Published in Modern Steel Construction
Your clients are eager to talk. Now is the time to set up a client perception survey to connect with them and collect their thoughts.
As we enter month ten of the pandemic, everyone remains stretched thin, both personally and professionally.
In some ways, we are busier than ever. In other ways, we’ve recaptured valuable time thanks to less commuting, less business travel, and fewer “standard” entertainment options. Many of us are still working to some degree in isolation, despite the countless video meetings, which can result in Zoom fatigue.
With this in mind, when I was recently contacted by a couple of firms to conduct surveys on their behalf, I was cautious about managing expectations in terms of participant enthusiasm, openness, and reachability. Luckily, I was pleasantly surprised on all counts. Participants were ready to connect, be heard, to contribute.
While there are several methodologies for conducting client perception surveys, my personal favorite for AEC professional service firms is a journalistic interviewing method, using the tried-and-true telephone. One-on-one phone interviews result in detailed, emotion-rich responses that can be used in myriad ways for your business.
Why Surveys?
Simply put, a client perception survey checks all the right boxes: time well spent, effort well spent, and money, you guessed it, well spent. Here is just a short list of expected useful outcomes from conducting a survey. Doing so can:
- Provide two to three touchpoints to existing clients or hot prospects. Specifically, in the form of an initial introduction, phone interview, and follow-up.
- Help you identify your clients’ industry challenges and trends. To encourage responses beyond the pandemic, inviting pre-pandemic responses is also an option.
- Demonstrate your level of commitment toward client happiness. Nothing says, “We care,” like listening.
- Float ideas. This provides your firm the opportunity to try out new ideas for client input.
- Test your assumptions. Sometimes, you get a piece of humble pie as the result of these surveys, further reinforcing the importance of collecting this information.
- Provide an opportunity to summarize and share relevant results. It’s a fair and reasonable trade to provide all participants with a few findings from your survey, if they’re interested. This can be done in a casual blog or a more formalized article or white paper.
- Help round out your existing marketing plan. The strongest business development and marketing plans carefully consider data from external sources. Without this input, action items might be off-the-mark and opportunities might be overlooked.
Why Now?
While the full impact and eventual aftermath of the pandemic remain fuzzy, there is no time like the present to collect information. For example, when you are scenario planning for 2021 and beyond, your survey data can help inform your alternatives. Even better, when we finally have more clarity about the world at large, you’ll already be ahead of the game, ready to slice and dice the data and put it to good use. Conducting a survey right now saves you that extra step later, when you will mobilize and make proactive business decisions. Even if you need to revisit and clarify survey findings after the COVID dust settles, it will still be faster than starting a survey from scratch.
Conducting a survey now also affords you the opportunity to connect with those who may have been hit directly by the pandemic. Simply put, you will have a chance to offer genuine and timely empathy to your clients.
What to Include?
So what are some best practices for client perception surveys? And how can you best craft, execute, and interpret the data?
Essentially, you’ll be looking for themes among the responses. That said, you may uncover isolated but worthy nuggets, such as “real” language or a mini-anecdote that can be woven into your marketing messages.
Here’s some advice when it comes to designing the survey and formulating questions:
Develop an open-ended line of questioning. It’s no surprise that questions need to have enough wiggle room for the respondent to elaborate.
Limit the prepared questions to four or five at the most, and consider the sequence. Strategically sequence the questions to hook clients’ interest right away, while also letting them warm up by beginning with the big picture and moving toward more specific topics.
Carefully craft questions to glean the most depth from responses. If you seek feedback on, say, specific aspects of your business offerings from a prior project, then those can just as easily be answered in a scaled-online survey. For each question that you are considering, challenge its value to make certain that it is worthy in this context.
Recognize that your sample size will be small. I usually aim to survey 15-20 clients to represent each market sector or practice group. Quality greatly outweighs quantity, and you can always expand your reach through a separate scaled-online survey.
In advance of the survey, you should:
Announce the survey. (Obvious, right?) Send an email to targeted recipients, introducing the survey and requesting participation. Make sure they understand the type of information you are collecting, whether it be overarching industry insights, perception of your brand, or favored service providers. In a succinct message, let them know the general gist or the survey, along with how you hope to use the information.
Offer to give more details about the questions. If a participant expresses interest and would like to know more first, don’t hesitate to share the short set of questions. Sometimes people like think things through first, before sharing their perspectives.
When you’re ready to perform you interviews, consider the following:
An unbiased third party can tease out additional candid responses. If at all possible, the interviewer should either be a trained consultant or a trusted internal colleague that doesn’t know the participant directly. In fact, due to reductions in billable work, this is a perfect use of time for a savvy, communicative, professional. (Pro tip: If you plan the interviews to be conducted by an internal colleague, then be sure to practice the interviews with them first through role-playing. It will be worth the effort, and it will definitely serve to strengthen the experience for both interviewer and interviewees.)
Voicemails are OK! Leave voicemails that are reasonably succinct but that give enough information to express your genuine gratitude for your clients’ participation.
Respect your clients’ time and read their tone: During the call, you’ll be able to tell if they are rushed, chatty, or somewhere in between. Regardless, kick off by confirming that it’s a good time for a 15-minute conversation, and let them know you will be setting your phone alarm. They may request to finish in 10. They may reach 15 minutes and agree to speak awhile longer because they are enjoying the conversation. Be flexible.
Let it flow. The top priority is to get the client sharing in their own words. Try to probe without influencing their response. Make it feel like a conversation rather than an interrogation. It should be enjoyable for the interviewee, and they should feel like they are truly contributing to an end result: the actionable client perception report.
Create communication options. Twice during my recent surveys, a few participants from the same company requested to participate as a small group. We did this on Zoom, and it gave them the opportunity to build off one another’s responses while also remaining independent and willing to respectfully disagree.
Capture the “calling notes” but know it won’t be perfect. Unless you request permission to record the calls, you will be frantically typing as the respondent talks. It’s OK if it’s messy. Do your best to document the important bits, and know that you are not expected to be a professional transcriber.
Offer anonymity: One of the best benefits from this type of interview-based survey is the language: quotes (for white papers and blog posts); testimonials (to vouch for your company); and “real talk” (for marketing materials and advertising). However, if the respondent prefers to remain anonymous, then it must be established in advance. Even so, their input will still be useful in your overall findings.
During tough times (e.g. pandemic): Empathize. While we can’t possibly know what each individual is experiencing during this time, we can undoubtedly relate to the fact that we have all been incredibly challenged. Uncertainty looms on, while we remain hopeful that concrete answers are imminent. Even the smallest sliver of human-to-human connection can help build rapport between the interviewer and the participant.
Very few things are certain these days, but it’s safe to say that people still appreciate feeling heard, and people still want to help and contribute. Let them, through a Client Perception Survey!