How does your company collect customer satisfaction data and how effective/accurate would you rate each method (including pros and cons)? Some methods I've seen and used:

Self-Addressed Prepaid Postage survey forms--Passive form of data collection. Easier to be made anonymous. If designed well, data can be unbiased. Reciever cannot pick up on subleties in feedback and ask further probing questions.

My company currently uses fax-back forms for customer service and web feedback forms for other customers. Another division uses phone-interviews through a 3rd party service. We have found that each has benefits and costs. One of my concerns is how to choose the right method for a given product/service. Thoughts?

---

Fax back forms--Passive form of data collection. Difficult to make anonymous. If designed well, data can be unbiased. Reciever cannot pick up on subleties in feedback and ask further probing questions.

Telephone Interviews--Pro-active method of collecing data. Interviewer can ask additional questions or ask for free-form feedback. Data can be biased by a poorly written or follwed script of questions. More difficult to make data anonymous.

3rd Party Telephone Surveys--Additional cost. Pro-active method of collecing data. Interviewer can ask additional questions or ask for free-form feedback. Data can be biased by a poorly written or follwed script of questions. Easier to make feedback anonymous.

Web Feedback form--Passive form of data collection. Can be anonymous. If designed well, data can be unbiased. Reciever cannot pick up on subleties in feedback and ask further probing questions.

I've posted my entire process with actual data in another thread.

About survey forms I can ad something we do here.
The questions of each survey are made during the Design process of each service.
So each service has different questions. This allows the design process participants to know what should be asked customers in order to check service efficiency! ;)

Just wanted to say that Surveys work for me ...in my industry. I use them mainly for the end-user (consumer). :)

If anyone has suggestions for improvement, then chime in!

There is some more information in the following thread that might help you.

http://elsmar.com/Forums/showthread.php?t=16570

Otherwise, "real" survey's don't work for us because our customer doesn't like to put things in writing. We do passive surveys were those with customer contact take notes during meetings with the customer and assign values from 1 to 10 based on guidlines established to determine the ratings on key indicators such as cost, easy to work with, schedule, quality, etc

We also collect any emails or awards that the customer gives us as proof of their love!;)

Scroll down to the bottom of this thread and you will find several links to similar conversations had here in the Cove.