Improve Defection Survey Response

Market research on current and prospective clients is useful. It helps tell you where to direct your business and what steps to take to reach the best audience. This research is extremely useful for figuring out how to best reach your market and what you can be doing to improve your standing in the economy.

But some of the best research doesn’t come from the market you’re trying to reach. Sometimes it comes from the customers you’ve lost. Researching customer defection is a great way to get the upper edge in business, because it tells you what you did wrong, and what other companies are offering that caused you to lose business to a competitor.

However, for obvious reasons, sending surveys to customers you’ve lost tends to result in a low response rate. Very few ex-clients want to take time out of their day to fill out a survey for a company they no longer plan on using. Here are several tips for increasing the response rate of your customer defection survey.

Don’t Try to Re-sell Them When you lose a client, the natural reaction is to try as hard as you can to win them back. Your sales staff will likely be contacting them over and over within the following few years in an effort to see if they can win back their business. Yet for the purposes of your research, you are simply trying to gain information.

Your clients don’t want to be spammed with your sales pitch, so let the survey be something that is focused on research purposes only to avoid any ex-client burnout. Personally Explain What the Survey is For Rather than send some impersonal bulk survey with little explanation about what its purpose is, take some time to compose a message along with the survey that explains why you would like their response, what the survey will be used for and how it will be used to make your business better. Make sure they understand that you’re not using it to re-sell them.

You’re only using it to make your business better. Keep it Short Once your former client starts to take the survey, they are not going to want it to continue forever. Make sure your questions are straight and to the point, and try to limit the questions as much as possible so that they do not get survey burnout from a company they don’t plan on using again.

Long surveys will drastically reduce the number of lost clients that will take the survey. Make it Anonymous Finally, make sure the client understands that the survey they are filling out is completely anonymous. It will not be exploited to try to win back their business.

Defected customers are not coming back right away, and they certainly don’t want to worry that you will try to win them back using the information you provide. More on anonymous surveys . Customer defection surveys are extremely valuable.

They are a great way to gain insight into your business, your products, your services – and even your competition. Yet you need to do them right if you want to receive a good response rate. Use the tips above to improve your survey response rate so that you can receive that valuable data.