Customer service and customer satisfaction surveys are similar, but they contain important differences. A customer service survey should focus on the actual process involved for a customer to receive a product or service. It should also focus on the evaluation of the participants in the service process.

Qualtrics can help you improve your customer service with a tool that makes this process easy and powerful. The following are general measures commonly included in customer service surveys.

• Tangibles – Rate the appearance of physical facilities, equipment, personnel and communication materials.
• Reliability – Examine your company’s ability to perform services in an accurate and dependable manner.
• Responsiveness – Gauge the willingness of employees to help customers and provide prompt service.
• Assurance – Measure employees’ knowledge and courtesy and their ability to convey trust and confidence.
• Empathy – Ask about the caring, individualized attention provided to the customers.

Surveys are a cost effective way of obtaining feedback from customers that can add value to your company in a number of different ways. We would love to help you develop your own customer service survey to improve your business. Please click here to see sample customer service survey questions or you may contact one of our project consultants for additional assistance.

Qualtrics Mailer generates a unique link for each individual respondent.

When it comes to distributing surveys, it is important to remember the tracking options that are available to you. Qualtrics includes numerous tracking options, the most efficient of which are available when you use the Qualtrics Mailer.

Qualtrics Mailer

When you use the Qualtrics Mailer to distribute your survey, each link is unique and can be set to only allow one response. This unique link is tracked and enables the user to see which respondent said what.

The Qualtrics Mailer also allows you to:

• Save and Continue: If a user closes the survey without completing it, they can be allowed to pick up and finish from where they left off.
• Reminders: Users may distribute reminder emails targeted at recipients that have not responded.
• Thank You: Users may distribute thank you emails to recipients that have responded.
• Limit Responses: Users may limit responses to only one per link or allow multiple responses for links they anticipate will be forwarded.

For those who want their survey to be anonymous, this option is available as well. Some of the above features are still possible, but they are less effective in their implementation.

Be sure to check with Qualtrics Support if you have any questions.

Happy Surveying!

People tend to get suspicious when personal questions are asked, and they often think of situations like the one above. The best way to avoid problems is to not ask personal questions. If you have to, be sparing and explain why you are doing so.

Happy Surveying!

Share survey findings with a public report created in Qualtrics

With the new year quickly approaching, business approaches in 2011 may need to be a little bit different. Mark Johnson, CEO of Loyalty 360, a non-profit dedicated to improving customer loyalty across all organizations, addressed this when he said:

“2011 may well be called the year of customer loyalty. In today’s crowded marketplace, creating loyal, engaged customers is more important—and more challenging—than ever.”

According to the National Business Research Institute, Inc., in such a faceless online marketplace, customers yearn for trustworthiness in a company.

So how can you take advantage of customers’ desire for loyalty and trust? Here are four ways to use Qualtrics to increase customer loyalty.

1. The obvious answer is to ask customers for feedback in a customer satisfaction survey. Asking customers for feedback is the easiest way to find out what customers are really thinking. Everyone likes to think their opinion is important, and giving them a chance to share it creates a win-win situation.
2. Make your surveys relevant to your customers and keep it short. Do your homework and know your customers—if you can, use analytics and tracking to know who’s coming to your site and why. Generic surveys feel impersonal and won’t resonate with respondents.
3. Keep your questions unbiased and be clear about your purpose. Transparency is key when it comes to customer loyalty. If customers feel like they’re being force-fed opinions or kept out of the loop, they will be less likely to trust the company on the whole.
4. Share your results and do something about it. After the survey has run its course, let customers know what actions you will be taking as a result of their feedback. Then, when all is said and done, make sure you act on the results you have been given.

To keep your company current in 2011, make sure you stay on top of customer loyalty with these four tips from Qualtrics.

Online surveys populate data in real-time for instant analysis.

At Qualtrics, we are occasionally asked about the ability to perform surveys on paper. While the Qualtrics Research Suite does allow users to print surveys and distribute them by hand, we see more value in online solutions.

Paper surveys cost a lot because an employee always has to do something to get the data collected. You also have to wait for this work to be completed before you can analyze the results.

Benefitting Users

Instead, we like to help users convert their surveys from paper to online. This has been a great benefit for many Qualtrics users who have found it saves them time and money.

After implementing Qualtrics, one user said this:

“It saves time—not hours, but months. When I first came here, conducting a full survey project would take a month and a half. Now we can do it in just two weeks, start to finish. That’s timely service.”

This user reports that his organization, which serves over 400,000 clients, is more efficient and saves money as well.

Immediate Reporting

Another benefit of moving surveys online is that data is immediately ready for analysis. Many Qualtrics users analyze data as it comes in. This is particularly useful when you are analyzing feedback that is immediately actionable.

For instance, if a customer reports a bad experience with one of your employees, you want that information immediately. Qualtrics lets you view the data as it comes in and can also send an email alert when a certain response is given. This means a front-line manager can be immediately alerted to correct a serious problem.

Converting Your Surveys

If you are doing surveys on paper, be sure to contact one of our representatives who can help you convert them to online surveys. This will save you time and money, and it will help your staff be more responsive to the feedback you receive.

Low response rates and different management perspectives are the major challenges we often face in cross-cultural research. An article in “Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal” provides a few simple recommendations for those problems.

The first tip it offers to is to eliminate any potential language barrier by having an accurate translation. We all know and love those free translation websites, but let’s face it – they don’t always give the best results.

The most important step to take is to build a relationship with your respondents. This can easily be accomplished by building rapport, using people the respondents’ trust and becoming part of the respondents’ group.

• Build rapport with respondents. It is okay to have a social conversation with your respondents before jumping into business projects. This can help alleviate any anxiety or uncertainty the respondent may have. Pre-survey phone calls and simple e-mails can help you accomplish this goal.
• Identify people the respondents will trust. In most cultures, employees will quickly respond to their supervisors’ requests. Identify individuals with authority and visible job-titles who can prompt respondents to reply to the survey quickly.
• Be perceived as part of the respondents’ group. Respondents trust members of their same organization to keep in mind their best interests. Institutional endorsements are often an effective method for international researchers to join a respondents’ group.

Be sure to keep these simple tips in mind as you survey international respondents!

Source:
Rao, P. (2009). Understanding national cultures to increase survey response rate. Cross Cultural Management: An International Journal, 16(2), 165-178.

A quick search of "Qualtrics" on Twitter reveals many different surveys are distributed every day.

It might sound like a broken record when we say that social media is one of the most powerful communication tools in our world today. This new medium is a great way to contact respondents for surveys.

College students appear to be leading the way on this front as they account for more than half of the Qualtrics surveys sent via Twitter. Theses surveys are typically for classroom research and are directed at other college students.

However, we believe that social media can be useful for more of our clients. If you’re getting lost in the social media fog, here’s a quick list of how to get started:

Three Easy Ways to Use Social Media for your Surveys

• Get out there and know your network. Before you can use social media to distribute your surveys, you have to build up your network. Follow lots of (relevant) people on Twitter, add or join groups related to your organization, and comment on applicable posts or tweets.
  
  But when you do gain a large (or larger) following, DO NOT SPAM your network or try to overwhelm them with surveys immediately. Nobody likes to feel overwhelmed, and you’ll lose credibility as an organization.
• Take advantage of Qualtrics’ survey distribution options. Qualtrics provides an anonymous survey link that can be included as a part of any tweet or Facebook post. Your surveys can also be embedded in a personal or company blog or presented as a pop-up link. You may want to use one or all of these options to target different groups of people.
• Offer some incentive. No matter how much faith you have in the human race, most people aren’t going to take a survey just because it’s put in front of them. The majority of surveys presented via Twitter offer some incentive for respondents. Anything from a drawing for a $50 gift card to a company bumper sticker can serve as motivation to take your survey.

In September, Twitter hit 145 million users, and over 500 million users spent 700 billion minutes on Facebook. This widespread acceptance of social media makes it an attractive (and cheap) way for any organization to obtain responses. Consider using it for your next survey.

There are a few different ways to collect customer retention feedback. The one used will vary based upon a number of factors including: the product or service provided, the kinds of customers served, and the number of customers served.

Here are three different approaches to customer retention that can produce meaningful and useful findings:

Post Purchase Evaluation

In this method, feedback is collected from the individual customer at the time of product delivery. This type of satisfaction survey is often part of a CRM (Customer Relationship Management System) Retention System and focuses on maintaining a long term relationship with the individual customer.

Periodic Satisfaction Surveys

In this method, feedback is collected from groups of customers at periodic intervals to provide an occasional snapshot of customer experiences and expectations. This type of survey monitors the general "health" of the company and can be used to provide tracking benchmarks.

Continuous Satisfaction Tracking

This method combines the previous two. Satisfaction feedback is obtained from the individual customer at the time of product delivery and then periodically thereafter. Customer retention scores based on the satisfaction tracking surveys will provide flags and a management tracking tool to assure quality is at high levels over time. Using Qualtrics, scores can be compared over time for customer tracking.

These methods can each be the basis for customer retention surveys. Be sure to consider each and determine which is best for your enterprise.

Unfortunately, there is a cost to collecting too much information in a survey. If the questions are personal in nature, respondents might feel uncomfortable. Also, a survey that is simply too long can cause respondents to drop out.

Qualtrics recommends that surveys take less than 15 minutes and avoid unnecessarily collecting personal information.

We've created a quick 12-step process for survey creation. Enjoy!

1. Review the basic objectives of the study. What are you trying to discover? What actions do you want to take as a result of the survey?
2. Visualize all of the relevant information items you would like to have. What will the report look like? What information do you need to make a decision?
3. Rank order each topic in items 1 and 2 according to the value of the topic. List the most important topics first. Remember, you can't solve the problem if you ask the wrong questions.
4. Ask “how easy is it for the respondent to provide information on each topic?” If it is difficult, is there another way to obtain the information with another question?
5. Create an unbiased sequence for the topics. Make sure that the questions do not bias the results of the next questions. Make sure that you don't provide too much information or disclose the purpose of the study in a way that can create bias.
6. Determine the question type that is best suited to answer the question and get the best information. Use open-ended text questions, dichotomous, multiple choice, rank order, scaled, or constant sum (ratio scale) questions as appropriate.
7. Write the questions. You may need to write several proposed questions for each topic and select the best one.
8. Sequence the questions so that they are unbiased. Keep step 5 in mind during this process.
9. Repeat all of the previous steps to find any major holes. Having another person review your work is ideal.
10. Time the length of the survey. A survey should take less than fifteen minutes. The best way to check is to have someone else take it and time themselves.
11. Pretest the survey to 20 or more people. Obtain detailed feedback. What were they unsure about? Did they have questions? Did they have trouble understanding what you wanted? Did they take a point of view not covered in your answers or question?
12. Revise your survey and pre-test again or start distribution.