Resetting Survey Baselines

Once you have decided on your customer satisfaction survey, it is considered a bad idea to change it. Changing your survey makes it much harder to track the results, and since it is the changes in customer satisfaction over time (rather than the scores themselves) that can often be the most telling about the customer satisfaction levels, making even a minor change can cause you to lose the most telling data. Still, sometimes changes need to be made. While you should do your best to make these changes as infrequently as possible, there are occasionally times where a change is absolutely necessary to measure what you want to measure.

You always want to be able to track trends, at least to the best of your ability. Once you change a survey – even if you are simply deleting one single question – you may alter the results of the entire rest of the survey. That is why it is important to find a way to still try to track trends even after survey changes.

The most effective way to do this is to run BOTH surveys together with different customer samples. While this will be more expensive, what it will do is allow you to establish a baseline for your new survey. In other words, if you get straight 5’s across the board with your old survey, and get straight 6’s across the board with your newer survey, it may show indicate that you have a new baseline you need to work from with this new survey.

You should run both of these surveys together for at least 2 or 3 survey periods, if not more if you can afford it. The trends should track together, and you can establish the right baseline for your surveys in order to ensure that you are still able to track changes and trends in the data.

Running both surveys is not a perfect measurement. You cannot be 100% sure that the trends are going to track together, and that the new baseline you create is going to be the right one. But although it may not be perfect, it is a much better way to ensure that your survey data is still valuable. Starting a new survey and starting the data and analysis from scratch is a waste of data and efforts, and will cause you to lose out on information that may be crucial for your business.