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The Answers You Need Are In. Now What?
Posted on Mon, 07/20/2009 - 14:13 by Caroline Shahar
Part 1: Understanding what you're seeing and finding a starting point
Small businesses and organizations that run smoothly, profitably, and efficiently know the answers to these kinds of questions:
What about our offerings have our audience extremely pleased?
What existing or new topics/products/services are our audience most interested in?
Where will investing our time/money yield the biggest payoff?
What changes can we make that will get our audience engaging with us more often?
What is the competition doing that we are not doing, and that has our audience taking notice?
The best place to get these answers for your organization is your own audience -- whether for you that means your customers, clients, members, or donors. And as more and more small businesses and organizations are discovering, online surveys are a very simple and affordable way to gain the opinion of the majority of your customers quickly. Once your online survey is out in an email or on your website, as soon as you can say, "Badda bing, badda boom," your answers are in! The ability to receive instantly computed results is one of the great bonuses of getting your feedback online.
The feedback you need is easy to attain, but once you have it, then what? This information doesn’t do you any good if don't use it correctly. So what does this information look like? The result of your audience’s opinions will look something like this if you used an online survey. Take a look at it. What’s your first impression? What stands out? This impression will help you find your starting point.
Review the overall results to see how people have answered the questions and record your baseline numbers. Your baseline numbers are a guide to your performance, and a way for you to measure the impact of the future actions you take to improve and grow your organization. The numbers you track depend on your business objectives.
For example, if your business objective is to win new customers, then your survey objective will be to track customer satisfaction and loyalty. One question you might ask is, "Overall how satisfied are you with us?"
In the results you see:
- 45% of your customers said they are "Extremely satisfied"
- 35% said they are "Somewhat satisfied"
- 10% answered "Neutral"
- 10% said "Somewhat dissatisfied"
- 0% answered "Extremely dissatisfied"
So for this example, the baseline number for customer satisfaction is 80% (those that answered extremely or somewhat satisfied).
Next time, we will take a look beyond this baseline, and dive into understanding what your audience is really telling you. Questions? Feel free to send a comment. Until next time, happy growing!
Small businesses and organizations that run smoothly, profitably, and efficiently know the answers to these kinds of questions:
What about our offerings have our audience extremely pleased?
What existing or new topics/products/services are our audience most interested in?
Where will investing our time/money yield the biggest payoff?
What changes can we make that will get our audience engaging with us more often?
What is the competition doing that we are not doing, and that has our audience taking notice?
The best place to get these answers for your organization is your own audience -- whether for you that means your customers, clients, members, or donors. And as more and more small businesses and organizations are discovering, online surveys are a very simple and affordable way to gain the opinion of the majority of your customers quickly. Once your online survey is out in an email or on your website, as soon as you can say, "Badda bing, badda boom," your answers are in! The ability to receive instantly computed results is one of the great bonuses of getting your feedback online.
The feedback you need is easy to attain, but once you have it, then what? This information doesn’t do you any good if don't use it correctly. So what does this information look like? The result of your audience’s opinions will look something like this if you used an online survey. Take a look at it. What’s your first impression? What stands out? This impression will help you find your starting point.
Review the overall results to see how people have answered the questions and record your baseline numbers. Your baseline numbers are a guide to your performance, and a way for you to measure the impact of the future actions you take to improve and grow your organization. The numbers you track depend on your business objectives.
For example, if your business objective is to win new customers, then your survey objective will be to track customer satisfaction and loyalty. One question you might ask is, "Overall how satisfied are you with us?"
In the results you see:
- 45% of your customers said they are "Extremely satisfied"
- 35% said they are "Somewhat satisfied"
- 10% answered "Neutral"
- 10% said "Somewhat dissatisfied"
- 0% answered "Extremely dissatisfied"
So for this example, the baseline number for customer satisfaction is 80% (those that answered extremely or somewhat satisfied).
Next time, we will take a look beyond this baseline, and dive into understanding what your audience is really telling you. Questions? Feel free to send a comment. Until next time, happy growing!
