How Do I Choose the Best Customer Loyalty Survey?

If you want to know what customers really think about the services you provide, a customer loyalty survey can be a great way to get the truth. To choose the best survey, you should consider factors such as the size of your operation and the kind of budget that you have. For example, if you own a small business with a limited customer base, you might want to compose your own customer loyalty survey that you distribute to customers as they are leaving your establishment. Professionals in large companies, on the other hand, can't possibly contact each of their customers, so they might choose to use phone or Internet surveys. Representatives of larger companies also might have the budget to hire market research firms to develop large-scale customer research projects.

A customer loyalty survey is a questionnaire that professionals distribute to clients to determine if they are happy with services they received and if they plan on returning the next time they need a similar service. These surveys differ from customer satisfaction surveys, which measure only how happy customers are with products and services. A customer loyalty survey can help professionals to learn if clients plan on using their services in the future and if they might recommend their services to others.

In order to choose the best customer loyalty survey, it first can be important to determine how best to reach your customers. If you do much of your business online, for example, you can benefit from adding a survey to the end of a transaction. Professionals who work for companies that do much business over the telephone might give callers the option to participate in surveys once phone sessions have ended. Insurance company professionals might hire market research firms to call clients who recently have communicated with company representatives.

The way in which questions on a customer loyalty survey are worded can impact the feedback customers provide. To get the most honest responses, you should make sure that questions are written as objectively as possible. Answer formats should allow customers to give nuanced answers. Yes or no formats, for instance, might be less effective than 1 through 10 rating scales. You may even benefit from a survey that enables customers to provide short answers so they can talk about personal experiences they have had with your organization.

In some cases, you might want to customize a customer loyalty survey to answer certain questions you have about your organization. If your organization has undergone a change in infrastructure, you can write questions regarding customer services this change might have affected. Likewise, if you are thinking about introducing new products or services, you can find out how this change might impact the loyalty of your customers.