How to Design a Shared Services Customer Survey
Corporations often hire shared services companies to handle various aspects of their business, such as customer service, accounts payable, human resources and Internet technology. This practice is often called outsourcing, which can help a company save money and expand their capabilities with fewer employees. Once a company integrates a shared services function such as customer service within their organization, they need to periodically measure the performance of this outsource company. Following are steps on how to design this shared services customer survey.
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Instructions
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How To Design The Survey
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Hire an outside marketing research agency to work with your marketing research manager or person in charge of all customer surveys. Hold a meeting between your marketing research department and other functional areas, such as product or brand marketing, advertising, research and development and finance. Decide what customer service-related questions are most important for each department. Contact the marketing research agency and start working with them to create the questionnaire. Determine the best methodology for garnering the information, such as a phone or mail survey.
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Design the questionnaire. Add questions related to the customer's latest experience, including the timeliness in which questions or problems were handled and whether or not their issue was resolved. Ask questions related to the professionalism of the customer service representative, the quality of the call and their knowledge of the customer's issue. Use a five-point scale such as Likert (very professional, somewhat professional, neither, somewhat unprofessional, very unprofessional) for most questions, instead of simple "yes/no" questions--except at the beginning of the questionnaire, when you should ask if the person's question or problem was corrected. Include a few open-ended questions so the respondent can provide feedback on the experience. Limit the questionnaire to about 20 minutes for phone surveys. Finalize the questionnaire. Get approval on it.
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Schedule the start date for the surveys. Obtain lists of all customer calls from the past 15 to 30 days from the shared services company. Provide these via e-mail to the marketing research agency so they can set up their database. Start the surveys, scheduling them so that you are measuring customer service performance on an ongoing basis.
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Tips & Warnings
Focus on the feedback from the other departments. They will have specific issues that they want measured. Your job will be to take these issues or attributes and phrase them into a question. Do not make the questionnaire too long or the quality will be impaired. Customers only have so much attention span. Hit them with the most important questions up front. Finally, communicate the data findings to your shared services company and have them address all areas of concern.
Never conduct surveys from calls that are over 60 or 90 days old. You will not get accurate information, as the customer's memory of the call will diminish over time.
