Surveys Value is Underestimated

In today’s competitive market place it’s hard to differentiate your product and service offerings from your competition. The technology available to both you and your competitors has made it easier to duplicate each other’s products and services. Because of this, it’s difficult to rely on features alone to differentiate your company from the competition. Excellent customer service is one of the few ways to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.

Consider this, only 4% of all customers with problems complain. The average customer with a problem eventually tells 9 other people.

The value of satisfaction is often underestimated. An essential part of assessing satisfaction includes identifying dissatisfaction. Dissatisfied customers and prospects often hold the information you need to succeed. Understanding when and why dissatisfaction occurs helps you implement changes to gain new customers and retain old ones.

It doesn’t matter what type of business you are in, surveys are an important tool to help you collect the information you need to understand and evaluate customer and prospect satisfaction.

Full Article: Surveys Value is Underestimated

A Value-added Reseller Takes Action on Survey Results

By Angi Fisher
Contact 101


In working with our clients, the one thing we at Contact 101 stress is you must take action on your feedback. The purpose of conducting a survey is so companies can see how well they are performing or not performing. But if you don’t take action once you get the feedback, how valuable is the survey? I would say the survey is only as valuable as the action you are willing to take based on the survey results.

We worked with a value-added reseller who was willing to take action on their survey results.

Situation:

A value-added reseller of high tech security software was looking to bring on new business and sell additional services but was concerned about its 40-50 percent conversion rate on sales. The vice president of sales wasn’t sure of the cause, but she understood several factors could be involved including the experience of the sales team, trends occurring in the security industry, and her company’s marketing messages. The value-added reseller turned to Contact 101 because of its successful track record in getting feedback from prospects and customers.

Solution:

After several discussions with the vice president of sales, Contact 101 recommended surveying the resellers prospects and customers using an on-line survey over a 6 month period. Contact 101 targeted 50 prospects and customers monthly asking five key questions that targeted the assumptions of the vice president of sales.

Contact 101 used its proprietary methodology to obtain feedback from 81 percent of the prospects and customers during the six-month survey period.

Results:

As a result of surveying, the reseller learned that some sales calls were security education sales calls only, the prospect buying cycle was much longer than anticipated and additional product and service information was needed to close key accounts.

Taking Action:

Based on the survey results, the reseller decided to re-educate and train its sales team. By using survey feedback, the sales team learned how to further qualify prospects and better understand each prospect’s buying cycle and the reseller’s position within it. In addition, the team used the survey results to gauge their performance in the sales process and overcome obstacles.

For example, the reseller saved a key million dollar account with a large automotive manufacturer. After several meetings with the prospect, the reseller assumed that they would win the deal. With the survey feedback, however, the company realized that without further work they would lose the deal. It took the reseller a month longer than they had forecast to close the deal, but in the end, they made the prospect happy and learned how to address their needs long term.

By using a third party to survey their prospects and taking action on the results, the reseller’s sales team learned how to develop a winning approach for each individual prospect. After only nine months, the company increased its revenues by nearly 50 percent.

There is something to be said about taking action on your survey results.

Customer Surveys - Understand How You will Take Action On Feedback

A key strategy for quality monitoring is listening to your customers. Prospect and Customer surveying is an essential listening tool that can give you valuable information about your prospects and customers expectations, customer satisfaction and strategies for improvement.

But just listening to your prospects and customers is not the only strategy; you must be ready to take action once you get that valuable feedback.

So how do you get started? Before you even think about writing your survey questions, it’s important that you have a clearly defined statement of what your survey will achieve and a good understanding of what you will do with your newly acquired feedback from your prospects and customers. If you don’t have a clear understanding of how you will use that data you acquire, the survey will have little or no value. Some of the questions you may want ask yourself before you start down the survey path are:

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Customer Loyalty / Customer Relationship Management. Does it Work?

Customer Loyalty (the relationship) is not defined as how customers perceive their relationship with companies, as most often a customer rarely thinks they have any relationship with any company.

Customer relationship management is a popular concept but the concept itself is actually its biggest barrier.

The development of the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) marketing practice has made more and more people realize the importance of strong customer relationship in building sustainable competitive advantages where their markets "perceive" this thus, generating sustainable profits in the long run.

However, current popular CRM marketing practices often produces disappointing outcomes. Surveys show a surprisingly high rate of failure has been reported for CRM practices. The failure rate of CRM systems ranges from 50% to over 80%. The more popular this marketing practice gets the more people who realize that the current CRM practices hardly manages customer relationship.

Read Article: Customer Loyalty

Pursuing Lost Customers

Companies that routinely purge inactive customers from further contacts are discarding a highly profitable source of future business. According to Terry Vavra, president of Marketing Metrics, response rates to lost-customer survey usually average 35 to 50 percent. Not only will they tell you what caused them to stop buying -- which allows you to rectify problems in your operation -- many of these customers will soon start buying again, because you've showed you care about their experience. Considering that one loyal customer spends about $50,000 at a supermarket in the course of a decade and about $150,000 at a car dealer over a lifetime, you really can't afford to let these people go!

Why not survey those inactive customers – using a third party survey company like Contact 101 can help you get valuable feedback from those inactive customers. Getting valuable feedback from those inactive customers, gives you the opportunity to win-back those inactive customers.

Customer Experience Management: What your Customers do not tell you

You must have customer feedback to get a pulse on how satisfied or dissatisfied your customers are. Customers typically won’t complain to you, if you don’t receive complaints, you can still be certain some customers are silently fuming. In fact, about 96 percent of dissatisfied customers never tell the company how they feel -- yet they each voice their complaint to an average of nine (9) other people. Nevertheless, if customers' complaints are handled well by the company, about 90 percent do stay with the company after all. Thus it's key not only to satisfy customers who take the trouble to complain but also to actively invite and get that feedback.

Third party surveys is one way to actively invite that feedback, by actively initiating a survey you can gather valuable feedback on your customer’s experience with your company that you probably would not get otherwise.

Market Research Home Grown

Market research is a fundamental necessity and more so today with the choice of methods to find product and services to fulfill customer’s needs.

It's crucial to analyze your market and target your clientele before you waste money on advertising that will not create the desired return. Market research is even more critical before you spending time and effort investing in the development of new products or services.

Conducting market research essentially means gathering the information you need to make decisions about how to move forward with the best chance for delivering on any major business decisions. This often entails a systematic gathering, recording, and analyzing of data relevant to the decisions you need to make for selling products and/or services you produce.

Read Article: Market Research

"Search" Market Research

"Search" marketing was a $1.1 billion market in 2002, $1.5 billion for 2003, and doubling in the first 3 quarters of 2004. According to Jupiter Research search marketing is expected to soar to $11 billion by 2008 as consumers have embraced search as a way to find and acquire products and services to precisely match their needs. As such, search changes the way businesses acquire customer and in order to follow the trail of the customer, companies must adapt.

Internet usage growth currently 1/2 billion daily users is primarily limited to four search engines, namely Google.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, and AOL.com. More importantly to marketing is the clear leader in search engine usage is Google at 56.4% of total search queries. In addition, Google provides secondary results for AOL (4th - 3.8%) thus providing a realized search market share of 60% of all search queries.

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