Many companies like to collect customer feedback on a regular schedule: monthly, quarterly, yearly, etc. This is a good idea, but it’s an even better idea to spread that survey out over the entire period.
For example, if you plan to measure your customer service performance through 450 customer surveys once per quarter, you should not do all the surveys at once. Instead do 150 surveys per month, or about five per day, each day of the quarter.
The cost should be about the same, but spreading it out like this has several advantages:
- Continuous surveying can uncover problems as they are developing, rather than at the end of the reporting period. You can catch things when they’re small and nip them in the bud.
- An intermittent customer survey is more disruptive to the organization. The quarterly or yearly customer survey is a project which everyone has to make room for, but an ongoing survey is simply another business process which goes on day to day.
- Everyone tends to be on their best behavior during “survey week.” Even if there’s no direct compensation for getting good scores, people still want to do well.