Evans Refreshes Customer Satisfaction Survey to Gain Deeper Insights
Customer satisfaction surveys are an excellent tool for organizations to gather valuable customer feedback on thoughts, opinions, and experiences related to their products and services. The most effective surveys are designed to produce high-quality responses with actionable outcomes. That can only be achieved through the elimination of ambiguity from both sides of the table—customers and organizations.
It seems straightforward: Ask a question and receive an answer. However, effective survey design requires planning, testing, and refining questions to ensure the data is reliable and meaningful to those receiving it.
“We found that customers were consistently answering our survey questions differently, therefore we were struggling to make sense of the data internally and results over time were becoming skewed,” says Dawn Harthun, Vice President of Sales & Marketing.
Among the biggest concerns were related to reaching the right customer contacts who were knowledgeable of Evans as a 3PL partner. We also realized our internal terminology to describe our services and capabilities was not necessarily translating accurately to customer respondents.
Developing a Comprehensive Survey Design
With a goal of eliminating this unintentional ambiguity, we decided to rework our survey questions and overall structure. We reviewed our data to identify questions that garnered consistent understanding and compared them to those that were open to interpretation or could have multiple meanings.
For example, a question about innovation could be interpreted differently depending on whether a customer was thinking about technology, operations, equipment, or systems. Since innovation comes in many shapes, forms, and degrees, we decided to drill down further.
“Instead of asking how we were innovative, we listed certain types of innovation that are common for 3PLs. By setting a clear baseline for our capabilities, we can measure change over time as we invest in new capabilities, technology, talent, or expertise,” Harthun says.
Introducing KPI Scorecards
New this year, Evans developed a KPI Scorecard that rate our performance on metrics specific to a service area including warehousing, fulfillment, and transportation.
“We track KPIs on all of our accounts, especially during the annual account review process and our ISO audits. It’s not that we don’t know which accounts are over or under performing, but rather that we want to understand how customers perceive our performance against key metrics.” Harthun says.
The scorecards also help uncover trends and consistency across accounts, metrics, and locations. This visibility helps identify where KPIs are being met, where improvements are needed, and how operations can be adjusted accordingly. The goal is to provide a quick and effective assessment of specific, measurable performance targets that can drive actionable outcomes.
Continuous Improvement Starts with Data
At Evans, every survey response goes through an internal review process involving operations, quality, sales, leadership, and any other relevant teams associated with a customer account. During this process, we uncover critical information related to:
- Areas for improvement
- Opportunity for service or capability expansion
- Customer pain points
- Corrective actions
Over the years, many of our best internal discussions have come out of this review process, especially at the individual response level in reading the open-ended comments. The new survey has an optional comment field on every question to compel customers to expand/clarify their perspective and once again, to make every response more comprehensive and meaningful.
“Every comment deepens our connection with our customers and allows us to advance our thinking on developing new solutions, processes, and capabilities with their benefit in mind,” Harthun says. “Now we have a new survey designed to strengthen that connection and build more strategic partnerships.”