Calling All Customers: Surveying Your Customer Base Works

Your telephone system can do a lot of things for you: route calls, transfer calls, forward calls and make calls. It’s the way your customers reach you over the still most preferred method: via a voice call. But what else can your phone system do for you? If you’re not an outbound call center, you might want to consider making a few outbound calls, if only for the purpose of better understanding your customer.

Outbound telemarketing is a serious undertaking, but surveying customers over the telephone doesn’t have to be. Since these people are already your customers, it’s OK under most circumstances (check federal and state laws fist) to call them. If you’d rather not take the risk of making the outbound calls, consider surveying your customers after they’ve called you and their business is complete. (You can even do it through your IVR in an automated way.)

According to a recent blog post by Nextiva’s Rieva Lesonsky, there are a number of ways to approach customer surveying.

“You can do customer surveys over the phone using in-house staff or, if you don’t have the manpower, hiring a telemarketing firm to help,” writes Lesonsky. “Create a script for callers to follow and have them call customers to ask survey questions. Or, keep it really simple by setting reminders (you can do that in your CRM system) to call customers shortly after delivering your product or service to ask, “Hi, I’m just following up on [X product you bought from us]. I wanted to make sure everything was handled to your satisfaction. Were there any issues?”

Other methods of surveying customers include social media – a great, broad prospect but limited to a narrow set of questions, online surveys that can be designed with free or low-cost tools, and paper surveys like comment cards that can be handed to customers or mailed to them (in invoices, for example).

The purpose of surveying, of course, is to gain a bigger picture understanding of how your customers interact with you, what they’re looking for from you, whether you’re meeting their needs, and what they’d like to see in the future. Too many companies simply guess this information, and judging from the disconnect between the quality companies think they are providing and the quality their customers say they are providing, they are missing their guesses.

Whatever method you choose, says Lesonsky, don’t be shy or afraid, since it’s likely that customers want to share what they think about your products, services and business. You only have to ask.