Surveys

[mmotley]

Curious if anyone does follow up surveys? Do you send them out yourself, is their certain criteria a customer has to meet to get a survey, do you mail them, do you email them, etc? How long do you wait to send one out? Do you use a third party company?

[Joe Marconi]

Surveys are great, but takes a little thought. The questioned need to be worded in a way that you can get the information you are looking for.

 

We did one survey a few years back to determine the interests and common qualities of my best customers. I hired a local business consultant. I was amazed at all the little things that went into creating a meaningful survey.

[Elon Block]

Curious if anyone does follow up surveys? Do you send them out yourself, is their certain criteria a customer has to meet to get a survey, do you mail them, do you email them, etc? How long do you wait to send one out? Do you use a third party company?

What are you trying to find out? If you want to find out how you're doing, it's been my experience,

the best way to do that is for you, as the owner, to contact your customers. I would do this by phone

because it's more personal. Following up with two or three a day will paint a pretty good picture.

 

And you can do that in a number of different ways. For example, you can randomly pick out a

number of customers that just had work done. Tell them you're following up and you really

want to know about their experience because you want to improve the business. People will

appreciate you wanting to get their opinion of how you're doing. Just ask them for honest feedback.

For example, "Did we meet your expectations?" "What could we have done better?"

 

The other very valuable thing to do is to call customers out of the unsold estimate pile. Especially

if the estimates were for safety-related items. Pick out estimates that are anywhere from 30-120 days old...

 

Find out: Did they get the work done? If they went elsewhere, what was the reason they went somewhere else.

 

They will tell you exactly what you need to know so you don't have to guess. In other words, this exercise

will help you find out "how am I really doing out there?" Their replies will give you all the answers you need

to know so you can tweak some things and get better.

 

If there were miscommunications, just apologize and then, thank them for their honest feedback. This is

not the time to get defensive or make excuses. The key is to be neutral and really listen to what they have to say.

 

 

[stowintegrity]

Curious if anyone does follow up surveys? Do you send them out yourself, is their certain criteria a customer has to meet to get a survey, do you mail them, do you email them, etc? How long do you wait to send one out? Do you use a third party company?

At our shop, we have several "call lists" that are printed out every week. these lists are assigned to various people in the company to "work through", and report the results to me. One of the most important lists is our service followup list, where each and every customer is called and asked up to 3 questions on our mini survey.

 

The first thing we tell the individual after identifying who we are (reminding them, actually...) is to let them know that we're simply calling to thank them for coming in to the shop and counting on us for the service on their car. It's firecely importnt for our staff to embrace the fact that it doesn't matter how much or how little they spent....sales dollars are NOT the point of the survey.

 

1. Did we do a good job? Did we address their needs? Was everyone nice to them? Was it obvious how much we care?

 

2. Did our staff focus on your primary concern? Did they listen carefully, without interrupting? Were you happy with the result?

 

3. Did we work hard enough to earn your business again in the future? Would you consider referring friends/co-workers to us?

 

These three categories of inquiry help us to know what our customer's impression of us was, whether we helped make their experience with us a positive one, and whether we can cont on their business/referrals in the future.

 

Like I said, these calls are only one of several lists we print & call on a regular basis, but one of the most important, because it really has nothing to do with cars...it has to ddo with PEOPLE, and whether or not our team worked hard enough to deserve their ongoing business.

 

Just one man's take on it all.