Articles

A key strategy for quality monitoring is listening to your customers. Prospect and Customer surveying is an essential listening tool that can give you valuable information about your prospects and customers expectations, customer satisfaction and strategies for improvement.

But just listening to your prospects and customers is not the only strategy; you must be ready to take action once you get that valuable feedback.

So how do you get started? Before you even think about writing your survey questions, it’s important that you have a clearly defined statement of what your survey will achieve and a good understanding of what you will do with your newly acquired feedback from your prospects and customers. If you don’t have a clear understanding of how you will use that data you acquire, the survey will have little or no value. Some of the questions you may want ask yourself before you start down the survey path are:

• Is my department is prepared to implement change as a result of this survey because
• Will the information gathered will enable my department to decide
• Will My department intend to use the feedback we are seeking by

Your responses to these questions can provide you with a clear vision that will keep your survey project focused. A clear purpose and focus of how you want to utilize your survey feedback will help in designing the survey questions. Don’t fall prey to collecting prospect and customer feedback then don’t take action.

So how do I determine the best possible questions that are going to yield me information that I can take action upon. Ask yourself:

• What is the information I really need
• What are my top-priority information needs
• I need this information because

You must identify the information that you need that will enable you to make decisions and take actions. You want to avoid the tendency to gather information that is merely interesting or might be "good to know".

Doing a little homework upfront on what actions you are willing take and the feedback you desire will ensure the most useful survey results. Your survey goals and objectives are the key to the entire effort.

To have a successful survey take time to plan and determine the actions your department is willing to take. Taking the time to strategize and plan your action path will make the feedback that you get from your prospects and customers that much more meaningful.