The most important question that any business can ask itself: “Is are our customers satisfied with us and the service we provide?” Unfortunately many management teams can’t answer this question because their business has no way of measuring customer satisfaction.

Some businesses will try to measure customer satisfaction through expensive and elaborate customer surveys. They’ll buy expensive software, contract with polling or research companies and spend vast amounts of money trying to gauge customer opinion. Unfortunately most business simply can’t afford these methods. Fortunately there are simple, cheap and very effective strategies that can give a business a good picture of customer satisfaction without spending a lot of money.

• Ask the customers what they think. Every time your business makes contact with a customer over the phone, online, in a store visit or on a service or sales call take time out to ask the customer what they think. Simply ask the customer did they get good service and are they satisfied with it. Always give the customer a choice whether to answer such questions or not but ask them. Asking for the customer’s opinion is cheaper and often more effectives than surveys.

• Use e-mail to improve customer service. E-mail is one of the cheapest and easiest methods of measuring customer satisfaction. Compose a simple customer satisfaction survey and send it to every customer who provides you their e-mail. It’s best to do this a few days after your business with them has been concluded. Even though most of your customers will not respond to the e-mail a few will. One advantage to such a survey is that the most dissatisfied customers will probably respond. This can enable you to identify problems and correct them before they cost you business.

• Another great way of measuring customer satisfaction is with a simple online survey. Asking basic questions like would you buy from us again or how was your last visit to our store? Will tell you what customers will really think of your organization. A good way to get customers to respond to these surveys is to hold a contest such as a drawing for a free gift card. Many organizations print invitations to such surveys on their cash register receipts or invoices. Others will send out a formal invitation. Either way a basic survey is a great means of measuring customer satisfaction.

Organizations that fail to devise effective means of measuring customer satisfaction will not be able to keep their customers.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 5th, 2010 at 9:53 am and is filed under Management Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.