Training Staff on Survey Handouts

Transactional surveys are shown to be surprisingly valuable. They provide instant data on a recent experience to provide, presumably, the most accurate results related to that experience. They’re often used to track changes over time, find out how employees treat customers, etc.

Overall they’re a useful strategy for many retail businesses. However, there are some problems with this method – particularly the way this that these surveys are handed out by employees. You need to make sure that employees are putting you in the best position to get the results you need.

Focus on Consistency It’s important that employees remain consistent in how they ask customers to fill out the survey. Many employees change their tone to something friendlier than their original tone, knowing that their jobs are going to be affected by the customer’s response.

But doing so introduces another problem – it could change the way surveys are filled out. Train employees to hand out surveys using the same language and speech each time. Consider Leaving Out Cashiering Data If the person handing out the survey is different than the person that helped the customer, consider leaving out any questions about the cashier so that they are not encouraged to change their tone in order to get a better rating.

You can learn enough about a cashier through watching them interact with customers and finding out their speed data. If the cashiers have nothing to gain by changing their tone, they may be less likely to introduce their own response problems. Make Sure Employees Know How to Spot Surveys Usually transactional surveys are handed out randomly on receipts.

On occasion, it’s possible that the employee misses the fact that the receipt has a survey at the end of it. You need to train them to spot the survey so that they can always promote it to customers, otherwise you may get less of a response rate or have different responses from customers that were introduced to the survey compared to those that found it on the end of their survey by accident. Transactional surveys can be very valuable, but it does take some training on the part of your company to make sure you are getting the most from the survey.

Your first step should always be to train the employees that hand out the survey, because no matter how well the survey is written, the influence of people can easily introduce problems with data collection.