Aberdeen's 2012 Customer Feedback Management report draws the obvious conclusions about successful versus laggard companies, and a meta-analysis of the same data quietly says something more useful. The biggest differences aren't about collecting feedback. They're about what successful firms do with it. Here are the five specific moves the leaders make that the laggards don't.
"We scored 76, is that good?" "We improved 10 points, why?" If your survey results are generating those reactions, you're probably missing one of the three critical elements every customer loyalty survey needs. Here's what they are, why most surveys miss at least one, and how to include all three without making the survey longer.
![How Long Should My Customer Survey Be? [Video]](/_astro/how-long-should-my-customer-survey-be.D3alTSkT.jpg)
How long should your customer survey be? "As long as it needs to be, but no longer" is a fine principle and a useless answer. Here's a sharper rule of thumb, split by B2C and B2B, with concrete question counts, drawn from the analysis of thousands of real survey response patterns.
Customer feedback surveys are easy to push off the to-do list when you're small, "we already talk to our customers". Here's why that intuition is wrong: customers won't tell you bad news to your face, proximity blinds you to systemic issues, and innovation can't run on what they don't say. Small businesses need customer feedback surveys too, and arguably need them more.
![[Guest Post] 4 Insights Into Building a Better Organisational Structure With Customer Feedback](/_astro/bigstock_Auto_mechanic_taking_working_t_15606284-e1568692434453.CcmTJvRi.jpg)
"All you need are good people" is a comforting management myth, and it stops being true the moment your organisation gets complex. Beatrice Hofmeyr has been interviewing Australian executives about organisation design, and four insights stand out. Here's the guest post: where poor design breaks customer experience, why language matters, and the co-design move that lifts the odds of success.
When to send a customer survey depends on your business, your transaction shape, and one principle that almost everyone gets wrong: survey customers, not prospects, and survey soon after delivery. Here's the decision tree, broken down by transaction period (long vs short) and relationship type (one-time vs ongoing), so you can pick the survey timing that doesn't waste either side's effort.