A great way to improve your relationship with your clients is via customer surveys. It also gives you the chance to raise questions and gather new information that may help your business expand. Regardless of the size of your business, customer surveys should be a vital part of your business marketing plan.

A survey can take many shapes. It can be as simple as a postcard sent to each purchaser together with their receipt or as all-inclusive as a page-long form that is filled out during an appointment at your office or business.

It’s simple to create a client survey that will expand the conversation with your clients. There are several templates available on the internet to choose from, or you can decide to work with a marketing agency to make sure you get the most relevant questions for your business.

Three main methods to survey your clients are:

1) Paper-based. This creates the chance to collect email addresses as well if you haven’t already done so.

2) Phone-based. In addition to obtaining the answers to the regular questions, there’s also the possibility for your telephone survey agency to ask further questions or get more free-form views.

3) Web-based. Presuming you have your customer’s email, this may be an effective way to ask your customers to finish a survey on-line. Most online survey tools will automatically tabulate the results for you.

Again, regardless of the format, invest time in getting the questions right. A customer survey service agency can create questions are objective, including both closed- and open-ended questions that are successful in securing useful data.

From a consumer relationship point of view, doing good customer surveys on a regular basis lets the client know that you care about their opinion and their business with you. A positive benefit, in addition to you finding out more about what they think, is that you have made your customer feel important and more certain to “spread the word” about your service to family and colleagues.

Louie Pateropoulos is president of OnTarget Research, A Toronto-based market research company specializing in marketing research and customer surveys.

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