Hey, we’re a company that makes a survey tool. So, I’m sure you can understand that we get asked the question, “What are the business benefits of surveys” about a trillion times a day.
And that’s fine. Because it’s a good question: after all, if you’re going to go to the effort of finding a survey tool, writing questions, sending them out to your customers/staff/event, then you’re going to want to be sure that your return on investment (ROI) is good, right?
Well, I’m here to make a concrete argument for the benefits of surveys:
- Discover problems in the business early
- Engaging customers significantly impacts business outcomes
- Successful businesses measure customer satisfaction
- Generate sales leads through market surveys
- Build new audiences at live events
- Improve staff retention
So strap in and let’s get started.
You’ve got an inkling that you want to do a survey of your customers. Maybe you’ve already read some guides online that talked about using surveys to build your customer base, improve customer loyalty and deliver sparkling customer service experiences.
But first of all, you’re going to want to be sure that using surveys will align to your work goals. Here’s a few ways that using surveys can benefit you right now.
Discover problems in the business early on
Surveying is one of the best ways to discover problems in your organisation at scale. Sure you could try to make a list of all the complaints people utter under their breath in your staff or client meetings, but that’s going to take you an age and you’re going to miss heaps of valuable stuff.
A survey by GTE in the mid 90s demonstrates the impact of the survey in finding these problems early though. The survey revealed that the performance of its billing operations was closely tied to the leadership style of different managers within the organisation.
Knowing this info helped GTE take action early and in the following year, they improved billing accuracy by 22% and 24% in the next two years, respectively.
Engaging customers significantly impacts business outcomes
Careful management and improvement of customer satisfaction scores (usually measured using a structured survey strategy) can:
- Give you a competitive advantage
- Create referrals to grow your customer base
- Reduce churn
- Decrease cost of acquisition
- Increase lifetime value by inspiring repeat customers
- Boost overall revenue
For example, 95% of customers tell others about a bad experience and 87% share good experiences. What does that mean? Measuring and tracking customer satisfaction to ensure you’re delivering delightful experiences can ensure you’re creating opportunities for customers to refer you to their colleagues/family/friends.
Additionally, and referencing that GTE survey above, spotting problems early can save you heaps of cash. Attracting a new customer is 6-7 times more expensive than retaining a current one. If you’re losing customers because you don’t know about problems, you’ll need to work way harded to get them back and spend a lot of money in the process.
Circling back a little, when leads hear from a friend or from their community that a product or service is good, they’re more likely to buy from you. In fact, 88% of consumers are influenced by customer reviews when they’re making purchasing choices.
Not enough for you yet? Check out our guide to customer satisfaction here to read more compelling stats on why you should invest heavily in surveying your customers.
Generates sales leads through market surveys
A benefit of surveys that doesn’t get discussed in most of the articles you might find on the topic is the potential for using surveys as a way to generate targeted sales leads from a wide audience.
How might this work?
Well, let’s say you’re in the consumer goods industry. And you want to build a mailing list of people who have specific characteristics and are likely to fit your buyer profile, there’s no better way to engage them than to ask them questions about things that matter to them.
For example, a survey aimed at this audience which asks questions around a current theme in your industry (e.g. attitudes to the environment) and also asks for email addresses at the end so that you can share the results of the survey with them at a future date.
That’ll provide you a super relevant reason to contact them with useful information and also to get any revenue generating opportunities into their inboxes at the same time.
Here’s what Neil Patel, one of the most referenced internet marketers says about the benefits of building a mailing list:
“Out of all the channels I tested as a marketer, email continually outperforms most of them. Not only does it have a high conversion rate, but as you build up your list you can continually monetize it by pitching multiple products. Just look at ecommerce sites like Amazon, one way they get you to continually buy more products from them is by emailing you offers on a regular basis,” he says.
“And if you aren’t selling any products, you should still collect emails so you can get people back to your site on a continual basis. For example, if you have a blog, every time you publish a new post, you can notify your list, which will help increase repeat traffic.”
Here’s some interesting stats from doopoll to show you how this can work.
On average, 47% of respondents leave an email address at the end of a doopoll survey. That is way above the industry standards. But it has tangible benefits.
- Imagine that you survey 1000 people and 47% of them leave an email address. That means you grow your mailing list by 470 people.
- Now let’s say you have a customer lifetime value of £100 and around 1% of your mailing list signups purchase.
- 4.7 people from your 470 strong mailing list will buy and have a lifetime value of £100
- Your survey has an ROI of £470 which is not bad for the time it took you to sign up to doopoll, create a few targeted questions and send out a mailer to respondents.
Build audiences at live events
One of the main use cases we see for surveys is in running live event engagement. This works by asking the audience to vote on a series of questions and projecting the results in real time.
This was never a possibility using old fashioned survey tools, but with tools like doopoll you can project beautifully designed results onto your conferences’ big screen live – and respondents can answer on whatever device they have. No apps to download.
Want an example?
The Bevan Commission — an organisation that supports and provides independent, authoritative advice on health and care to the Welsh Government and leaders in NHS Wales, the UK and beyond — saw over 500 health professionals, academics and policy makers take part in their flagship event celebrating 70 years of the NHS.
doopoll was used to gather insight from the audience which contributed to discussions across the two day conference.
Hannah Scarborough, Communications and Engagement Manager at the Bevan Commission said:
"We loved using doopoll as a way of engaging our audience and driving debate at our recent international conference. It was brilliant to see the audience responding and to see the results appearing in real time on the big screen."
The real benefit of this comes when you put your business development hat on too.
Imagine rather than losing an audiences’ attention when you deliver the closing remarks at your conference. How much value and insight gets lost at that point? Sure, you’ve got their contact details to email them but if you combine that with survey insights, you’ve got an ironclad reason to engage them going forward.
Did someone vote a certain way? Use that as a talking point and add them to a special marketing campaign. Remember the equation above on ROI for customer development? You’re burning money by not surveying.
Improve staff retention
Replacing staff who leave your organisation is costly. According to an article on HRReview.co.uk, it costs a legal firm around £40,000 to replace a lost employee including up to 32 weeks to get them to optimal productivity.
Of course, some of that is unavoidable, we live in a world where the job market is really in favour of the employee rather than the employer.
But some innovative firms are trying to tackle the issue.
“Using doopoll, we achieved a 65% increase in completion allowing us to make our training sessions even better,” says Jodie Fisher, a customer services trainer at Admiral Insurance.
The FTSE100 company managed to use doopoll to ensure that they could get well trained staff at the end of their onboarding sessions.
Why is that such a priority?
Well, picture it: If your staff feel disengaged or poorly trained when they join the organisation, how long do you think it’ll be before they’re either thinking about leaving or not performing to the standard you want?
A great way to avoid that is to ensure that they’ve got lots of opportunities to engage with you and tell you that there’s an issue that needs to be sorted.
In closing
Hopefully now you’ve got a pretty good insight into why surveys have tangible business outputs that you should be capitalising on right away.
Ready to give surveys a go for your next project? You can get started for free and be up and running with your first survey in minutes using doopoll. Get started by clicking here.
