You've decided to measure your customer satisfaction (smart choice) and now you're wondering what you should include in the survey. Obviously, selecting the right questions is essential if you want to get meaningful results for your efforts.

In this article I won't be able to give you a magic recipe for building your specific survey, but I will outline the essential components. My objective is to offer you some basic guidelines which have been proven over many years of experience. Hopefully that way you won't forget anything important along the way. At the end I will also try and give some advice which should significantly improve the return on your customer satisfaction investment.

Every well-structured customer satisfaction survey should include the following five basic types of questions:

1. General Evaluation Questions

2. Detailed Departmental Questions

3. Efficiency Questions

4. Customer Experience Questions

5. Customer Profile Questions

It is important to include at least two or three general evaluation questions in your survey. One of the most important results of the process should be the identification of factors which maintain a high correlation con overall satisfaction. These factors are where you should expend the greatest effort. Questions like "What is your overall opinion of our performance?" or "Did we adequately meet your expectations?" permit us to establish these correlations.

The meat and potatoes of your survey are the detail questions. You should make an inventory of the "contact points" that your customers experience when they do business with you. Who do they talk to? Which departments are responsible for meeting their needs? For each of these contact points, you should design a specific question. If you run a hospital you might ask "How well did the nurse administer the iv?" or "Did your doctor keep you informed every day?"

Whatever your business activity is, time is always important to your customers. Repeatedly we observe that responsiveness and efficiency correlate very highly with overall satisfaction. That's why you need to include specific questions regarding how well you respect your client's time. "Was the admissions process quick and efficient?" or "Did we respond immediately when you pressed the call button?" are great examples of questions from this category.

The last type of valuation questions you should include center around your customer's perception of doing business with you. These questions should clarify the impression that you are causing in your customer's mind. Optimally they should enjoy working with you and believe that you provide a professional and friendly service. "Did we show interest in solving your problems?" and "Was our staff caring and concerned with your recuperation?" are examples of customer experience questions.

The last type of questions you must include are profile questions. It is very important to build relevant customer profiles that you can contrast with your valuation questions. These questions will obviously depend on what is important for your company. A hotel might need to know if the customer is a man or woman, or if the purpose of the stay was business or pleasure. However, a hospital will want to know the age group and illness being treated.

When designing a customer satisfaction survey you should be careful to be as specific as possible. Often I see surveys where all the questions are vague and abstract. This won't allow you to improve your processes. Although you should include a couple of overall questions, try to include as much detail as you can about aspects of your business which you can improve. Don't bother to inquire about things beyond your control. For example, why bother asking "Is our hospital conveniently located?" unless your planning on relocating. However on the other hand, "Was the wait for receiving analysis results adequate?" is a great question.

Since you've endured to the end of this article, I'd like to share with you a new and exciting solution which makes measuring customer satisfaction much easier. It has several characteristics which will help you reduce your costs and maximize your participation rates.

This powerful management tool allows you to measure customer and employee satisfaction in realtime. Customers answer quick surveys by touching the screen of the "gustometer" with their fingers. Since the entire survey process usually takes about a minute and a half, the use of the gustometer can be incorporated into the normal day to day interactions with your customers. Once completed the survey is automatically collected by the servers, tabulated and ready for analysis.

In the analysis stage, this tool really shines. Thanks to the sophisticated business intelligence system built into the online analysis system, you are able to contrast your custom profile questions with the scores for every one of your valuation questions. This way not only can you extract the maximum value from your collected data, but you can also adapt your surveys on the fly to meet new customer perceptions and needs.

The benefits of the system are substantial and easy to put into practice, and you can be up and running in less than a week.

Pick up the phone and call Gustometria toll free at 1-877-448-7865.