Retail, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG), Restaurant and other organizations of all types often conduct customer surveys in which they ask their customers how well they’re doing.

Earlier we had provided you the first mantra of “understanding the importance of attributes being measured” and “identifying customer expectations“.

Presented below is the third mantra to making your customer surveys successful.

Third Mantra: Compare to the Competition

An important supplement to measuring expectations in customer surveys is to ask how competitors perform on the same attributes. Something which appears to be a strength based on your own performance may in fact be a relative weakness if the competition is doing even better.

One of our national retail clients boasted of receiving high customer satisfaction ratings in all customer surveys. These results were driving a sense of general complacency in the company and However, when we asked their customers to compare them to key competitors, then all competitors received significantly higher ratings on satisfaction, as well as service attributes considered critical by customers!

There are many ways to capture actionable information on these topics, and the best approach depends upon the circumstances. At Gold Research, we understand that customer intercepts, in-store interviews, and online surveys are easy to do, but hard to do well.

Gold Research Inc. has extensive experience in journey mapping, path-to-purchase research, deploying customer intercepts and mobile surveys for concept testing, marketing testing, satisfaction research, shopper insights, and mystery shopping. We can also act as an extension of your research team in helping with data processing, analysis, report development, and survey programming. Contact us at 1-800-549-7170 or send an email for a free 30-minute consultation on this topic.