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The Test Kitchen
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| Submitted by: | Paul Cardis (paul.cardis@avidratings.com) 6/27/2008 1:03:30 PM PT |
| Location: | Madison WI |
| Occupation: | CEP |
Jeff,
We get between 50% up to 80% of surveys returned for our clients. The article is not about comparing our system to your system for surveying. You choose to provide a smaller range of questions to gain the upper end of the response rate. I argue its not needed and so does the entire survey research community. Depth is more valuable than bredth and in our case we have a nice balance of both. By the way Pulte, Centex, John Laing and virtually all the market leaders use a balanced approach to their surveys. Dont get hung up on response rate and rather focus on the systems that are broken. The only way you will understand if systems are broken is to dig deep with customers. Shallow surveys just dont get to the heart of the matter as you suggest.
| Submitted by: | Geoff Graham (geoff@guildquality.com) 9/6/2007 6:48:19 PM PT |
| Location: | Atlanta, GA |
| Occupation: | Customer satisfaction surveying for homebuilders and remodelers |
I agree with Paul's fundamental point: If a builder servicing 1,000 new homeowners each year wants to know how well his or her business is performing, 160 survey responses will paint a reasonably clear picture.
However, a mere 16% response rate from 1,000 customers is virtually worthless if you're interested in using your data to manage and motivate your people.
The reason: Each customer-facing employee manages far fewer than 1,000 customers.
Your entire business may serve a million homeowners each year, but if your builders (or salespeople, warranty managers, design consultants, etc) handle only 40 customers per year, you're clearly not helping them by giving them survey feedback from only 16% (6.4) of their customers.
If you are interested in using customer satisfaction surveying to give each member of the team a clear picture of how they perform (and how they perform in contrast to their peers) you must go further than that.
Also, I think it's important to note that the last thing a satisfaction survey should do is annoy the customer. Statisticians (who are passionate about numbers) often lose sight of this. These are YOUR customers, after all. Treat them like you'd want to be treated.
We suggest a succinct survey that is designed to get only the quantitative feedback you really need. It should also engage the customer to provide as much open-ended commentary as possible.
A brief and thoughtfully composed survey conducted in a consistently respectful manner is the best way to support your efforts to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
It will give you the information (and the high response rate) you need to understand how well you're doing -- both on a macro- and a micro-level.
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