There are many compelling and rather obvious reasons why you should survey your customers. For example, they help you to:

• Increase Satisfaction
• Enhance Loyalty
• Open Up Communication
• Recognize Successes and Opportunities
• Pinpoint Trends
• Identify Areas of Additional Leverage for Growth
• ...and many more!

But, today consumers are bombarded with surveys, and often times we can't hang up a call fast enough when the oh-so-pleasant automated recording says, "please stay on the line for our 2-minute survey..."  So how do we pull off creating an engaging survey that can result in those benefits listed above?  Zendesk has some great tips, which are here in an excerpt from one of their infographics (click on it to see the whole graphic and article):

Keep it short, give rewards, and raise interest - sounds easy enough, right?  Also, we suggest that you make sure that your objective is clear and that the responses are easy to measure and understand. What you want to find out and learn needs to be specific; don't confuse and lose your audience by covering too much ground. If you need inspiration for what types of questions to ask, SurveyMonkey, which is a great online survey tool that we have used for years, has some helpful samples that you can look through.

Once you have created and distributed your surveys, you need to have expectations and a plan in place for how you will manage the responses and feedback.  Your Key To Survey Success: respond to and apply what you learn! A great example of outstanding execution of responding to survey feedback was one that we felt firsthand. We recently used a trial version of the Formsite "form builder," and after a week of using it, they sent us a survey so they could understand our impression thus far. Within 3 hours of completing the short survey, we got a personalized email back from Alex Powers, and he directly addressed all feedback that we provided and offered solutions. How cool and what good service! When you fill out a survey, you certainly don't expect an immediate response, if any response at all.  This was truly a "wow" moment, and it has inspired us to duplicate what they are doing.  We must all take the feedback we get and immediately take action.  

Don't tell, but we are completely guilty of not doing enough surveys. Our goal is to send one to all of our customers before year-end so that we can grow in the new year. Logical timing, right?  Why don't you make the same goal?  If we can help you get started, just reach out.