What is the best way to survey customers to improve our on-line ordering?

Hire a temp! For $12/hr you can have an intelligent human being who you control directly asking your questions to people you already know. An ad on Craigslist would net you the person you need and you already know the questions you want asked. And you already have the names and phone numbers of the people you want to call. Easy.

Additional benefit of the DIY approach is that you can make changes as you go based on what you are seeing. Perhaps you want to change/add/remove questions based on early feedback? Great, do it instantly and easily. Going third party with this may seem convenient, but it will cost you far more and you will get worse results.

1. Password requirements make people have many passwords which they cannot remember, making it easier to call than try to figure out their password. People usually remember their main accounts that they use often but not others.

2. Because it is available and someone answers the phone. Most of corporate America has gone to annoying phone systems, which make it very difficult or impossible to get a person. Most people will give up or try the online resource when this happens. While I do not condone this approach, it is effective for cost reduction.

3. Give your call center a script to read at the end of each call for a week ... something like, 'Just curious, why did you call us rather than use our online resources for this matter?' Have them send you a report of the comments for the week. Simple and inexpensive.

4. Link a call list to the account email addresses and put together a quick survey in one of the online programs like www.SurveyMonkey.com.

Good luck!
Edwin

I appreciate the input from both Michael and Edwin, but a few more details might help you understand the crowd we are dealing with. First off, we do recognize that some of our clients are at mom and pop shops in PoDunk WhereEver, USA and really don't have computers. That said, the majority of our clients have and are required to use a log-on for a Tier One or Tier Two supplier to obtain access to our sites as well as other mandated electronic reporting, so this is not another log-on and password for them to remember. We are tied in directly to their current access. We deal significantly in the auto arena and have clients who are part of 100's and 1000's of dealership networks. These are all computer savvy operations who send and receive material to and from their parent operation daily.

On the part of hiring a part-timer. We use an outsourced call center right now. Somehow our agreement with them does not allow us to bring in our own temp to take calls that are re-directed to us. This will be strictly an incomming call survey, nothing outgoing will be done. Since our current call center gets paid on volume of calls received, they aren't likely to actively engage clients with asking them why they called versus using the online system. We can receive up to 30,000 calls a month. Tracking and forwarding common answers to questions would result in a book of data that cannot be easily consolidated.

Sara, I'm not really trying to sell you something, but my company is in the customer feedback business and we could probably help you for less than the $10k price you got. You can see what we do at mshare.net. After you check out our website, just let me know if you would like to get more info.

Mark

You say this is a survey for Phone customers only. You also state a 3rd party call center handles all the inbound calls.

Why can't you have the call center tag on the 5 questions at the end of each order and record the answers as non-billable/non-printing items on the order. (so it's 5 more items they process, with the 1-5 being listed as quantity.

End of time period, you have your answers.. Reports can look at averages or whatever way you want to view the data.

I think Edwin McGusty hit the nail on the head with this. The long and short of it is recognizing that us humans prefer to speak to a live person and thus are drawn to the place where they can have that experience. And in the long run you will draw more customers and revenue.
Tai Aguirre CFO Taico Productions