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This is the time of year where you are rushing to get those last minute Christmas gifts, send in your final payroll, ensure all your items are recorded in Outright, maybe make some end of the year donations, and just take some time off.
However, you should also take the time here at the end of the year to survey your customers and maybe even your prospects, but most importantly your customers.
As a business owner who was trained in statistics and data analysis in college as a Political Science major this comes second nature to me, but many business owners I've spoken with do not do any kind of surveying of their customers.
You don't have to make the survey a long complex survey like the one I received last week from my cable company that took me 45 minutes to complete. It can be as simple as one page with say 10 questions, like the one I received yesterday from a local restaurant.
Several tools are available for you to conduct surveys of your customers or prospects. These include companies that host the survey for you and even have question libraries where you can choose from pre-written questions or save your own for later use. Some developers have even built software that you can download to your computer and install on your own website if you would rather be a lone ranger.
Their are benefits to both types of software. By far the easiest solution is to use a company like SurveyGizmo or Survey Monkey since for a low fee they take care of everything including hosting the survey, emailing reports to you, giving you the ability to post your survey to Twitter or Facebook, plus more.
The team at SurveyGizmo have posted a three part case study of how to put together a survey. They cover why to survey, segmentation and using existing data. It's probably one of the better blogs on how to do a survey from the various survey software providers.
No matter what solution you prefer you should put a lot of thought into your survey before you send it out to your list or call on your customers. I prefer to at least collect demographic data as part of my survey and as a tip I can tell you that if you ask these demographic questions last you will get more responses.
So go ahead and send out a simple survey to your customers and make sure they are pleased with the services they are getting and don't forget to ask where you can improve or what services/products they would like to see. And tweet this post to share the secrets of surveying with your network!
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