Customer Feedback Surveys: Essential Elements Gathering customer feedback can be a challenging process. Businesses need good customer feedback to shape their offerings and services. Having a clear view of a customer’s experience with a company is essential, and conducting a survey is an excellent way to gather essential feedback. The exponential growth of businesses asking for survey input has saturated the market. Customers are routinely asked to respond to survey questions on everything from retail experiences, funeral home offerings, and cell phone plans. As a result, it can be challenging to encourage customers to respond to a survey, and harder still to wade through the false or negative responses to gather legitimate feedback. When designing a survey, it is essential that the survey be worded clearly and directly. It needs to have specific questions that target exactly what the company needs to know: what the customer liked about their experience, what they disliked, and what they would like to see changed. By asking about likes/dislikes/needs, companies target the three ‘B’s of customer experience: beliefs, belonging, and behaviors. In other words, a good survey asks about the customer’s preconceived or confirmed beliefs about a company, what demographic group they belong to, and what behaviors the customers exhibit based on the way they respond to the survey questions. While these general question categories will result in an insightful customer feedback survey, it is useful to look at a specific survey recently received via email to evaluate what factors determine a successful or unsuccessful survey approach.
Company Profile The company that sent the email customer survey is Purolator Inc. This is a courier and freight delivery service based in Canada. Their packages are inducted at either UPS or FedEx in the United States and sent north across the