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Home>Business Resource Center >Business Articles >Direct Selling

Customer Satisfaction: The Secret's in the Survey

Customer relationship management is an ongoing process, greatly improving the owner's ability to predict the customer's needs. Besides staying in close communication with your customers before, during and after a sale, utilizing customer satisfaction surveys is a great way to garner critical information.

As you develop your survey, experts encourage you to keep it clear and concise and be willing to heed newfound advice, if appropriate. Satisfaction surveys fall into one of two categories: transactional and image-based.

In a transactional satisfaction survey, any company-customer interaction counts as a transaction. They need not buy your product to offer feedback. Phone calls and emails become tools for monitoring customer service over time.

In an image-based satisfaction survey, an overall impression about your company is based on numerous transactions your business has had with customers over time. This type of survey will help you ascertain where you stand with both your customers and in your market sector. Experts recommend implementing both type of surveys on a regular basis, but not concurrently, primarily to avoid customer confusion.

While CRM core principles underscore relationship-building between owner and customer, they also necessitate a huge financial investment. In fact, smaller businesses often underestimate the total costs involved with regard to training and software implementation.

Nevertheless, tracking clients and their buying patterns, even on a small scale, leads to an understanding of your clients' changing needs - and future trends.

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