Goals for the Customer-Service Survey
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Sat, Jan 09, 2010
"We really should do a customer-service survey." Wow, words to inspire mediocrity! Of all the types of surveys, the customer-service questionnaire may be the least considered: typically, it is done because it should be done, rather than because it is the best way to meet a particular goal.
With case-management systems, support portals, CRM systems, survey tools, and enterprise feedback management systems all offering prewritten customer-service survey templates, most organizations just grab a template and modify it as the whim strikes them. In fact, most organizations have not explicitly identified the goals for their customer-service survey.
Here are some of the more common goals you can consider.
- Identify specific dissatisfied customers so that immediate action can be taken to try and resolve their outstanding issues.
- Determine how a specific service transaction affected the overall customer relationship.
- Uncover opportunities to provide better support to customers in the future.
- Discover unmet needs for future products and service offerings.
- Produce pretty trend lines for the executive dashboard. Er, "benchmark your organization over time to track how customer perceptions of support are changing."
- Internally benchmark support for different products or services in order to identify opportunities for cross population.
- Benchmark your support organization against that of specific competitors or the industry in general.
- Identify employees who are providing poorer service than their co-workers so that the employees can be mentored.
Don't just consider what goals you want to set. Martyn Drake offers Three Questions to Ask Before You Start Surveying Customers7.
Does your customer-service survey have some goals different from the ones I listed above?