How to Properly Survey Your Customers

Customer surveys are critical to any business. Whether you provide a product or a service, knowing what your customers think about your offering and what is missing is how your business can best improve its products and services. But surveys often produce inaccurate results - leading businesses to invest resources in the wrong areas. Eric Almquist and Jason Lee of Bain & Company have a much better approach - and I'm very impressed with its simplicity and effectiveness.

The Problem with Traditional Surveys

I know for Ixpleo, it's been difficult to get feedback from Compass customers on exactly what they love, what's missing, and what would be nice to have. Eric and Jason put together a video at the Harvard Business Review explaining the problems with the typical survey approach. One problem is that customers will often select most of the options as being of extreme importance - when what your business needs is the options ranked in terms of importance - as well as an idea of how important each option is. You can see the entire video here.

Their recommended approach is called Maximum Difference Scaling - and it begins with the assumption that each option or attribute included in the survey has an equal chance of being selected as most important. So given ten options, each options begins with a ranking of 10%. From there, customers go through a series of rounds and comparatively select the most and least important option from the group. After each round, the most important option is increased by a percentage and the least important is decreased by the same amount. By forcing customers to compare items in various rounds instead of simply rating each on a 1-10 scale, Maximum Difference Scaling returns much more accurate distinctions between options than typical surveying might.

Where to Go From Here

The video doesn't explain how to a) determine how many rounds you'll need, and b) determine how many items, and which items, to choose for each round - I guess that's what you'll need a business consulting firm like Bain. But if you're on a budget, a quick Google search can reveal more information into how you would setup this type of survey - or even software programs that could help you.

If you haven't watched the video yet, go watch it! It was very well presented, and Eric compares the results of both types of surveys at the end. I'm very excited about this. I'd love to hear about your results conducting surveys and any unique methods you have used to improve survey results.