Time and time again I find people in business trying to come up with new ideas, fresh ideas, something to bring in more clients and keep existing clients. Teams of people sit around trying to come up with ideas people will like, services people will want, products people will buy. In the game of simplicity and results, this is really a difficult task to complete and one that doesn’t need to happen. There is a much faster way to getting quality answers about what your customers want.
Survey Your Customers
It’s really that simple, how many business owners survey their existing customers? I’m not talking about a survey they fill out on a piece of paper when they happen to buy something, I mean an online, quick and fast survey? People generally don’t like to fill out surveys because they take up time. I get that, I don’t necessarily like it either, but many people will fill them out, especially your existing customers whom you have a relationship with. Don’t try and be a mind reader, the best person to tell you what they want and like are the people who will buy it and want it!
If you have started building up your email list, it is a nice way to interact with your customers, asking for their input, have them tell you what to fix, what they want more of, what they don’t have already. Imagine now nice that would be to have that information rather than playing a guessing game?
Millions of dollars are wasted every day on ideas that someone “thought” were going to work, and I bet a good portion of that could have been avoided had someone asked rather than assumed. It really does come down to that. Do not assume you know what your customers want, just ask them.
Survey Options
Two great services (which offer free and paid services) allow for you to quickly setup an online survey, both www.surveymonkey.com and www.surveygizmo.com. We personally use SurveyGizmo, I prefer their interface and social media connectivity on places like Facebook etc.
Sign up for their service, create a survey and send the link to your customers. Send it via email, post it to your fan page, post it to your twitter account, have it setup on your website so anyone who browses to your site sees the option to fill it out.
You’ll really need to offer some sort of incentive to fill it out, after all, 
that’s the nice thing to do, they’re helping you, you help them.
Survey Creation Tips
There are number of things to remember when making a survey, here are some tips:
- The body of the survey invitation should not use pressure language such as “must” or “hurry now”.
- Save paper – use SurveyGizmo to facilitate data collection and analysis when conducting a phone survey.
- Avoid the temptation to gather extra bits of info that are nice to know but irrelevant to your objective.
- Survey questions should be short and simple, rarely exceeding 20 words.
- Giving a definition to each point on a scale instead of just to the endpoints will usually yield higher-quality data.
- If all your respondents have to do is click a few boxes you’ll have a higher response rate.
Summary
Do no under estimate the power of a quick short survey, stop making assumptions, start engaging your customers, and making them happier. Start increasing your business with new ideas, ones you know your customers WANT! How easy is that compared to guessing and wasting.
Survey Example
Below is a quick Poll I created with SurveyGizmo. It allows me to embed it into this page directly rather than sending you to a different website. This is as simple as it can get, SurveyGizmo and SurveyMonkey can create very advanced looking surveys, colors, logos, advanced answer logic etc. This is just one of MANY examples.
Not sure how you can make use of online surveys? We can help you come up with an action plan to get a survey made, and get it to your customers, and most importantly, get them to fill it out!
