Editor’s note: Vivek Bhaskaran is the founder and CEO of Seattle-based Survey Analytics.
Here’s a simple exercise for every marketer who values customer satisfaction: Create a simple 10-question survey. Ask nine random questions and make sure to include an open-ended comment question at the end. Send it out to all of your customers every six months. Then, don’t do anything with the data.
You might just double your customer retention rates.
Don’t believe this could be true? It’s already been proven. The act of sending a simple survey to customers, regardless of what the outcome is or what is done with the data, can enhance customers’ opinions of your firm.
Why? The game-changing notion of participation. Participation makes us believers and serves to establish an emotional bond. In this example, which was an actual market research experiment conducted by Paul Dholakia and Vicki Morwitz for Harvard Business Review1 , just sending a survey and asking for customer feedback had a positive impact on retention rates.
Why? Because end-users felt that the company was listening to them. They felt the company cared about their opinions and demonstrated this by asking them for feedback. Generally speaking, if we as consumers are involved in an endeavor, the rules of the game change - we grow more forgiving and become emotionally attached to the cause. The hierarchal, top-down relationship between companies and their customers evolves and becomes something new: a partnership, one in which customers are given a mechanism to contribute their ideas and, most importantly of all, a sense that their ideas are actually being heard.
While the concept of customer satisfaction will always be a business priority and a determining metric for eventual success in the market, any marketer worth his or her salt will tell you that it’s typically assigned an arbitrary value. For marketers who have dedicated thems...