\r\n Over the past 5 years we have seen an explosion of customer surveys including ones administered to us in IVR or email post-call, forms passed out onboard\r\n aircraft, online during web sessions, emailed to our Inboxes, outbound automated IVR, outbound pollsters, mall intercepts, \u201cusage and attitude\u201d forms, and\r\n much, much more!\r\n<\/p>\r\n
\r\n Unfortunately response rates haven\u2019t risen despite pleading or coupon offers \u2013 sometimes under 5%, introducing disturbing levels of sample bias, and the\r\n stark reality of uneven survey results plaguing interpretation \u2013 customers still tend to provide \u201cpolar\u201d responses, low or high, only. This means that we\r\n are extrapolating from low levels of skewed replies, hardly the prescription for gaining wisdom.\r\n<\/p>\r\n
\r\n While it is also important to figure out customer sentiment and collect suggestions and ideas from your customers (Insights), discover if they are loyal to\r\n your brand (e.g. NPS), and find ways to make it easy for them to do business with you (e.g. the new metric CES = Customer Effort Score), low response rates\r\n and biases mean that companies can\u2019t get an accurate picture or forecast or list of remedies.\r\n<\/p>\r\n
\r\n We all know, too, that it is important to get a \u201cstatistical sampling\u201d of each customer segment, but to paraphrase Don Peppers and Martha Rogers\u2019 seminal\r\n books on \u201cOne to One Marketing\u201d we really have \u201csegments of one\u201d, somewhat artificially collected as personas or demographic categories.\r\n<\/p>\r\n
\r\n As my co-author and I discovered researching our latest book Your Customer Rules! Delivering the Me2B Experiences That Today\u2019s Customers Demand <\/em>\r\n (Wiley, 2015), the fact that we do subject our customers with so many surveys and ask them to spend their valuable time responding to them violates one of\r\n the 7 customer needs that lead to a winning \u201cMe2B\u201d culture, that of \u201cYou make it easy for me\u201d1<\/sup>. This is especially true with multi-page surveys\r\n that often ask customers to repeat what companies already know.\r\n<\/p>\r\n \r\n And that\u2019s the key point here: Don\u2019t Ask, Know!<\/strong>\r\n<\/p>\r\n \r\n Instead of spinning up more surveys and spending a lot of effort to interpret what customers are telling you and decipher what customers are saying and\r\n doing, doesn\u2019t it also make sense to figure out what customers are not<\/em> saying and what they are not<\/em> doing?\r\n<\/p>\r\n \r\n Here are four other approaches that will bear bigger and better fruit:\r\n<\/p>\r\n \r\n So the next time you get a survey from another company, ask yourself \u201cisn\u2019t there a way for them not to have asked me this?\u201d and then start challenging\r\n your team to \u201cDon’t Ask, Know!\u201d\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n \r\n1. Here are the 7 Customer Needs that Lead to a Winning \u201cMe2B\u201dCulture:\r\n<\/p>\r\n\r\n
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