While InfoQuest has been described as the most effective, efficient and actionable survey process in the world, the fact of the matter is high response rates, candid data, attributable results and powerful analytical tools, by themselves, will not accomplish anything. For any survey, including ours, to successfully generate a return on investment, the results must be put to productive use.
To help assure that outcome, we developed post survey workshops, customer and employee options.
Our workshops give our clients’ personnel with a systematic, internalized understanding of the direct and hidden messages uncovered by the InfoQuest review. What our clients find attractive is that the Workshop is not a forum to give you our opinions on what we think you should do. Rather, by acting as a
facilitator, we help your management team understand the nuances of your customer responses.
Senior Management Brainstorming Workshop
-
Sales Meeting Review Workshop
-
Marketing Communication-Customer Feedback Letters
-
Internal “Customer Focus” Analysis
-
Employee Satisfaction Surveys
Senior Management (Full Day) Brainstorming Workshop
InfoQuest offers your Senior Management team an opportunity to open a constructive dialogue with your most important accounts. To help assure that outcome of this dialogue will be most productive; we developed a full day Senior Management Review.
The first part of the Workshop entails a review of the implications of Total Satisfaction on business growth and profitability. This sets the groundwork for the emphasis on Totally Satisfied and Totally Agree in all the elements evaluated by the survey. This is followed with a detailed explanation of the survey results and the hidden messages. Your InfoQuest NA moderator reviews each of the report sections and provides guidance on how to read them, what they mean, and where the priorities lie. This part of the workshop normally takes about three hours.
In addition, the marketing communication for customer feedback is reviewed along with a discussion of how it will be administered and feedback tracked. Further exploration, including a Q&A session, is provided during a working break. After the break, the Management Survey results are reviewed. Management becomes aware of how their employees’ perceptions and opinions compare to actual customer responses.
The workshop continues with three breakout sessions where, armed with this new understanding, participants are provided the opportunity to present their opinions, recognizing any preconceived biases, on how to deal with major issues identified in the survey. The goal in identifying each opinion is to search for conscientious ideas that, based on the survey results, can be expected to generate recognizable results. Some actions will be systemic in nature, others will be aimed at individual customer needs, but all will address needs identified in the survey.
Finally, the groups reconvene; discuss their findings and collectively score the ideas. Numeric scores are compiled each of the concepts presented based on:
- Speed of Change (Time required to carry out the concept. The more time required, the lower the score.)
- Cost of Change (Considering the investment that will be required, the lower the cost, the higher the score.)
- Benefit of Change (To what degree can more revenues be generated and/or existing costs lowered, thereby producing a direct return on investment?)Resources Required (This is customized for every client to reflect the relevant access to resources such as IT, engineering, etc.)
- Probability of Succeeding (All things considered, if adopted, what is the likelihood of the action actually succeeding? For example, an idea may score high on the previous four scales, but if the idea is contrary to the prevailing corporate culture, it may be unlikely to succeed, at least in the short run.)
Many of the ideas will be able to be put in place within days. Others may take weeks, even months to finalize, but regardless of the time required, two certainties will emerge.
- One, the resulting action plan will have been designed and developed by your own management team, increasing their level of agreement and commitment.
- Two, each action item adopted will be in direct response to the voice of your customers.
Combined with the built-in relationship building elements of the InfoQuest process, the result is a program that elevates customer satisfaction from a general corporate goal to a specific and measurable action plan.
Best of all, with each subsequent survey, you will be able to watch the impact on customer satisfaction over time. Why is that important? Because customer satisfaction is like any other aspect of your business – if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.
Back to top
InfoQuest offers an opportunity to your sales staff and/or sales management team to open a constructive dialogue with your most important accounts. The workshop can be structured for sales managers and senior sales staff or it may be used to educate your Sales Force at a National Sales Meeting. The three-hour Sales Workshop provides your sales force with understanding how the rate of “Totally Satisfied” customers impacts revenue growth.
The first part of the Workshop entails a review of the implications of Total Satisfaction on business growth and profitability. This sets the groundwork for the emphasis on Totally Satisfied and Totally Agree in all elements evaluated by the survey. Your moderator reviews each of the report sections and provides guidance on how to read them, what they mean, and where the priorities lie. This part of the workshop normally takes about an hour. Further exploration, including a Q&A session, is provided during a working break.
After the break, the Management Survey results are reviewed. Employees become aware of how their perceptions and opinions compare to actual customer responses. Armed with this new understanding, participants are provided the opportunity to present their opinions, recognizing any preconceived biases, on how to deal with major issues identified in the survey.
The objective in identifying individual opinions is to search for conscientious ideas that, based on the survey results, can be expected to generate recognizable results. Some actions will be systemic in nature, others will be aimed at individual customer needs, but all will address needs identified in the survey. Your moderator provides guidelines for this phase, and monitors the process to make sure the group stays on track. This usually fills out the balance of the two to two and a half to three hours normally scheduled for the workshop.
The benefits of the sales workshop are:
- The workshop exposes your customer contact people to the unvarnished opinions of your customers, increasing their level of understanding of met and unmet customer needs.
- Your customer contact staff becomes aware of the importance of Total Satisfaction and their role in contributing to it.
- Your customer contact staff becomes aware of how their own perceptions of customer needs and behavior may differ from actual customer opinions.
- And, your sales personnel carry a unified message to your most important relationships, “We heard what you said and we are taking action on it!”
Back to top
Marketing Communication-Customer Feedback Letters
The premise of the InfoQuest customer survey is: We would like to understand how we improve our service to you as a business partner”. You're asking our customers to invest their time and effort in telling you what they think. The payback for this is: “we will tell you what we found out and what we plan to do about.” This doesn't mean a detailed explanation of the results and/or specific plans; it does mean an overview and a commitment to address some of the key issues.
We will prepare a cover letter, typically signed by a senior manager, thanking those customers who did take part for their time. We will also prepare an attachment for the letter, the independent consultant’s overview, an appropriate review of the findings in a way that will support your efforts for enhancing relationships. Usually senior managers hand carries these letters to their most important customers, and sales staff review them with other accounts.
This is what we call “closing the loop”, a process that provides an open forum for discussing customer needs and expectations.
Back to top
Internal “Customer Focus” Analysis
In this process employees are asked to predict the rate of customers who are totally satisfied or fully agree with the same questions that were used for the customer satisfaction/loyalty survey. Of particular note in this process the degree to which the overall response rate is consistent with the actual results. This is an index of how “close to the customer” a company is globally.
In addition, this internal survey leads to an understanding of how “close to the customer” individual employee responses are. Whether the ratings are high (we see ourselves more positively than the customers do) or low (we are harder on ourselves than customers are) knowing where we stand provides more insight into we see customer relationships at the baseline.
Back to top
Employee Satisfaction Surveys
Customer/Employee Satisfaction: "We found that there was a cause-and-effect relationship between the two; that it was impossible to maintain a loyal customer base without a base of loyal employees; and that the best employees prefer to work for companies that deliver the kind of superior value that builds customer loyalty.”1
InfoQuest employee surveys are a proven vehicle for evaluating the internal environment and ensuring that communication and productivity are on par with a healthy morale. It is near impossible to have happy customers without having happy employees.
Although the delivery mechanism on employee satisfaction surveys differs from that used in a b2b survey, the InfoQuest survey box remains the driving force. Using our prescribed system, the average response rate will generally exceed 95%.
Back to top
1 “The Loyalty Effect, the Hidden Force behind Growth Profits and Lasting Value": Frederick F. Reicheld, Harvard Business School Press, 1996, p4.
