Go Ahead, Ask

Today’s online survey services have a number of features that remodelers may want to investigate before committing to one service over another. Survey Monkey, for example, has an option for randomizing the order in which response choices are presented.

“Survey respondents have a tendency to read until they find something acceptable, sometimes without reading all the response options,” Garland says. His company’s product, he says, allows the user to flip the order or responses or put them in a random order.

There’s also a telephone option that is automated and works much like the online version.

Response rate is another concern that is sometimes misunderstood by novice survey creators. “Most people assume that response rates need to be high,” Garland says. “But what response rates need to be is sufficient. Depending on how many people you survey, you only need a certain amount of people to get a good estimate of the entire population. For instance, we predict elections by surveying 1,500 voters. If you’ve got 100 clients and 50 or 60 reply, you’re in good shape. We’d like the response to be 90, of course, but the odds are that the people who didn’t reply aren’t really that different from people who did.”

Many of the major online survey creation services have templates with well-written questions and provide tutorials and other online help and advice to users. Many offer a free version along with fee-based levels of service for those who need more sophisticated products. The surveys can be emailed, links provided in a newsletter or they can be embedded on the remodeler’s Web site. Results are automatically tabulated, usually in real time. For those remodelers who have hesitated to survey their clients, there seems to be little excuse left not to do so.

How to Design an Effective Customer Satisfaction Survey

Ask the general satisfaction question at the start of the survey. This will allow measurement of a customer’s overall impressions prior to prompting him or her to think about specific aspects of the relationship.

Use a five-point satisfaction scale. The top end of the scale should mean the customers are truly “wowed.” If the ends of the scale are simply “satisfied” and “dissatisfied,” it will not provide a sense of the intensity of customers’ happiness. An alterative to the satisfaction scale is a five-point expectations scale, which asks how well the clients’ expectations were met.

The key measures of customer satisfaction, including the overall satisfaction question, should all use the same scale. Don’t use a five-point scale for the satisfaction question, and a seven-point scale for questions on timeliness and cleanliness, for example.

Avoid the temptation to ask everything you ever wanted to know, but focus on getting a read on your clients’ relationship with you. The longer the survey, the more likely respondents will abandon the survey.

Be sure to include the following key questions:

• Overall satisfaction
  
• An open-ended probe into the reason for the satisfaction rating
  
• Likelihood of recommendation
  
• An open-ended probe into the reason for the likelihood of recommendation
  
• Likelihood of repeat business
  
• Satisfaction with specific attributes of the service
  
• An opportunity to provide additional feedback

Source: Zoomerang, Zoomerang.com

Online Services and Software

InstantSurvey — InstantSurvey.com
KeySurvey — KeySurvey.com
QuestionPro — QuestionPro.com
SurveyGizmo — SurveyGizmo.com
SurveyGold — SurveyGold.com
SurveyMonkey — SurveyMonkey.com
SurveyPro — SurveyPro.com
Zoomerang — Zoomerang.com