Understanding The Importance Of Employee And Customer Satisfaction Surveys

The growth of an organization or business depends on lots of factors. For any business, both customers and employees hold great importance, and therefore it is necessary to understand the views and opinions of both. The valuable insight provided by customers and employees is one of the main reasons that customer and employee satisfaction surveys are conducted by thousands of organizations around the world. Likewise, there are many third party service providers that conduct these types of surveys for their clients.

Importance of employee satisfaction surveys

When it comes to enhancing the productivity of a company, the satisfaction level of employees matters greatly. Given that expectations of employees continue to increase, it is crucial to determine if employees continue to maintain their happiness. Unhappy or dissatisfied employees can impact a company’s performance, which in turn may lead to losses.

Employee satisfaction is also related to attrition. In today’s highly competitive world, if you are not keeping your employees happy, they may seek employment at another organization. On the other hand, satisfied employees also attract other talent to your company. These are only some of the reasons why utilizing an employee satisfaction survey is so crucial.

So, how are these surveys conducted and/or administered? Employees are asked various open and close-ended questions relating to: how well they understand their role in the company; how they feel about the culture associated with the company; how good or bad is the working environment; and many more. Based on analysis of the responses, the results can be summarized.

Importance of customer satisfaction surveys

When it comes to assessing the satisfaction level of customers, there are many platforms available such as: visual media, print media, and the online platform as well. With customer satisfaction surveys, customers can freely and openly express their views regarding their experience with a product or service. Customer views and opinions should play a major role in determining the future strategies of your company.
Customers provide a plethora of information in customer satisfaction surveys. One of the most important pieces of information gathered in such surveys is customer expectation. When your target customers are not happy with your product, it means they need something more out of it. Customer satisfaction surveys help to determine what needs to be changed or improved when it comes to products or services.

When choosing a service provider for employee or customer satisfaction surveys, experience and reputation are very important. After all, in today’s highly competitive world, information is the most vital element. Our researchers and consultants at Ambivista have decades of experience and a world-renowned reputation. We can help you design the perfect employee and customer satisfaction surveys tailored for your needs. 

How Not to Do Website Feedback

Collecting together website feedback is an important way to determine customer engagement with your site, but it can also be implemented poorly. Some of the more common methods to collect feedback are by including feedback links on your site, doing visitor intercepts, or in-page surveys. No matter which method, it should give you the information you need to provide engaging content, and great products or services.

Before you gather feedback on your website, read this first. If you do it wrong, it may result in wasted time and effort.

1. Timing is essential. Have you ever visited a website only to be presented with a customer survey in the first five seconds? Don’t do that. Not only will your visitors get annoyed, they may just fill out the survey and give false or wrong information. How can you expect a customer to provide feedback when they have only seen your site for a few seconds? Instead, add your survey pop-up to the bottom of the page.

2. Having extremely long surveys. Ten minutes may not seem like a lot of time to the web guru who spends all day online, but your average consumer is not going to want to spend ten minutes of their valuable time doing someone else’s job for them. Instead, let them know the survey will take thirty seconds—that’s time that most of us are willing to invest in giving our opinions.

3. Not offering an incentive. Usually it’s the more valuable customers who are willing to fill out an online survey. They may have visited your site several times in one month. Today may be the day that they decide to fill it out. Once they have done so, a coupon or offer may be of benefit to them. They choose whether to accept or not. But do give your best customers something for their time.

4. Discarding the surveys, without ever reading them. Sure, your day is busy and full of things to do. Be sure to assign time on a weekly basis to read through the online surveys. If a customer has provided their email address, shoot them off an email saying that you appreciate their business. Let them know that you value their feedback, and perhaps you may even give them a telephone call if you feel that you need to collect more information about a particular sales experience.

5. Don’t berate your employees. Remember that there are easy customers, and there are difficult ones. People will seek the negative. They may have complained about one of your employees. Be sure to ask their side of things, and offer support, not punishment. Remember that unhappy employees are also likely to provide employee feedback survey on your website.

A website survey may be one of the cheapest, yet most effective ways to open up a direct channel to your customers. You can immediately start incorporating their suggestions into your business, so they can see that you are serious about providing the best products and services possible.

10 reasons why it’s important to conduct employee feedback surveys

Surveys provide a way to tap into the thoughts, perceptions, and feelings of a workforce. This can provide a detailed picture of the current state of a company. Ultimately, these insights can be used as the foundation for improving organizations.

Below are 10 ways that employee feedback surveys can be used to enhance organizations:

1. Assess employee engagement levels: Employee surveys can help companies determine the engagement levels of their workforce. Higher engagement equates to higher overall performance.

2. Assess employee satisfaction levels: Surveys can provide insight into satisfaction with: company policies, jobs, compensations/benefits, policies, and many other factors. A company can better understand employees’ perceptions and opinions regarding these issues and utilize them for future strategic planning.

3. Evaluate the working environment: With the appropriate questionnaire design, employee surveys can gauge employee perceptions of their specific working environment, the departmental environment, and even the organizational environment as a whole.

4. Understand reasons behind employee turnover: Employee exit surveys can help gain insight into why employees leave. This can help improve employee retention, particularly if reasons for leaving relate to  company policies, management and structures.

5. Build trust with employees: Conducting (and acting) employee surveys demonstrate that management is receptive to the feedback and opinions of its workforce. This can help boost employee confidence, morale, and trust in the organization.

6. Identify what motivates your employees: There is no “one size fits all” when it comes to employee motivation; employees are motivated by different factors including, but not limited to: working environment, career development, and compensations/benefits. Surveys can provide insight into what motivates different employees to ultimately improve organizational performance.

7. Providing feedback for decision-making: Employee surveys can encourage employees to provide feedback that can improve their respective working environments and organizations at large. This can facilitate feelings of empowerment, despite positions held within the organization.

8. Evaluate how one’s company is doing internally: Oftentimes, management may not be aware of processes, policy changes, and new initiatives are received by its staff. Surveys can provide such insight to management for purposes of further improvement.

9. Helps generate useful ideas: In most cases, the best ideas are generated from within. With a survey, employees are given the opportunity to voice their ideas for further vetting and evaluation by management.

10. Provide insights into management performance: In many cases, organizational leaders may operate without having a realistic and/or holistic sense of their respective performance. 360 feedback survey provide a medium for employees, peers, and management to evaluate one’s performance from their respective positions.

Techniques for making online survey cheaper and easier

Small businesses are more concerned with reducing operational expenses and thus always looking for ways they can cut them down. However, this does not mean avoiding the most important set of operations that improves chances of their survival and increases the possibility of their expanding. Now that online surveying is an important cost-effective way of doing market surveys and research, small businesses have several tools that they can use for conducting online surveys. You can use these tools cost-effectively to gather information about your customers, business prospects, and market. 

However, the most important thing is not conducting online surveys but doing it right. Below are some of the techniques to take advantage of if you want to make a survey online, from customer feed backs, web searches to online questionnaires. Besides, you can reach us to do your marketing survey campaigns online quickly, using modern online survey tools and leveraging on the knowledge we have about it.  

1. Web searches: Customers who use the internet to buy products and services usually use keywords and phrases to search for companies they can buy from and offerings they can take advantage of. On the other hand, a company should seek to find which keywords potential customers are using, their effectiveness in marketing campaigns, how much they are being used by competitors, and then tailor their surveys according to the gained knowledge and their marketing campaigns according to these keywords. This is among the common online survey tools being employed today.

In addition to that, make sure to check for customer reviews about related products or services, which will provide details about what value customers are currently getting and what they would want. Web searches can help you make survey online cheap, easier and quick to accomplish.  

2. Competitor links: This can also be categorized as web search. If you want to ask your target interviewees some indirect questions about which competitor brands they have been using, this technique might help to device valuable questions. If you are always concerned about what your competitors are doing that could take you out of the market, consider checking for and at their PR campaigns and link development, for instance, by checking how many websites link to their pages. You might find one or two skills to copy. Like many other online survey tools, web search is not adequate on its own and should be combined with others.

3. Database research: This helps you to find and exploit customer data such as their buying habits and then tailor survey questions as would be helpful to your research, or use the information to improve your product offerings. You can also get specific data relating to income groups and which could help to better position your marketing.

4. Online questionnaires: This is one of the most employed among all online survey tools. Questionnaires can help get details about customer trends, use of certain products by individual customers and tastes. It helps gain insight of the whole market scene by way of sampling. Make sure to get the correct representative sample, keep questions short and few, and send them via emails. Many companies also present people with short questions after they visit their website or simply open a new page and call on people to participate.