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How business surveys can help your company improve products, services & employee satisfaction

With business surveys, companies discover what people think, what they want, and whether what’s being provided today is satisfactory in their customers’ eyes or not. This business insight is invaluable. You can gain similar insights when you visit Betfair and take advantage of all the opportunities it has to offer.

Read on to learn how business surveys can help your company succeed.

How happy are your employees?

The day of the suggestion box is over. Using an interactive business survey tool, employees can be surveyed by their employer to gain insight into their feelings about working conditions, how the company can help them to perform at a higher level and increase job satisfaction.

The key to surveying employees is that there must be a plan going forward for how the information gathered will be used. Otherwise, employees may candidly share their honest options or suggest ways to modify procedures to get better results and then see no change. This leads to frustration and a lowering of morale, not an increase in job satisfaction. Therefore, companies must use surveys in a constructive way with a plan for how they’ll use the findings.

Understanding customer satisfaction levels

Using an online survey a company can quickly obtain answers to customer’s questions about their happiness with the product (or service) provided. Whether to check on satisfaction levels or to seek feedback on the performance of a help desk service, using a business survey tool such as SurveyManager®  to present questions and collect thoughtful responses lets managers gain clarity about what the company is doing well and where it’s falling short in the eyes of their customers.

Information gathered is often visible in real-time, so responses from the earliest ones through to the most recent are visible from a web or smartphone app.

Market research for the win

How would Coca-Cola have fared if they’d performed adequate market research on their concept of “New Coke” instead of changing the classic Coke formula and finding their customers entirely dissatisfied with their decision? Don’t make the same mistake!

Companies that test their ideas for a new product (or service), or a variation on an existing one, avoid painful and costly blunders. Using survey forms to facilitate market research closes the gap between what’s believed to be true and what is true.

When product (and service) teams develop a new product (or service) based on customer feedback, marketing teams can produce campaigns that speak to this ideal customer. End consumers see the company adjusting their offering or just hitting it out of the park on the first try with a new offer that is a perfect fit for their needs. Only with thoughtfully conducted market research and smart interpretation of what the results mean can companies short-cut the development process to find success sooner.

Market research for the new brand

For any company looking to rebrand itself, surveying its existing or prospective customers is a good check to see if the new name is going to resonate with their target audience. The view internally can sometimes be myopic; getting outside opinions delivers invaluable food for thought.

What people associate with a brand name isn’t always what is expected. Brands often discover this when they perform market research for different countries. A brand name might make sense in the USA but fall flat in Canada and offend potential customers in Japan. Words also have different meanings, even when translated. It often requires soliciting local opinions to understand subtle word usage differences that could change how a brand or product name is interpreted.

Templates for days

Surveys aren’t helpful if they don’t ask the right questions. If you think about market researchers who pose leading questions rather than open-ended ones, it tends to skew the answers away from what was initially intended and creates a clear bias in the responses.

Being provided useful templates filled with sensible questions to ask employees during an internal survey or customers with a new product, shortcuts the time to get ready to run a survey. While having access to useful questions is a good starting point, it doesn’t mean that a company must stick to only those questions. It offers a jumping off point and provides a valid framework.

Templates provide suitable questions that don’t lead people to give certain responses in a tight grouping. It helps to shape the thinking on how to successfully draw up a new set of unbiased questions that relate to the company or their customers in their industry.

Business market surveys have many useful purposes for companies intent on improving their business results or the happiness of their employees. Only with a better understanding can acceptance occur, and improvements be applied.

Australian Times

For, by and about Aussies in the UK.

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