Posts Tagged ‘best practices’

Customer-directed surveys seem to be a blessing and a curse to most dealerships.  OEM survey results can determine so much for dealership, yet are often highly contested by those within the dealership.  So why not find out how your customers feel about the experience they had at your dealership by sending out your own surveys?  Whether through email or direct mail, here are a few common survey mistakes taken from a MarketingSherpa article and from DealerOn’s experience, and how to avoid them.

• Biased Population – It’s very easy to only survey a certain population of your customer base.  Always keep in mind who you’re sending surveys to, for example: buyers vs. non-buyers, age groups, and income levels.  Decide ahead of time who will receive this survey, either everyone, or a completely random sampling.  If you do want to send a survey to a targeted segment, make sure you keep that in mind when you receive your results.
• Leading/Misleading Questions – These types of questions include those that are written to lead a respondent to answer a certain way, and also those that are difficult to understand.  To prevent this from happening, have an uninvolved third party read over the questions to ensure they are unbiased and clearly written.  Be on the lookout for judgment words like good, bad, better, worse, etc.  These can push respondents into answering one way or another and can lead to skewed results.
• Small Sample Size – Typically, a sample size of about 100 will provide a fairly representative sample.  However, it is possible that this sample can get cut up into demographic cells making these samples too small.  Work to prevent this by making sure you select a random sample, and check the results for these smaller demographic breakdowns.
• Purpose – Before you write the survey questions, make sure you have a clear reason for surveying your customers.  Not only will this help you find a focus and formulate your questions, but it can help you determine what you are trying to get out of the survey results.  Will you use your responses to change your dealership, or are you simply trying to understand how your customer base feels?
• Consistency and Regularity – The best way to improve your customer satisfaction is to take action based on the feedback, and then re-measure your customers to see whether your changes have impacted their satisfaction.  You want to consistently and regularly ask each new customer the same questions.  You need to have consistent questions that don’t change much over time so that you have a standard scale to measure against.  Ideally, you would ask all the right questions the first time and never have to change your survey.  This is not very realistic, but you need to understand that materially changing a question or the scale for the response (from a 1-10 scale to a 1-5 scale for instance) can compromise the consistency of your results.
• Length – People have short attention spans, so make sure that every question is clear, concise, and adds to the purpose of your effort.  If the survey itself is too long, analyze which questions will give you the most beneficial results, and use only those.

Surveys can be extremely powerful tools in improving your dealership.  There is no substitute for actual customer feedback on your sales and fulfillment processes.  The most adept marketing companies not only measure their customers’ satisfaction, but also take action to improve satisfaction.  They then measure whether or not the changes they’ve made have been successful.  Using this recursive customer feedback and measurement process is how companies with lackluster customer service become companies with phenomenal customer service.