance that customers will spend time answering your questionnaire. 

Once you have considered the four points above, you must decide which type of survey best supports the overall purpose of the survey. 

There are different types of surveys, which partly depend on the purpose of the survey, partly on how often you want to conduct the survey, and partly on what you want to survey. 

Customer Manager, Member Organizations

Xact By Rambøll

M +45 51 61 78 82

pemj@ramboll.com

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