The difference between in-house and independent surveys
If you are planning a customer satisfaction survey and you are not sure whether to keep the project in-house or whether to outsource, you are not alone. There are many businesses that have this dilemma.
On the one hand, do you have the skills in-house and on the other hand how much is it going to cost to outsource? Of course, what you really want is to get a great result, so which route will be best for you?
Let's first look at what defines a customer satisfaction survey. If you are already a pro-active company and from time to time telephone your customers along the lines of:
Is everything alright, are you happy with everything, is there anything more that we can do for you....?
That's great; however, that's not a customer satisfaction survey. A customer satisfaction survey takes the customer through logical steps, creates an environment of trust, gives the customer time to answer accurately and provides you with powerful and meaningful information. Your customers are more likely to tell an independent company about their satisfaction levels than they are to tell you how they feel. The independent approach sanitises the process, keeps it impartial and customers can choose to remain anonymous.
Think about the survey in three parts. Firstly there is the design. Leadline will actually just design customer satisfaction surveys but we do prefer to manage the whole project. Next, there is the actual gathering of the information, and the final stage is the analysis and reports. To produce reports we use tools which will provide you with graphs, bar charts, pie charts and as well as the pretty stuff some amazing analysis.
Looking at this in-house-v-independent question for carrying out customer satisfaction surveys, can you be really sure that you are getting an objective impartial result with an in-house approach?
We, like most companies, like to know how we are perceived by our customers, and we believe that the independent approach tells us more.