The latest news from GuildQuality.

Fred Reichheld, author of two seminal works on customer satisfaction surveying and the correlation between service excellence and profitability (the shorter one: The One Number You Need to Grow; the longer one: The Ultimate Question), has a great blog about Net Promoter Scores, Surveying, and Customer Satisfaction.

This morning, I came across a discussion on survey response rates. Since our inception five years ago, we’ve promoted the need to achieve a high response rate. My logic (and this came from my days as a homebuilder and developer rather than any experience as a statistician) was that if you could get feedback from just about every customer, you could use it to tangibly and immediately improve the experience of every one of those respondents. We called that actionable feedback. A 20% response rate meant that you had no actionable feedback from 80% of your customers.

Also, from our personal experiences as respondents and surveyors, we knew that unhappy customers were less likely to respond to a mail or email survey than were happy ones. That meant low survey response rates were the equivalent of rose-colored glasses.

I’ve been very pleased to see the increased awareness and successful implementation of Fred Reichheld’s strategies, as it reaffirms a great deal of our underlying surveying and information reporting philosophy: A high response rate is important; Real-time feedback is critical; Information must get in front of all the right people; and GuildQuality must report it a manner that makes it easy to understand how well the business and its various employees/teams/divisions are performing.

With regard to survey response rates, Reichheld writes

[Though I would have once suggested that] response rates between 30% and 60% seem like a reasonable goal for a well-designed relationship survey. Now, I am convinced that these targets (which many consider radically aggressive) are actually far too low.

We go to great lengths to create a positive surveying experience for our members’ customers. Our philosophy is that we’d like to survey our customers in the way we’d like to be surveyed. So we give them lots of options to respond (email, phone, and survey mailers), and our telephone surveyors are super-nice people that work out of our Eatonton, GA office. Their primary goal is to positively represent our members.

That strategy is working for us and our members. While we aren’t yet at a 90% average response rate for everyone (Reichheld suggests that number as a great target), many of our members enjoy response rates well above 90%, very few are below 50%, and our overall average is slightly better than 70%.