How to Do a Customer Assessment

Gathering customer assessments is valuable in growing your business.

Regardless if you sell doughnuts, make engine parts or provide an accounting service, customers keep your business moving forward. Changing customer needs, staffing changes, business growth and business reduction all can be reasons for implementing a customer assessment project. The best results will be thorough and objective. Take the necessary time to create the right survey, train your staff on distribution and data collection and analyze the results. Keep an open mind and be willing to let the assessment lead your business into a successful future.

Instructions

1. Write a simple and brief questionnaire. Try a few variations to see which survey questions help you find the glitches in your business. For some businesses, open-ended questions will be the most helpful. For other businesses, rating scales and simple yes or no questions will be best. If you are collecting hundreds of surveys, you many want to avoid too many open-ended questions as the results will be more difficult to analyze.

2. Train your staff on how to ask customers to fill out the assessment. Remind the staff that the goal is to find general ares of improvement. This will prevent the employees from feeling personally threatened by the assessments.

3. Ask a cross-section of customers to get the most accurate picture of how the majority of your customers feel. Consider which groups of customers account for the majority of your revenue and make sure you get the most feedback from them.

4. Ask more than just your customers to fill out the survey. Request that employees fill out the survey, as well as other businesses for whom you are a customer. This will give you a thorough understanding of how your business interacts with everyone.

5. Give a thank-you gift to the customers who fill out the survey.

6. Analyze the results. Hire a business analyst or statistician to go over the survey results. Numbers are easily misunderstood. Once you have spent the time and money in an assessment, a statistician will help you root out the meaning of the results.

7. Design your next assessment. Keep in mind, no assessment is perfect and assessment results will need to be updated at least once per year.

References

• Office of Research Services: Customer Scorecard
• Question Pro: Survey Design Tips