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.