The Voice of the Customer: A User's Guide to Customer Surveys

Abstract

Firms conduct customer surveys to gather their customers’ voice in order to fully understand their perceptions, judgments, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. Among firms, the practice of surveying customers is widespread. However, if conducted incorrectly, surveys can lead to significant errors in companies’ conclusions. This note describes the different types of customer surveys a firm might conduct. It also summarizes the range of the issues a firm must resolve, such as the survey method (phone, mail, email), the data analysis technique (univariate, bivariate, multivariate), the survey content (items to be used), and the survey type (cross sectional, longitudinal, tracking). Readers should develop a better understanding of the different ways such surveys can be a powerful tool for gathering customers’ voices.