Multi-Company Satisfaction Surveys

Companies looking for their own satisfaction information often create a survey designed to gauge those specific qualities. They have questions that relate to different areas of their storefront or business, and they ask the customer what areas they like, what they don't like, etc. Often, however, there are customers that frequent more than one store, or have experience with more than one type of business. These customers can provide insight as to where your store ranks compared to the other competitor options.

In order to get unbiased results, you may need to either have a third party company run the survey or de-emphasize your company's role with the survey. You do not want customers to answer in favor of your company simply because you're reading the information. Also, rather than start by asking questions about your own company, you can start by asking the respondent to select which companies they have experience with (from a list of you and all of your competitors).

Then ask them all the same questions based on which answers they select from the list. While it will make the survey longer, it will also provide useful information for not only your business, but also the rest of the market. You can learn how your competitors are doing, all from a sample that has already opted to answer your survey.

These types of results arguably give you more data than you would receive running the survey regularly. You can check each answer based on the way the user answered other questions, or check the means and deviations of responses from the total data. You can learn how your competitors are doing – and perhaps even discover if the competitor may have something in place that makes their store work better.

From there you can create new surveys and attempt to discover what you can do to make your company greater as well. Your own data is always valuable, and like most satisfaction (and to a lesser extent market) research, trends are very important, so running satisfaction studies about your own company regularly is a good way to collect data.

But often it's not just how your own company fares, but how you compare against other companies in the same industry. This type of survey will provide you with that data, so that you are making the right judgments in the future.