Customer surveys: outsource the asking, keep the acting

Key takeaways

Customer satisfaction survey outsourcing makes sense when surveys keep slipping: sending, calling, chasing responses and coding comments are routine and easy to measure. Deciding what to change because of the results stays with you. Keep genuine research separate from selling, or the call becomes direct marketing under PECR.

• Outsource: sending, calling, chasing and coding comments.
• Keep: question design sign-off and actions on results.
• Ask few questions, often, at the right moment.
• Never mix a sales pitch into a research call.

Which parts of a customer survey can be outsourced?

Sending surveys after set triggers, phoning customers who prefer to talk, chasing non-responders once, coding open comments into themes, and producing a monthly summary. Phone surveys usually get richer answers than email, and they take time a small team rarely has.

• Which business processes should you outsource?
• Customer feedback loop: turn complaints into fewer contacts

What makes a customer survey useful?

Few questions, asked soon after the experience, with one open question about why. Customer effort, how easy it was to get something done, is often a better predictor of loyalty than satisfaction alone, as Dixon, Freeman and Toman argued in Harvard Business Review in 2010. Pick one score and track it over time.

• Ask within days of the experience.
• Use one score and one open question.
• Keep the same wording over time.
• Report themes, not just averages.

• Customer effort score: how hard does your site make buying?
• Can you measure it? The test every outsourced process needs

Why does acting on results stay in-house?

Because changing a product, a policy or a team's behaviour is a business decision. A provider can tell you that delivery complaints doubled this month; your team decides whether to change courier. Book a monthly half hour to read the themes and pick one thing to fix.

• Complaints handling: what to outsource and what to own
• Win-back calls: bring lapsed customers back

When is outsourcing surveys a bad idea?

When you have very few customers and the owner can call them personally, which is often more valuable. Also when nobody will read the results: a survey without action annoys customers and wastes money. And never use survey calls to sell, because research that promotes your products is treated as direct marketing.

• How much volume makes a process worth outsourcing?
• Website trust survey questions that get honest answers

What does this look like in practice?

A pattern we see: response rates rise when the survey arrives within a few days and asks one thing. Long annual surveys get answered by the happiest and angriest customers and miss everyone in between.

• See client work
• BPO Solutions for UK businesses

Survey checklist

Agree these before you start.

• Trigger for each survey.
• One score and one open question.
• Phone or email, by customer preference.
• One chase for non-responders.
• Theme codes for comments.
• Monthly summary and action review.

• Customer service processes: which ones to outsource
• The process selection score: outsource, split or keep?

Next step

Tell us when your customers would be best asked for feedback. We will suggest a survey design and tell you what running it each month would take.