Episode Description:
Using a survey can be a powerful tool in gaining insights from customers or employees. Properly executing and analyzing the data of a survey can prove to be quite complicated. One wrong move and the survey results may provide data that is unreliable and could result in making poor decisions based on false assumptions. In this episode we’ll dive into the how and why of surveys!
Action you can take right now:
Unfortunately, this particular episode was a broad overview of the problem with surveys and techniques that can be used to help improve them without the call for immediate action items. However, if you are considering using surveys in your business to gauge service or customer sentiment than here are some action items you should take BEFORE getting started.
- Think about what you really want to measure? If you want to measure the quality of your customer service experience, vs. the quality of a particular agent for example. There is a huge difference and the questions SHOULD be much different in this instance.
- What is the goal of the survey? Create a clear and defined goal of your survey. What do you hope to learn? How will you act on the data the survey provides? How will you measure success? Will make fundamental changes than try the same survey at a different time to ensure the desired impact was delivered?
- Is a survey the right thing for your business? Surveys aren’t always appropriate, especially if they aren’t developed properly or acted upon properly. If you own a restaurant with a survey card, and 1 in 5 respondents rate the food poorly, what will you do? Will you change the entire menu? Fire the chefs? Assume 1 in 5 were unlucky? The answer isn’t always clear, but those answers need to be considered before creating the survey.
Episode After-Thoughts
Solicitation for feedback can be frustrating when you see the process failing in front of your eyes. Think about the Dunkin’ Donuts example, or the intro to this episode. We’ve all been in a position where we are uncomfortably persuaded or pressured to complete a survey with a specific rating (all 5 stars!). I don’t object to the statement “If we failed to deliver a 5-star experience we want to know why!”, except when it’s used between a franchisee and corporate as a barrier to submitting the survey in the first place, or an employee with their company.
Take this one thought, imagine if every service interaction in your company was a three, and a stellar service representative convinces each customer to change their rating to 5 across the board when submitting their survey. Even though at the end, the customer is ‘maybe’ happy, a major problem has failed to reveal itself in the process.
Episode 20 Transcript:
Thank you for listening to the marketing and service.com podcast. I hope that I have delivered five-star service for you today. If I have not, or have failed to deliver five stars in any category possible, it is a personal reflection on me, myself and the consequence, my home, my job, my marriage, and my life.
We’ve all heard this before. Do you mind taking the survey at the end of the call, along with that? But why. That and more coming up on the marketing and service.com podcast.
Hey, I’m Justin Varuzzo with the marketing and service.com podcast. The podcast designed to help you build your business by creating incredible customer relationships. And today we are talking a little bit about surveys and how surveys play into customer service and why so many companies are doing surveys wrong.
So let’s start with the example in the beginning, if you’re listening and you’ve ever had an experience where you were asked to take a survey, and then we’re told that that survey is a reflection, a personal reflection. On the person that’s helping you. And that it must be five stars across the board.
Raise your hand. Okay. Hopefully if you’re driving, you didn’t raise both hands, but the point is, this is asked all the time and it gets even a little more complicated because as you already know, more often than not, the questions in the survey are not directly related to the items that are pertinent to the representative.
That’s how. There are also other times where the survey questions we’ll ask something like, was your problem resolved? Give it one to five rating. How well was your problem resolved? Well, maybe the problem couldn’t be resolved, not because of any fault of the representative you are dealing with, but simply because they weren’t empowered to give the answer or to give the solution to the problem and had to transfer it to someone else or escalate it, which is a fairly common thing in the customer service world.
So let’s just cover a few very basic. About surveys, call these the survey fundamentals, if you will. So, one of the things that we collect with surveys is data.
The whole point of performing a survey is to collect data. And this data can come in one of two forms. There is quantitative data. This is data. That is a numbers, right? So if you say rate this on a one to five scale and someone rates it a three, that’s a, that’s a distinct number. We’re assigning a value, a numerical value to some type of, uh, Scale that we can then use later on to measure the overall satisfaction of that survey question.
Right? So that is quantitative. Think of that as quantities, numbers or quantities, right. The other type of data that we can collect in a survey is qualitative data. You’ll see this often, if you research how surveys are structured, you will always see or statistics for that matter. You’ll always see quantitative versus qualitative.
Qualitative data is more of the open-ended questions you might say. What did you enjoy or what did you disapprove about your experience today? And now a customer has the opportunity to write out a sentence. They can write out text. It’s not a, uh, it’s not a multiple choice.
Okay. It’s not an answer where they’re forced to assign a numerical value, but they can say what’s on their mind and speak out about whatever this subject is.
One of the other things with surveys is that surveys are inherently subjective. Uh, they’re not necessarily objective, right? People don’t go in without preconceived notions. It’s it’s exactly the opposite. So one of the issues with surveys is it’s usually self-selected right. You have the opportunity to take the survey or to decline to take the survey.
If you’re a customer. And there’s an inherent bias about the person who says, yeah, I want to take the survey. I want to participate and I want to provide my feedback. And it makes sense. If you think about it, you’re probably more inclined to want to leave feedback and share your experience. If it was really bad, uh, on the, on, on the other end, you might be inclined more inclined to participate in a survey if you were really happy because you want to get your feedback.
I’d say this was awesome. If it was just a mediocre run of the mill experience, you might find, even being asked to take the survey is an inconvenience. And you might pass up on it. Just keep that in mind. The fact that a lot of surveys are self-selecting surveys. This does create a little bit of bias in service.
Another thing that can create a bias in a survey is of course the medium of the survey, uh, you think surveys, it could be literally a person standing at the door saying, do you have my, a quick minute to take a survey? Can you answer these few questions? Right. Someone’s behavior towards another human being in person might be a lot different than phone, right?
So if someone calls you on the phone and. It’s a solicitor and a telemarketer, trying to sell you some crap. You are more likely to be rude and obnoxious and hang up on them. Then if you’re walking through a mall and someone steps out and says, oh, excuse me, for one moment, uh, would, would you like to buy this or that, uh, you, you might be more inclined to say, oh, sorry, not, not today.
As opposed to, uh, just punching them in the face and running off. Okay.
Yeah. So you have real life people to people surveys, you have phone surveys, uh, you have written surveys, right? You might have an email survey. You might have an email that links you to a survey system where you take it online. There’s a lot of different ways for a survey to be performed, but just, just keep that in mind.
Now we know on the surface that one of, and probably the most likely reason. Companies do surveys is to better understand where they have room for improvement and to better understand the pain points that their customers are having with their service experience. But the problem is, is because of a lack of training.
When these surveys are implemented, they become the litmus test as to whether or not this customer service person will keep their job. Now that could potentially be. The purpose of the survey, depending on the circumstance is, is this customer service representative doing the right thing? If it is you shouldn’t be asked questions, like, was your problem resolved on a scale of one to five with no opportunity to elaborate?
And in that situation, Is literally making the customer service person look bad when it was not their fault at all. So what are some other reasons that companies might run a survey? Well, maybe you want to measure the success of your operations. Uh, maybe you are seeking areas of impact. Maybe you’re trying to determine what the sentiment of your service department is.
Uh, it could be personal responsibility. Uh, what, what is the staff perception? So there’s a lot of reasons why you might want to do a survey, but at the end of the day, you’re inconveniencing your customers because you want answers to questions. And the best way to get those answers are directly from the customer.
Right? A lot of times these surveys can provide statistics or they can provide KPIs. The brand or the product or the service to allow you to create a better brand, a better product or a better service. It seems that as these companies scale larger and larger, the problems with these surveys become more and more intense.
Now, you know, I like to give a nice personal story to go along with these things, because as much as I would love to think I’m some genius with a long endless list of amazing ideas to solve the truth of the matter is I just go day by day. Make some mental notes about the experiences I have. So I was very surprised recently when I was at a Dunkin donuts and found a handwritten note on the counter that said, show us your five star review and we will give you a free donut.
Now as a customer. This is great. All I have to do is. Leave a review, show it to the person and I get a free donut, but this undermines the entire survey process. And this is happening for a multitude of reasons. Obviously, Dunkin donuts wants to solicit their customers and ensure that they are getting a good experience from.
Each one of their franchisees, right? Because Dunkin donuts is a franchise operation. You have independent business owners that are running Dunkin donuts, but Dunkin donuts also is corporate owned stores and they are a brand of their own. So it’s important that the franchisees follow the rules and deliver the value and the exceptional service that Dunkin donuts has built into their brand.
Now, this is not unique to Dunkin donuts. I’m just using them in this example. Any franchisor is usually keeping tabs on their franchisees to ensure that everything is running as it should. In this particular instance, Dunkin donuts wants to know how this franchisee is performing. Are they doing things properly?
Are they ensuring the customers are getting a great experience? The problem is is the franchisee is nervous that if they get bad reviews, they will be penalized one way or. And it’s quite possible that maybe they would be. So they’re taking it upon themselves to go an extra mile, to get a good review by soliciting free food to their customers and using the free food as a tool to solicit the review, I should say.
So think about this for a second. Corporate wants to know some answers to some questions so they can dive deeper into the experience that their customers are having. But the very people that these surveys are intended to help and identify are the ones that are essentially bribing customers. To leave reviews by giving free food.
Now there’s a lot of instances where it is completely appropriate to provide a customer, some type of gift or a thank you in response to leaving some type of feedback. But very rarely is it appropriate to hinge that reward on a positive review? Because again, the goal here is to gain insight, not to just get fake positive reviews.
That’s not helping the company move forward. It might. Good on some report somewhere, and I’m not talking about public facing reviews like Yelp or Google, I’m talking internal reviews and internal audits that go along with internal surveys of service, quality, or brand quality or product quality. Right. So really what I’m saying is at the end of the day, For the people, the end users.
And I don’t mean the end users is in the customers filling out the survey, but the end users, as in the franchisees, their goal starts to become creating and getting perfect surveys back. But that’s not the objective of the survey. The survey is not to make sure that the surveys are perfect. This whole objective of a survey is to understand what’s not working.
And when you. People in your organization or franchisees who are representing your brand. And you’ve now created an environment where you’re incentivizing them to solicit fake reviews or bribing customers, which in and of itself is an uncomfortable service experience to say, Hey, I’ll give you a free donut, but only if you say great things about me, that just, it just doesn’t sit right to me from an ethical level.
And it certainly does. Any sense from an organization level, trying to gather information or research about your customer service operations. I have to give another very recent example of this happening. I, uh, probably about a year ago, right before COVID started, I had started going to orange theory gyms.
Orange theory is absolutely amazing. So I’m I’m, I don’t want to trash talk them or they are an awesome organization. I’ve really enjoyed their gym classes and I continue to do so, but it was right after I believe my second visit. And I didn’t quite understand yet what the orange theory was. Uh, I understood that you did exercises, but I hadn’t really, I’d gotten a little.
Toward the facility and a brief 10 minute introduction to what it was about, but there seemed to be a lot of little cultural things and Facebook promos, and contests and events that would happen on a monthly basis that I just wasn’t entirely clear on. And after the second visit, I had gotten a request with a survey, which asked a lot of questions about my experience at that particular facility about my experience and how I felt about the program in general.
And in overall satisfaction rate now, honestly, I think with only two visits to a business, like a gym where you’re intending to go on a regular basis multiple times a week for possibly years on end, it was a little awkward to be getting a survey, asking a lot of these intimate questions about how my experience was.
When I, I wasn’t even sure what I was doing yet. I wasn’t comfortable yet. You know, going to a new gym is almost like a, you know, when going from elementary school to middle school, it’s all new people. It’s intimidating. It can be kind of wracking. And, uh, you know, I know it sounds, sounds a little pathetic to say it out loud, but come on, you know, you’re, you’re in a group of.
Working out and exercising together that you don’t know. And it takes a little while to get used to that. So on the survey, I remember the coach was great. Uh, and it said, would you recommend this to a friend? And my answer was that I don’t know I was right in the middle. I think it was a one to five rating.
I said, I don’t know, I guess a three, like, I’m not at a point where I’m like, Hey, this is the greatest thing in the world. I want to recommend this to all my friends, but I didn’t have any reason not to, I didn’t have a negative experience. Until I got the phone call a day after submitting that survey where I was told this is a personal reflection on the coach.
And if they don’t get all fives, it’s going to have an impact on their career here at orange theory. Now I might be dramatizing that just a bit, but in essence, I was being asked, why, why didn’t you give this person a five? And I said, well, I did give the person a five. They said, no, you, you said, when you would, you recommend this to a friend that you might.
And I said, yeah, because I might not, I don’t know yet. I haven’t been doing this live only been doing it for two weeks and they basically begged me. They said, listen, we can send you a new survey. Uh, and if you could just put a five, we’d appreciate it. And I did, but again, now I’m thinking to myself, I just undermined the survey process.
I did a favor to the person at the gym, and maybe I did a favor for that coach. But I completely undermined the purpose of the survey for orange theory. And they might not know now that maybe they shouldn’t send the survey within two weeks. Maybe they should wait a month or maybe they should wait after your fourth or fifth visit, even if that’s over the course of a few months or maybe it’s in the course of one week, if you go every single night.
But I think you get the point here where I’m going with this, that particular. Was undermining to the intentions of the survey. And it seems especially disturbing when you see it at a franchisor and a franchisee level, because these are people who are business owners, they’re corporate representatives.
Basically, there are people who should know better than to undermine the survey. On the other hand, the actions that come as a result. Of a survey can be equally disturbing. And this is where finding this balance. When you commit to a survey is so important, finding the balance between let’s gather information that gives us actionable items to improve ourselves.
If these surveys don’t come back the way we want to see them, which of course is we all want to see five stars. We all want to think that we’re doing a great job, but when we see that something went wrong, we can’t be so quick to say, oh, well, we got to get rid of this person. We got to give them a penalty.
Uh, we got to crack down on this. We got to crack down on this because now what you’ve done is you’ve created a culture of fear that goes on along with the survey, as the survey creator, you’re undermining your own survey. By doing this now in the case of Dunkin donuts, supposed to be an anonymous survey, that’s the whole point in this instance, though, they’re saying, show us your receipt and.
That you left us a good review and then we’ll give you the free donut. So it undermines the anonymity of the process as well. So why are we talking about all of this? And I think the reason I wanted to bring this up is because I do think surveys have a place. I think surveys are important. And I do think you can uncover and learn things as a result of a survey.
But surveys are really difficult. Uh, they’re they’re not as easy as one might think for the people who major in, in statistical analysis, uh, survey design is so incredibly important. It, it becomes such a huge element. And I mean, there’s people who literally spend their entire career trying to create surveys that will provide accurate.
Data at the end of the day, because there’s so many things that can go wrong in a survey and skew the results of a survey. And depending on what the survey is, uh, you know, maybe it’s not that important, maybe Dunkin donuts decides not to put sprinkles on that particular donut because they got some surveys that said that it wasn’t the best thing in the world, but the data wasn’t really right.
People love the sprinkle donut. And, uh, you know, you get some emails saying, bring it back, right. That that’s like a very minor issue that could happen on a survey. But take a look at maybe a hospital, uh, where people’s lives are on the line. And now the survey is to ensure patient care and now actions are taken as a result of a poorly written survey that could potentially have a huge impact on the quality of care that someone receives not intentional.
This could be completely unintentional as a result of a poorly crafted survey. Now I know most of you. I know if you’re listening right now, you’re probably in your car. And you’re probably a small business owner thinking who cares. This is all crazy. I’m not a corporation. I’m not issuing surveys at the end of every phone call, but I think after bashing the surveys and how they operate right now, it’s worth taking a few moments just to look at what can be accomplished with the survey.
So the first thing is nobody thinks a survey is fun or good. Nobody says, thank God. I was the one who was selected to take the survey at the end of this call and evaluate your business for you. So you should. Consider some type of reward for someone who does take the time for a survey. Uh, maybe it’s a $5 gift card to Starbucks, unless you’re Dunkin donuts.
That’s probably not a good idea, but maybe it’s a free gift. Maybe it’s a gift certificate to your website. If you have an e-commerce website, maybe it’s something that can be redeemed in the future or some coupon code something to incentivize the customer to give you honest feedback, because the point of the survey is you want to know what you are doing well and what you can do to improve things.
That aren’t going so well. And that is not nearly as easy as it sounds. And if you’ve been listening to this podcast, we talk about bad reviews and negative customer experiences. There’s so many things we talk about regularly and it’s never obvious a lot of times you’ll never even know. You’ll never even know why someone stopped coming to your business, or you won’t even know the thing that a customer perceived as inappropriate or dissatisfying that you had no idea even.
And those are the scariest ways to lose a customer. When there’s something that’s really bad, that happens. If you had an argument with someone or there’s a fight or an employee blows up at someone at least, you know, right then and there that something really bad has happened and you need to make the effort to go out of your way to correct it, rectify it and make it better.
But as we’ve discussed in past surveys, up to 15 to 20 customers, you lose. They will never express to you why they chose to go somewhere else. You will never know the problem of that failure. Now I’m not entirely sure that the survey is going to help, but it might, if you have an email list with customers that have not shopped with you for maybe the last six months or 12 months, maybe there’s an opportunity to give them a gift to try to solicit some feedback.
Determining the value of that feedback is really important too, because I know me personally, I get some surveys, if it’s personal, like in the case of orange theory, this was an instance where the person in the office that is local to my gym, that I know, and that I have to see every time I go there.
They’re the ones asking me to fix it, or they’re the ones asking me to take it in the first place. That’s a little bit different than just receiving a random email. Right. And it makes sense because everything we talk about is building business is really about building relationships, personal relationships.
So now that I’ve been going to this gym, even though it’s only been a couple of times, I now a personal relationship with this person, I know their face. I know who they are. I don’t want to go in there back to the gym after I just ruined their life and got one of their coaches fired. Right. So I feel much more intimate.
To help them out and to leave the review, right. Or answer the survey in this case, Dunkin donuts. On the other hand, I’m not the type of person to do a Dunkin donuts survey because there was a code on the bottom of a receipt. I understand why they do it. I’m just saying me personally, I’m not the type to do that for nothing.
And I’m not really the type to do it for a free donut either. I mean, I feel like they’ll give, give donuts away with just about anything now. So it’s just not something I want to take five or 10 minutes out of my day. For a donut at Dunkin donuts to do this and keep in mind, this was definitely. Dunkin donuts, the franchise giving away a donut in return for review.
This was a franchisee undermining, the corporate survey process. And again, that’s not to say that Dunkin donuts corporate would never engage in some type of activity that would permit them to give you something for free. I’m encouraging that they would, but not hindering it on a five star review. Point is to solicit honest feedback.
So again, you might want to go back to customers. You haven’t seen for six months, and you could even preface the survey with we haven’t seen you in six months and this could be a tool to find out why those customers are no longer shopping with you. Now I’m not going to get into survey design because one, quite frankly, I am not an expert at it.
And too, I know we could spend an entire podcast, uh, and the next five years talking about how a survey should be designed and how the questions should be asked, but just be aware if you decide to use a survey to solicit information about your business or solicit an experience from your customers, you do need to make sure you do some research.
Want to consider hiring a company that is an expert at creating surveys, because how you ask questions can make a huge impact on the survey answer. And how you ask a one question can have a dramatic effect on how someone perceives the next question that’s asked and people who are experts at this will be able to structure it in a way that will minimize the possibility.
Of you tainting your own survey, by the way you frame or phrase the questions. A great example of this was the orange theory survey question that said overall, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend that forced me in a position where I either had to not give them a good review? Although I had a good experience, I wasn’t able to give them a five on that category, but it didn’t give me a way out.
It was basically forcing me to either lie or just say. Without giving me the option. I don’t know. And obviously that’s a pretty obvious example, but I’m sure we’ve all taken surveys before where you get to a question that says, well, I can’t answer this because it just doesn’t apply to me, but there’s no option that says does not apply.
So you just randomly picked something. Uh, and this happens more and more often as the surveys get longer and longer one example of like an exhaustive survey, if you’ve ever taken a JD power and associates survey, uh, you’ll normally get one of these after you buy a new car, because that’s a, that’s a big deal, right?
Everyone wants those JD power and associates awards to put on their commercials when they’re a car company. So when you buy a new car, you’ll often get a JD power survey shortly after. And honestly, I normally wouldn’t fill it out, but because I’m in marketing, I kind of enjoy the actual survey process. I wanted to know what type of things they were asking.
So I could better understand and perceive if JD power ratings are a complete joke. Or if they’re really based on legitimate, good well-written surveys and they are, I’m not, I mean, I’m not going to do an analysis of their survey, but, but it’s a very, very long survey and they do ask a lot of questions and they really want to understand how your experience was with the brand, how the experience was with the dealer who sold you that brand and how your experience was with service.
Overall, another example of a. Survey that gives escalating rewards is Nielsen ratings for radio. Uh, if you’ve ever gotten one of these it’s it’s so insanely archaic, uh, but basically Nielsen will send you a pre-qualification letter that essentially has $5. They literally put a $5 bill in the envelope with a letter that says, fill out these four questions and send this back and we’ll send you another $5.
Okay. I mean, it literally takes 20 seconds to fill this out. It’s basically how old are you? Average household income. What zip code do you live in? And like, that’s the whole thing. You send it back and sure enough, they’ll send you another letter with $5. With a letter explaining that they will send you a diary and another $10 to fill out a radio diary.
And literally it’s a diary that you have to write. They give you the pencil too. Uh, but you write in this diary, every channel you listen to on the radio or on XM or on Pandora or apple music or Spotify. Every hour of the day for every day, for seven days. And then you send this back to them and this is how they come up with radio ratings.
When you hear this show is the number one show on talk radio, or this shows number one demographic for males between 30 and 45. Nielsen ratings are the ones who do this, and this is how they collect that information to provide those statistics, which of course are used by the radio stations to determine their advertising rate.
If you’re a number one radio station, you’re going to get a lot more for ad time than if you are some small local radio station that has very little audience, but they use this power of giving you a little gift up front saying, Hey, here’s a couple of bucks. Just look at this letter. Now when you open it.
And money falls out of it. That definitely grabs your attention, even though it’s $2 or $3, it still grabs your attention. I mean, this is cash, just two to $3 cash, a $5 bill I’ve, I’ve gotten a few different ones of these and the money amounts are always different, but a $5 bill falls out of envelope.
You’re going to look at the letter and when the letter says, Hey, just check off these three things and we’ll send you another, another five bucks. I mean, who’s not going to do it. It’s a prepaid pre I don’t even have to put a stamp on it. It it’s, you know, I just made $10. 30 seconds. Now you receive another letter with a little more money with a little bit bigger of a request.
Then you receive another packet with more money, with a bigger request. Now we’re getting into this diary and keeping track of the diary. And, and if you send that back though, there’s the promise for more money for completing the survey, right? So I think maybe it’s $20 when you complete the survey. Uh, when all is said and done, you end up probably getting about $35.
To go from the beginning to the end of this. Now they know what the drop-off rates are. Right? So you, you send out a survey or an initial feeler for say survey, just to see if someone’s qualified and you know that, you know, maybe you only get one, 1% or 2% response rate. Now you go to the next phase where it’s, uh, you know, here’s some money we’re going to send you a diary.
Here’s the heads up. And if you complete it, we’ll give you even more. So they know in that second phase, you might just take the five bucks, throw the envelope out and never look at it again and be like, I’m not filling out a whole thing, but their hope is that by keeping you engaged by giving you a little more money each and every time one they’re building trust.
You’ve already given me the money up front. It’s, it’s a, it’s a cool trust exercise. Like I don’t think that after you send me a $5 bill for nothing that you’re now going to rip me off five bucks for completing that sheet. And they don’t, they’ve sent me the money every time. It’s only happened a few times, but so you want to make sure your survey has a reward, something to entice a customer to take the time to do it and do it thoughtfully, not just scribble something on every page to get the money assessing individual.
Should not be a unique purpose of a survey. It should certainly be a component of a survey. You know, how was the attitude of the person who helps you today? Did the person who help you today help you find what you were looking for? What if those are two different people? You have to clarify these things.
It’s really important because you want to make sure when you do assess an individual through a survey, that one you’re assessing the appropriate individual. To that you’re assessing the skills in which they are being paid to perform. If you’re assessing a customer service agent, and you’re asking questions about a sales process, which happens, it’s crazy as that sounds, that has nothing to do with them.
Now you’re going to get wonky results from this. And lastly, you want to make sure you have actionable data at the end of the survey. Uh, if you get five surveys that say, you’ve done something wrong, you can’t just say, oh, those people are idiots. They don’t know what they’re talking about. Well, what’s the point of the survey then?
Because I’ve seen this happen too. I’ve seen businesses put out a survey, they get responses, and then they literally sit there and they think that anyone who gave them a negative. Response to one of the survey questions is an idiot. And was that, that was cranky customer and it’s, they’re an outlier. And the truth is they’re probably not.
They could be, but you should still take it into consideration. What’s the point of a survey. If the survey, if you just want a bunch of people to say, you’re great, uh, you could probably just pay. To tell you that all day long, the point of the survey is to get good feedback and to be able to take action, to improve the areas where you are not succeeding at a five-star level.
You’re going to do a survey. You might want to enlist the help of a professional to do this. So I apologize. I know today’s podcast was a little more of a. Then it was real actionable items. Uh, but I hope that I did provide some value. And if you consider using surveys, which I do think they’re good. And I do think they serve a place.
Just keep in mind that you structure the survey in a way that makes it fair for everyone involved. Pin your customers against your service staff or pin your customers against sales staff, or pin your customers against a certain franchisee. If you’re in a corporate environment, you want to make sure that you are soliciting feedback in a way that is truly going to help your business.
Punishments attached to anyone involved. And more importantly, sometimes people just perceive this themselves and employee will just perceive that if I don’t get all five stars, I’m going to get fired even though it’s never happened. And no one’s ever said that to them. So you want to make sure that they understand the point of the survey.
Hey, sit someone down and say, We’re going to be doing this survey. We are going to ask questions about how you performed, but we don’t want you to think that this is a personal reflection of you. Every time someone says something, that’s not five stars. Now, obviously you want to train your staff and encourage them that you want to try to do your best to create an incredible experience that is five-star worthy.
But if you get responses that say otherwise, Try to figure out what’s going wrong. Now, if you’ve got a common thread over and over and over again about a certain person or in a certain situation, then of course you want to work to try to fix it. But that alone shouldn’t be the, your fault. Result because of one or two negative surveys, even if there’s quite a few negative surveys focused on a particular person, take a minute, review your training practices and see, is this someone who is just an outlier?
That’s not doing their job well, or is this something inherent with, we did not train them properly or somewhere along the lines, they don’t have the proper tools that they need to resolve a problem for the customer, because I’ve seen it in every area. I’ve seen it where you’ve just. A bad customer service person.
I’ve seen where you’ve got a good person that was poorly trained. I’ve seen where you have a well-trained good worker that doesn’t have the tools at their disposal to resolve the problem. And I’ve seen workers that have a good attitude and they’re well-trained and they escalate things. And somewhere in the escalation process, things get lost in the shuffle.
And then it somehow ends up reflecting poorly on that person who was the first to get involved, even though they did everything. Right. So just keep those scenarios in mind. Try to be human about it and realize that you are taking your customer’s time. And you’re asking for them to commit time for the sole purpose of you being able to improve your business.
Take it very seriously. Don’t just sit down and send out a survey with a bunch of dumb questions and hope that you’re going to somehow solve every problem in your business. Take time, hire professional, do the survey, right. And it can be an incredibly valuable tool to improve. Your business, otherwise it could be a complete waste of time.
It could be undermined by the people who are involved and it can be undermined by yourself. If you do not design the survey properly. Thank you so much for listening to the marketing and service.com podcast. I’m Justin Varuzzo. It’s been great. And I have to ask a favor, please take a moment to follow or subscribe on whatever platform that you are listening to this podcast on.
If you really want to do me a personal favor, I would love if you would leave us a review. And most importantly, if you have any questions you want to jump in and get involved in the conversation. Join us in the marketing service.com Facebook page. Uh, I’m I’m there, I’m answering questions. We’ve got discussions going on.
It’s a great place to jump into, and I’d love to see what everyone’s got going on. And I really want to know what your challenges are so I can plan out future episodes to provide you as much value as I possibly can, because I just love doing these podcasts. Thank you so much and have a great day.