6 Steps to Conducting an Effective Customer Survey

TRANSCRIPT

Hello and welcome to the 9th episode of the Tennis Business Academy Podcast!

Today the topic is customer surveys. And the reason I decided to cover customer surveys this week is because I actually ran a customer survey myself recently.

For those of you that might not be aware I also run a tennis coaching business in parallel with running the Tennis Business Academy, and given the fact that we’re still in a lockdown and can’t play, we thought it was the perfect time to run a customer survey. We’re actually planning to conduct a survey every 6 months.

And that’s the first thing that I’d recommend you do too. Commit to conducting regular customer surveys. At least once a year.

The idea being that every time you run a survey you give yourself the chance to learn from what your customers are thinking about you and your business or club.

And not only that, but if you do it right, you’ll also make them feel like you care and value their opinion.

Which can’t be a bad thing, right?

And there’s still a third benefit!

Assuming that you have happy customers, which I’m sure you do, by prompting them to fill in a survey you’ll be able to collect testimonials that you’ll then be able to use on your website and other marketing materials!

So to recap, if you run a survey the right way, you’ll make your customers feel valued, you’ll learn how to improve your business and you’ll be able to collect testimonials

Sounds like a pretty good deal to me!

So, for the rest of this episode I want to go through the 6 steps I used to run our customer survey and explain how you can do it too.

So, let’s do this and let’s start with

1) Create the survey

I mean, no surprises here!

The first step has to be creating the survey. I’m sure you could figure that one out on your own.

But still, I have a few recommendations for you. 

Let’s start with the software you can use to run the survey.

I used Google Forms. And that’s because I have a Gmail business account and the forms tool comes included with that.

It’s not the prettiest tool you’ll ever find, but it certainly is enough for me, and I think for the majority of us. If you also have a Gmail business account I think Google Forms will probably work for you as well.

If you don’t, the 2 alternatives that I suggest you check out are SurveyMonkey and GetFeedback. These 2 platforms provide a lot more functionality than Google Forms, but you’ll have to check their pricing to see if it makes sense for you to use them or not.

Ok, with the software bit out of the way, the second tip I have for you is that you should keep the survey short.

People should be able to fill it in in 5 minutes or less. The longer it takes, the fewer people will complete it, which defeats the whole purpose of conducting the survey in the first place!

So, this means that you can only ask a few questions. Which in turn means that you need to think carefully about which questions are important for you to ask at the moment you’re running the survey.

Your surveys don’t all need to look exactly the same. The questions you ask today, might be, and probably should be different from the questions you ask 6 months from now.

It’s up to you to think about what you’d like to learn and then ask questions around those topics. 

But having said this, I do have 3 question recommendations that I think you should always consider adding to each survey.

The first 2 are the NPS questions. NPS stands for Net Promoter Score. If you’ve never heard of it, here’s the definition from their own website:

Net Promoter Score or NPS measures customer experience and predicts business growth. This proven metric transformed the business world and now provides the core measurement for customer experience management programmes the world round.

Now, I’m not sure about the claim that it transformed the business world, maybe that’s a little bit exaggerated, but I can definitely vouch for the fact that it is now the core measure for customer experience in companies around the world.

And the reason why it’s become so popular is that it provides a numerical, tangible value for customer satisfaction which you can track across time and compare with other businesses. 

This will give you an objective measure of how good your business is at making and keeping customers happy.

And the way it works is very simple. It consists of 2 questions.

The first question is “How likely is it that you would recommend ABC coaching/ABC club to a friend or colleague?” and people answer this question by choosing an option on a scale from 0 to 10. 10 being extremely likely to recommend you and your business to their friends and family and 0 being not at all likely.

So that’s the first question.

And then the second question is quite simply “Why did you give that score?”. This prompts people to justify their score. Meaning that if they give a low score, they’ll hopefully tell you what you need to improve on, which will be valuable to you.

In order to then calculate the actual NPS of your business or club there’s a simple formula which I’m not going to go through on this episode. But if you google Net Promoter Score formula you’ll find it really easily. 

The main point is that once you use the formula you’ll get a score from -100 to +100. -100 being the unhappiest customers in the world, which we definitely don’t want, and +100 representing the happiest customers in the world.

And again, the value of having this metric is that you can then track it over time and understand how the way you’re running your business/club is impacting customer happiness - which is a pretty important thing to know!

Ok, so the first 2 questions I recommend you always add to the top of your survey are the 2 NPS questions. But I think there’s a third question you should consider adding.

And this one is about prompting customers to tell you what they think you can improve. On our latest survey I phrased it as “What can we do to improve your experience with us?” but you can phrase it whichever way you want

The idea is that this type of question puts the focus on the customer who is filling in the survey. It gives them permission to ask for what they want, which is important as we’re trying to draw honest answers that are specific to the person completing the survey.

Ok, as far as I’m concerned these 3 questions should always be in the survey and then you can add whichever other questions you think are important. To give you an idea, on the survey we just ran, I added another 3 questions and people were still more than able to complete the survey in less than 5 minutes.

Let’s move on to step number 2.

2) Send the survey out

That’s right. Once you create the survey, you need to send it out to your customers.

Again, no surprises here!

But here’s a few ideas on how to do this well. Firstly, you should consider putting some sort of incentive in place to encourage people to fill in the survey.

The goal is to get as many customers as possible to fill it in and a little incentive will help achieve that.

For our survey we used a prize draw where we picked 2 names out of a hat out of the people who filled in the survey and offered them a month of free coaching each. 

This is easy to do, it creates that extra incentive for people to complete the survey and it also creates a bit of a buzz and positive excitement about something that people tend to think is quite a boring task!

The only thing you need to remember is that if you do opt to run the prize draw then you must take people’s names or emails on the survey so that you can know who has earned the right to be entered into the draw, in the first place!

The other thing you should do when you send the survey out is set a cut-off date for 7 to 10 days after the day you sent the survey out.

You don’t want to drag it out. You want to get people to fill it in as quickly as possible, so that you can take action off the back of it as quickly as possible as well.

Having the prize draw incentive also means that you can put a bit of pressure on people to fill it in as soon as they see the email since you can say that only the people who fill it in before the deadline will be entered into the draw.

And lastly, you should always send customers 2 or 3 reminders throughout the week. Some people won’t see the first email so if you don’t send reminders there will be lots of people who won’t fill it in simply because they weren’t aware of it.

Ok, moving on to step number 3.

3) Compile the feedback and calculate your NPS

Like I said earlier the NPS is really easy to calculate. It’ll take you 5 minutes to do and will give you an overview of how people are feeling about your business or club, which is key.

But it’s also important to dig deeper.

And the way you do that is by finding the different themes that people mentioned in the survey and to categorize them. To put them in different buckets, if you will.

The categories you end up creating should be led by what people wrote, not by what you think is important.

So, for example in our survey a bunch of people mentioned the same theme which can be broadly described as “customers want more sessions during the week”. This topic kept coming up, so we made a note of it and counted how many people mentioned this same idea.

I suggest you do something similar. Find the themes that have been mentioned and count how many times each comes up.

Just to give you a couple more examples, other topics that people mentioned were “more competitions and matches” and the “we would like it if the start times for the under 8 lessons were a bit later”.

Finding these themes will allow you to identify what people care about and more importantly it will allow you to quantify how many people actually care about it. 

So the idea is that after you identify the themes that people mentioned, you count how many people mentioned each topic so that you know which topics really need to be addressed since a lot of people are obviously thinking about it.

Now, I appreciate that this might all seem a bit confusing when you just hear me describe the process instead of actually seeing me do it. Which is why I’ve recorded a video just for the Academy members that shows exactly how I’ve gone through this process bit by bit. Once you see it, you’ll realise that it really isn’t complicated and it does provide a lot of insight into the results of the survey and what your customers are thinking.

If you’re not an Academy member yet, you can check it out on tennisbusinessacademy.com

The Academy is the essential resource for anyone who works in the tennis industry and is in charge of running or growing a tennis coaching programme or club. 

Inside our community we have coaches, head coaches, tennis business owners, club managers and committee members.

And every single piece of content in the Academy has been created specifically for our sport. There are no adaptations of someone else’s content that doesn’t fit what we do.

I, myself, who as you know, run my own coaching business, am constantly experimenting and sharing my learnings inside the Academy, so that you can benefit from it.

If you’re interested in joining a global community of tennis professionals who are keen to learn from and support each other, while also getting access to in-depth practical training and resources on all aspects of running and growing a successful tennis club or coaching programme, then the Academy is definitely the place to be and you should check it out at tennisbusinessacademy.com

Ok, so by the end of step 3 of your customer survey, if you’ve done things right, you should have a very clear idea of what it is that your customers care about.

Which brings us to step number 4

4) Act on the Negative feedback

The idea is that as you’re going through the process of reading and categorizing the feedback, if you come across a particularly negative comment you should contact that customer as soon as possible and ideally on the phone.

And you should contact them for 2 reasons:

1. So you can get more detail as to why they’re so disappointed and unhappy. This might help you in changing something that if left unchanged has the potential to make other customers unhappy.

2. So you can try to resolve the problem and rescue the relationship. If a customer fills in a form in a very negative way then reaching out to them might just be enough to turn it around. They might think, oh, actually these guys do care. They did read my feedback and are keen to resolve the problem. That might go a long way with that particular customer and with everyone else who that customer might come into contact with.

So that’s step number 4. Very simple but very important to ensure that you’re reaching out to unhappy customers.

Which brings us to number 5.

5) Collect testimonials

If step number 4 was about dealing with the negative feedback, step number 5 is the exact opposite.

What you should do now is identify and store the positive quotes from the survey that you think you might want to use for your future marketing initiatives.

These could be used to put on your website, on your flyers, on posters, on social media and anywhere else that you deem relevant.

Social proof is one of the best ways to sell your services. Rather than you saying how good you and your business/club are, let your customers say it for you!

And with that in mind, you should contact the customers that wrote the positive comments in the survey to ask for their permission to use their quotes going forward and ideally, if you can you should also ask for a photo of them that you can use with the quote.

It’s always better if you can associate a name and a face to the quote as that will make it more real and relatable for the people reading it, who don’t know you, your business or club.

It’s much easier to dismiss just a bit of text than it is to dismiss the text with a photo and a name attached to it.

And this brings us to step 6.

6) Act on the feedback and follow-up

This is the last and perhaps most important step of them all.

All of the other points are important, but if you don’t take action after the survey then everything else feels a bit pointless.

The point of running a customer survey is that you’ll learn from it and then create a plan to make the changes you think you should make based on the feedback you’ve received.

Once you create the plan you should follow-up with customers to let them know what the plan is. This will make them feel valued since here you are announcing these changes based on the feedback they provided.

Now, if you feel like no changes are necessary, then you have the duty to at least follow-up with your customer base to let them know what topics were mentioned the most and what your thoughts are on them. 

Having to do this puts pressure on you to really address and follow-through on the important points that came out of the survey. 

And this pressure is good! It will help you improve your business/club and it shows customers that you’re actually taking notice of what they say.

Which will only strengthen your brand and your relationship with them - which is definitely a positive thing!

——

Ok, so these are the 6 steps that I’ve gone through myself when I ran a customer survey and the ones that I’d recommend you go through as well. Let’s just quickly recap them before you go:

1. Create a short survey that takes less than 5 minutes to complete. I used Google Forms, but you can consider using SurveyMonkey, GetFeedback or any other tool that you think can do the job. Always use the 2 NPS questions and another question that prompts customers to tell you what you can do to improve their experience.

2. Send the survey out. And when you do, you should set a deadline of 7-10 days for people to fill it in. Don’t drag the survey out and make sure to send a few email reminders throughout the week to get more people to complete it. Consider also creating an incentive like a prize draw to motivate people to fill the survey in. The goal should be to get as many customers as possible to complete it.

3. Categorise the feedback into themes and calculate your NPS. Count how many people mention each theme, so that you can get a sense of how important each theme is to address

4. Act on the negative feedback. If someone gives you really bad feedback you should reach out to them immediately to try and learn more about what went wrong and so you can try to turn the relationship around.

5. Collect testimonials from the positive feedback. Contact the customers who wrote positive things and ask for their permission to use their quotes on your marketing material. Ideally, if you can you should also ask for a picture to use with the quote.

6. Act on the feedback and follow-up with customers. Create an action plan for addressing the feedback based on the themes that emerged and communicate that plan to customers. If you feel like nothing needs to be done then you need to still justify that to customers. This puts pressure on you to make sure that you are truly addressing what needs to be addressed - which is a good thing!

Alright, that brings us to the end of today’s episode. 

I really believe that customer surveys can be a very valuable tool for any business.

So I hope this episode was useful in helping you think about how you can conduct your own customer surveys.

I’ll be back next week with another instalment of the Tennis Business Academy podcast.

Until then and thanks for tuning in.