Three Successful Customer Surveys That Businesses Have Used

Customer surveys can be extremely useful in building and improving your business. Here are three examples of successful assessments that well known companies have run. Go to Psychometric Testing fo rmore information.

Walgreens: Walgreens runs an ongoing monthly survey, sweetened by a cash prize incentive for participating. The information is printed on every sales receipt. Every time a customer makes a purchase they get an opportunity to participate and enter the cash drawing. It can be taken either via phone or online; customers are directed to call a certain 800 number or go to a certain URL.

Walgreens monthly assessment demonstrates how successful research can be if there is something in it for the customer, such as the opportunity to win a cash prize.

News Sites: Virtually every big news website uses assessments to gauge reader satisfaction with the site. Not every visitor is presented with one, because visitors are normally chosen at random.

If they accept, it usually opens in a new window, enabling the customer to go back to what they were doing when they are finished. If they decline, the pop up window disappears and the visitor is immediately returned to the page they were viewing. The survey usually takes a very short amount of time to complete, a fact which is stated on the pop up window.

However, one mustn’t overlook the indirect incentive these assessments can offer: there is always the possibility that the visitor’s feedback and suggestions could result in a change that would benefit all involved.

eBay: eBay is famous for soliciting tons of feedback, such as feedback about transactions and other eBay members. However, eBay is also well known for periodically doing random customer assessments in order to find out how members feel about eBay itself. Refer to Psychometric Assessments for more information.

Invitations to take a quick survey are typically emailed to eBay members. However, members typically have strong personal incentive to take them: For example, many members take them because they are unhappy with some eBay regulation or policy, and would like to provide input on what changes should be made.

What makes them successful? Clearly, there must be an incentive in order for your customer assessments to be successful. As we saw with both new sites assessments and the eBay research, incentive can be customer driven, such as possibility of influencing the website or company policies.

In the Walgreens and eBay study, they required the effort of picking up the phone or going to a website, but the incentive justified the effort: the chance to win a cash prize from Walgreens, or the opportunity to influence the company they had a vested interest in. The news site study, on the other hand, was easy to do, and therefore needed considerably less incentive in order to be successful.

Examining customer surveys that other companies run enables you to analyze what works and what doesn’t. By applying what you have learned, you should be able to run a reasonably successful examination of your own.