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[Q23]Questions To Ask Customers

by Peter Lawless, Pet

The general perception of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has matured in the last few years, with potential users of CRM ensuring that people and processes form part of an implementation. In addition sensible success criteria are being set to create a compelling business case, which clearly states the potential returns and measurement goals.

Your customers know why they buy your products - do you?

However, I wonder how many companies actually talk to their customer or indeed to their future prospects about what criteria for success they would put on a CRM implementation. If done correctly, will also be an excellent source of leads and will signal to the marketplace that you really care about providing levels of service that delights your customers. After all, while CRM is primarily implemented in response to a demand for increased profit. This should be achieved by making existing customer delighted. In addition, it should make it easier for potential customers to identify what the benefits of doing business with you actually are.

Soliciting opinion from your customers is not only a sound business decision, but extending this approach to your potential customers and prospects can be a very effective lead generation technique. This article will talk about the best way of soliciting opinion from customers and will include a customer and prospect questionnaire that can be tailored and used as part of the assessment phase of any CRM implementation.

Conduct a survey of your customers

The more you talk to your customers the more likely they are to keep buying your products and services. Have you ever driven behind a lorry and seen the sign “how am I driving – phone …”? It makes you remember them. So go and talk to your customers. If you have a lot of them, get a telemarketing company to do it. Even better encourage one of your customers to set up a users group, and have the users group run the survey.

Here is a sample list of some of the questions you might want to ask your customers;

Overall, how would you rate doing business with my company?
What aspects in dealing with our company do you like? (Provide a list)
What aspects in dealing with our company do you not like? (Provide a list)
Do we communicate with you often enough?
Do you understand the value our products and services provide?
Which of the following things we are thinking of implementing would make doing business with us better?
Would you recommend our company to anyone else? If yes please provide contact details, if No – why not?

Who else should you solicit opinion from?
There are three other key groups you should also speak with before you change how you interact with you customers. You should do this, even though you believe that the changes are positive. These groups are;

Your business partners
Key influencers like consultants or trade journalists
Your prospects.

This is an excellent, non threatening way, in which you can introduce new people to your business. If done correctly, will also be an excellent source of leads and will signal to the marketplace that you really care about providing levels of service that delights your customers.

Here's an example. Most organizations that provide charitable help to the poor like to check to be sure that those who receive the benefits are really poor.

Arrive at such a charitable organization, and you find long lines of people being checked in, checked up on, and checked out. That checking process may involve as many people as those who are actually providing aid. The delays that the paperwork creates may also mean that recipients stand in lines for hours. Without the paperwork, the time needed for a pickup could be just a few minutes.

If you ask those who receive this aid, they find the whole process frustrating. On many occasions, people will tell you that after standing in line to receive such contributions they are turned away because the supplies run out before it is their turn.

Such problems become a bigger source of wasted time because recipients sometimes spend the night in line for morning aid distributions in climates where that's reasonably comfortable to do. Do you think that any aid recipient who goes through such a bureaucratic process favors the approach? We haven't met one yet.

Who else is inconvenienced by this approach? Young children may have to go through the same process because a single parent doesn't want to leave them at home unattended. If one adult in a household spends time going through these processes, that's one adult who has less time to provide other benefits for the family or to look for a job.

Each recipient has to be checked through each time. If the families were qualified once a year based on some simple process, the checking in and checking out process might be eliminated for the other 51 weeks of the year.

Better yet, some organizations have found that they could help more poor people by simply not checking on whether people are poor. If someone asks for help, the organizations just give the help. After all, there's only a modest resale value for what is given away.

You may be thinking that charities are a special case because they have responsibilities to those who contribute to be careful. That may be so, but how would donors feel if they understood the implications of such continual surveillance?

More puzzling is why so many businesses require extensive information before accepting a new customer. It's not unusual to have to fill out pages of forms, supply references, and provide access to credit record information to be able to buy small quantities of business supplies on credit.

The cost of that approach has to be an enormous percentage of revenues for customers who buy very little.

It was a great relief to many such customers when suppliers began to ask instead for company credit card numbers. These numbers are kept on file, and the charges can be processed and the cash received in seconds after an order is requested. The horribly inefficient credit department of a supplier in such a case has been replaced by the efficiency of an automated credit card network.

Yet until the 1990s, many suppliers to small enterprises in the United States simply wouldn't accept credit cards. One of the last to do so was that venerable U.S. government monopoly, the U.S. Postal Service. Would any customer have said that they didn't want to be able to pay with credit cards for their small business orders and postage? We doubt it.

When did you last ask your customers, users, and beneficiaries what you are doing that they don't need or like?

What did they tell you?

Have you eliminated those activities?

Article Source : marketing mix 5

About Author

Both Peter Lawless & Donald Mitchell are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Peter Lawless has sinced written about articles on various topics from Customer Service, Business Marketing and Mortgage. This article was written by Peter Lawless, founder of . For previous articles like this, visit 3R's Articles. Alternatively, subscribe to Success our free mo. Peter Lawless's top article generates over 27100 views. to your Favourites.

Donald Mitchell has sinced written about articles on various topics from . Donald Mitchell is an author of seven books including Adventures of an Optimist, The 2,000 Percent Squared Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, and The Ultimate Competitive Advantag. Donald Mitchell's top article . to your Favourites.