In times like these, the importance of constantly measuring customer satisfaction has never been greater.

Right now your customers, just like you, are placing every expenditure under the microscope. If a dollar can be saved, or a payment postponed, you can be sure they are considering it very seriously. Everybody is questioning the fundamentals of their business models and even the most enduring relationships are being revised. When money is short, you can be sure that cashflow is the highest priority.

However, measuring customer satisfaction is pretty much worthless if you don’t get a significant number of responses. Unless a representative number of customers participate in your survey, at best you won’t have data and at worst you’ll have data that misleads you to erroneous conclusions. The following five steps will help you achieve high response rates:

Make the survey fast. Face it. Do you like to fill out surveys? Your customers don’t want to spend fifteen minutes filling out pages of boring questions. If your time is valuable to you, then you must also understand that it’s costly for your customers as well. My recommendation is that the survey take under two minutes to complete.

Invite your customers to participate. Distributing a stack of surveys to each office and hoping they get filled out isn’t going to cut it. Filling out surveys isn’t fun, and unless you actively encourage your customers to join in, they probably won’t do it. This requires a premeditated plan and a strong backing by the whole organization.

Make measuring an integral part of your business processes. If customer satisfaction is truly important to you, then measuring can’t be limited to an occasional snapshot. Instead, you need to make it an every day activity built in to your way of doing business. You need a constant stream of detailed information to really be able to make a difference.

Give your customers feedback from the results. Once you’ve gained valuable insights from your customers‘ opinions, share them! I’m not saying you should publish all the gory details, but at least send out an email with the major conclusions you’re going to be working on. You’re customers will appreciate the effort you’re putting into satisfying them.

Prove to them that your serious about satisfaction. If you limit your measurement efforts to a wrinkled photocopied printout which hasn’t been changed in six years, you’re sending a very negative message to your customers. Implement a modern technologically advanced system and you’re sending another message altogether.

All of these factors can be implemented quickly and affordably thanks to an innovative new system called Gustometria. Customers answer quick surveys by touching the screen of the „gustometer“ with their fingers. Since the entire survey process usually takes about a minute and a half, the use of the gustometer can be incorporated into the normal day to day interactions with your customers. Once completed the survey is automatically collected by the Gustometria servers, tabulated and ready for analysis.

Thanks to the built in business intelligence tools included in Gustometria, you are able to contrast all of your valuation questions quickly and easily with your custom profile questions. You can adapt and change the surveys on the fly, and thanks to the variable structure of each survey, you can measure hundreds of details about your company without having to ask any one customer more than a few questions.

I am convinced that tracking customer and employee satisfaction, on a daily basis, is a true survival tactic in today’s market. If you agree, you must implement Gustometria this week.

Pick up the phone and call Gustometria toll free at 1-877-448-7865.

Can measuring customer satisfaction be easy?

Everyone knows that customer satisfaction is key in a hard economy. If people are watching their expenditures more closely than ever before, you must be very careful about losing customers. Traditionally it’s been said that it costs twelve times more to capture a new client than it does to maintain an existing one.

In a market like this one, the difference only widens.

It ought to be relatively simple to find out what your customers are thinking. Ask them all the right questions and listen carefully to their answers.

However, the truth is that it just isn’t easy to pull off.

According to the legendary Jack Welch, you can’t improve what you don’t measure. However it’s equally true that you can’t improve if you go broke measuring!

The hard part of measuring customer satisfaction lies in the complicated process you must follow:

1. Design the survey.

2. Implement the survey instrument (a printed survey, a webpage)

3. Distribute the survey.

4. Invite customers to participate.

5. Gather the filled out surveys.

6. Calculate the survey responses.

7. Analyze the survey results to make conclusions.

Each of these steps takes a considerable amount of effort and expense to put into practice.

However, a new tool on the market, Gustometria, significantly reduces the time, effort and cost of measuring your customer satisfaction. And more importantly it provides you with powerful analysis tools which feed on the responses in realtime. Customer satisfaction measurement has never been this easy before.

The Gustometria system, which permits you to easily and affordably track your customer satisfaction, guarantees four additional benefits:

1. You will be able to adapt and change your surveys any time you wish.

2. Integrate customer satisfaction measurement into your daily business processes. Since your customers are answering the survey right at the checkout counter, while waiting for their receipts, you will achieve excellent participation rates. The whole survey process usually takes about a minute, and it effectively demonstrates to your client how important his opinion is to your company.

3. React immediately when you detect a problem. The fact that you are receiving results back in realtime truly empowers the system. If something is going wrong, you find out today, in time to implement a solution immediately. Tomorrow you’ll be able to confirm whether the new solution is as effective as you hoped.

4. Gustometria isn’t limited to quantitative measurements. You also get direct customer feedback in realtime. Your clients can submit suggestions, complaints or kudos whenever they feel like it.

The truth of the matter is that Gustometria opens every corner of your business open for improvement. You can see what’s going on, even if you can’t be there.

The truth is measuring customer satisfaction can be easy. As easy in fact as picking up the phone and calling toll free 1-877-448-7865.