Knowing what your customers think about your products or services is an important ingredient for a successful business. If keeping customers happy is one of your top priorities, you should be concerned with voice of customer.

The voice of the customer can refer to incorporating the wants and needs of the customer into product design by gathering information directly from the customer. It can also be defined as the process of gathering customer feedback.

There are different methods for obtaining customer opinion. One way to get customer reaction in your voice of customer process is by creating, distributing and analyzing the results of a survey.

Creating a Survey

The questions you ask in your survey should coincide with information you need to receive. If you want to know how people feel about your customer service, focus on those types of questions. If you’re interested in improving a particular product, ask questions related to the product. Don’t get sidetracked by asking questions that lack focus or are irrelevant to the purpose of the survey.

Here are some potential questions you may wish to include in your survey:

• When was the last time you made an online purchase from us?
• What did you purchase?
• When you received your item, was it what you expected?
• What made you decide to buy from us?
• Would you shop with us again?
• How easy was your checkout experience?
• Would you recommend our product/service to your family and friends?
• What would you use Product A for?
• Who in your household would use Product A?
• If you needed to contact our customer service department, were you put on hold? For how long?

Distributing your survey

There are three main methods you can use to distribute your survey:

1. Phone call
2. Mail
3. Online/email

Calling customers can be useful if you want to hear exactly what they have to say. Recording their responses will eliminate errors in summarizations by employees. A drawback to phone calls is that many people have caller-id on their phones and won’t answer if they don’t know you or think you’re selling something.

Mailing your survey might be the right choice for customers who are unlikely to respond online. You would want to take into account the costs involved in sending the survey and paying the return postage.

An online survey will likely cost less and be more effective than phone calls and mail. You should already have a customer database which includes email addresses. Emailing the online survey to specific customers is an efficient way to cover distribution and retrieval. There are companies, such as Omniture, which have specifically designed software to manage your online survey needs.

Regardless of which method you use, offering your customers an incentive for completing your survey may increase the number of responses you receive. It can be as simple as a percentage off their next order or free shipping. Giving people a reason to help you may boost your bottom line.

Analyzing survey results

Now is the time to take all the information you’ve gathered and use it to improve your business product or service. Use customer feedback to make enhancements to current products or change aspects of a new product to meet customer needs.

Some questions to ponder when performing your analysis could include:

• What can we learn from our survey results?
• What specific actions should we take in changing product design?
• Will suggested changes fit within our budget?
• How can customer service be improved?
• Are we meeting or exceeding customer expectations?

Providing quality products and unparalleled services will naturally attract customers to your business. However, maintaining a high standard of excellence and keeping your customers satisfied over the long term will be much easier if you are constantly asking for feedback and consistently making necessary adjustments.

 

Clarence Hancock is a freelance business writer.

 

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For many small businesses it can be hard to track how an employee is doing. However, if the company wants to have the proper customer service, then they may need to use an online service to help out. With this the business will see they can track how long the employees are logged in, the company can update the projects, and the company can allow all of the employees access to the project to ensure it will be completed in a timely manner.

The amount of time the employees are logged in can be important information for you to have. With this information, it will be easy for you to know if they are logging their hours properly for pay. However, you will also notice this can help you better track the way your employees are working.

With most of these programs the company can update them automatically. Then the company does not have to be concerned about the employees running out of work to do because it can automatically be updated. Then the company can have a great time knowing all of their workers are doing their job properly.

Allowing all of the employees access to certain projects will make it easy for the business to get the work done. then the person will not have to be concerned about none of the work being done. Without this, it may require the boss to assign the project and this can lead to the wrong employee getting the work.

Being able to run a company can be a great thing to do, but it can also be confusing and difficult at times for some people. This is when a person should learn about why a small business needs to have some form of online service to assist with the customer service needs. Some of the ways this will help out is by tracking how the employees are logged in, allowing the company to easily update the projects in real time, and even the way the employees can access the projects right away.

 

Author’s bio:

This article is written by Steward Copper, CIO of one of online project management consulting projects. As a project manager himself, he knows how vital customer service software is for process automation and he shares his experience though the web.

 

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