The first objective is to determine how well you're meeting customers expectations. Simply asking the question as "Rate how well has (COMPANY X) met your expectations on a scale of 1-10" will give you nothing but garbage. The results could come back as your company having an average rating of 5.8 out of 10 in meeting your customer's expectations. What changes would you put in place to increase that score? You don't know because you didn't ask that question. You asked a general question about their expectations instead of a specific one, you therefore got a general answer instead of one that gave you specific information.
The way to solve this problem is by using an Importance/Satisfaction style question. Create a list of attributes that are important to your customer, such as having a real person answer the phone, and then have your customers rate how important that is to them and then have them rate their level of satisfaction with YOUR company.
And here's a nice little twist you can do. You can then use the Loop function in SurveyAnalytics and ask them what other alternatives they use, and have them rate YOUR competitors' performance as well as yours, this gives you some important feedback about how you can improve relative to your customers.
Next you need to Figure out what unmet needs your customers have that you can deliver. First thing is to make sure you do something if your customers have unmet needs, and this information can be used to alert your sales staff to opportunities they may have missed.
Remember you can always set "alerts" in SurveyAnalytics so you can get an immediate message when one of your customers has very negative or even very positive feedback. It's a problem if you don't know what the unmet needs are, fortunately using "open ended" questions you can ask the customer to describe in their own words what they need, you can then use that to craft a response. Open ended questions are a way of getting the real voice of the customer. It's often useful to find out what the problem a customer has they are trying to solve with your products, because there may be a way of doing it they don't know about. Learn what the problems your customer has and suggest your solutions to them.
Now you get to generate ideas for new products or services. Of course the information on unmet needs is a large part of this, as is the information about the problems your customers have. It's important to make sure that you hear about the problems outside of the context of your products. That is, you don't want to know that product XYZ doesn't do a certain thing, rather than the customer needs to do something or make something and YOU then get to supply the solution to this problem. Very often there is a solution that the customer has not heard of, learn to seek out problems, because they can grow your business!
All of this brings you to being able Identify new opportunities. We talked about alerts previously, that is where the SurveyAnalytics system sends a message if someone answers with a very low (or high) rating on a question. In fact it can be used to monitor any sort of answer to a survey question. While no one likes unhappy customers, hearing that they are unhappy means you have a chance to repair the relationship and even expand your business with them. It's also important to remember that your customers often have ideas about new products that you may never hear about unless you ask them. So the customer satisfaction survey can also be a business development survey!
These results are hugely important and will yield a chart that will show you exactly what's important to your customer and to what degree you and the competition are meeting those expectations. Not only THAT, but it will also attack that other objectives of identifying new opportunities, finding unmet needs as well as generating new product and service ideas! All of that accomplished with just one series of questions.
