Customer surveys can help companies measure customer loyalty and identify opportunities for operational improvement and innovation.  Done right, they leave customers feeling valued and your organization better equipped to serve them.

To give your business the best chance of running an effective survey, besides applying technical best practices it helps to know how the process may feel to members of your organization along the way.

Below are five common emotions we see our clients experience in the course of performing a customer survey, along with tips on how to manage them:

Getting a call or email from an angry customer is a valuable opportunity for your business, though it may not feel that way at first.

The key to getting the most out of the gift of customer anger is learning how to unwrap it properly.

Over the past few years, we undertook rewriting a major part of our customer portal software to make it easier to use. 

It took a lot of time, money, nights and weekends, and we ran into our fair share of bugs and headaches along the way.

After we had launched the update, I thought “rewrites aren’t for the risk averse!”

According to the internet, Jeff Bezos once said: “It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”

It’s an incredibly powerful idea for anyone with customers, i.e., every single business!

A couple weekends ago, after many hours of online shopping and discussion, my wife and I were ready to buy a new family sofa.  We embarked on furniture store visits starting at IKEA, where we and our two boys sprawled out on a sectional sofa for some “real world” testing.

I recently toured  a client’s impressive heavy equipment sales, parts and service facility and I had a realization during the tour, "Your employees are the engine of your company."

Spring is in the air.  It’s a great time to do some cleaning and decluttering of your customer program.  Keep it fresh and functioning well.

In the movie Finding Forrester, Sean Connery, playing reclusive writer William Forrester, advises a young friend that “the key to a woman’s heart is an unexpected gift, at an unexpected time”.  Forrester’s friend, Jamal, acts on the advice and it works wonders.

Much has recently been written about the digitization of sales and marketing.  One study by CEB Global found that by the time a customer engages with your sales team after performing initial research, a whopping 57% of the B2B purchase process is already done.

Customer feedback is an essential ingredient for building better customer experiences, which help businesses survive and thrive.

Too often, though, feedback processes contain unnecessary friction, which causes customers to drop out of the process.

This is a lose-lose situation. The company is deprived of customer insights and customers waste their time.

Here’s the good news: By following a few simple steps, you can prevent or solve much of the friction in feedback processes. Before getting to those, though, let me share why I’m writing about this in the first place.