posted 26 July 1999 09:12 AM               

1. Have you had to contact our customer service in the last year? How would you rate our response?

2. Have deliveries been on time and intact (no damage)?

3. What can we do to improve our relationship?

Etc - just typical questions. Look at what customers ask you in their questionaires and I'm sure you'll come up with some ideas specific to your company and product.

posted 26 July 1999 01:42 PM               

Creating a Customer Survey is generally a long and challenging process. I would suggest that you get key folks in your organization together and discuss an approach on how to create one that will suit your organization. By trying to adapt someone else's survey, you may miss some key opportunities to discover things about your customers.

This is not to say that you can't adapt some basic questions as Lassitude lists above. Some are just that but just as important as the one's you will create. Since you are the authorities or experts on your product, you may have a pretty good idea of what questions you need to ask. For instance, what does your organization see as being the key driving factors for your business? Create questions around these factors. Since these factors vary from organization to organization, so will the format and question base of Customer Surveys. Yours needs to be specific to your needs.

Funny thing about perception, they are sometimes wrong. So questions you ask today (based on what you thought was important) may not make it into the revised survey. You may think people find so-and-so important, only to find that it is trivial. How many project are built about trivial items? Plenty! Also, what distinguishes a loyal customer from a satisfied customer? Find this out, tap into it immediately.

Anyway, I hope that I haven't muddled up the works. Back to the group...

Regards,