NFIB

Create Your Own Customer Survey
06/ 27/ 2002

by Vicki Gerson

Large corporations often hire organizations to conduct extensive surveys about their products and services, spending thousands and thousands of dollars for market research. So how can small to mid-size business owners conduct research without hiring expensive firms to gather information about their products and services? Try a semantic differential survey.

The semantic differential tool consists of pairs of adjectives and/or short phrases printed on a sheet of paper. These pairs are often called polar words or phrases. That means they are opposite each other in meaning. Think of the words good/bad, high-priced/low priced, cold/warm, businesslike/neighborly, friendly/unfriendly, courteous/discourteous or wide variety/little variety.

Create a survey in which customers rate your business on 10, 15 or 20 of these polar words or phrases. For example, the first phrase could be poor customer relations/ good customer relations. Have the customer rate your business on a scale of one to five, with one being the poorest customer relations and five being the best.

Once you've created your survey, decide how many customers you want to fill it out: 50, 75, 100 or more. If you are not surveying all customers, be sure to select customers on a random basis. If you mail the survey, provide a letter of explanation and a stamped return envelope. To ensure an honest opinion, tell your customers to return the form anonymously. Also, be sure to ask that the form be returned by a certain date.

Tallying up the responses is quite simple. Just add up your total numbers for each of the pairs and divide it by the number of people who took the survey. It shouldn't take you long to get a true picture of what people think of your business practices. If you prefer a more detailed statistical picture, you can figure out the percentages of responses for each one to five scale.

A semantic differential instrument provides small to mid-size business owners with a snapshot of their business issue by issue. Consequently, it allows businesses to improve upon their weak points and publicize their strengths.

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