Sharing commercial cleaning surveys with your customers can be one of the best ways to improve your business – if you do it right.
The better your business is, the more customers you can attract and the more you can expand. There are a lot of ways to look for areas to improve, but one of the best is to learn from your customers through commercial cleaning surveys.
Done well, cleaning surveys can show you how your customers see your business. You can discover every area that needs improvement and find out why customers do or don’t want to continue doing business with you.
Keep in mind, however, surveys can also give you a lot of incorrect information. Here are some tips for getting the most out of your surveys.
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Creating Commercial Cleaning Surveys that Work for You
There are a few best practices to follow when making commercial cleaning surveys and though it might seem like a lot at first, it’s not that complicated once you get used to it.
1. Make it enticing. This has to do with your email subject line. Try to make your subject line something that people want to open. For example, instead of a subject line that reads, “Survey,” try something like, “Will you take this survey & help us improve?” Or, “Can I ask for 3 minutes of your time?”
2. Make it anonymous. There are pros and cons to this, but it’s more likely you’ll get honest answers if the survey recipients don’t need to identify themselves.
3. Keep it short. If you’ve ever completed a survey that seemed to go on page after page, you understand why this is so important. Keep your cleaning surveys under 10 questions, or you risk people giving up on it before they’re through.
4. Tell your customers how long the survey is. Along with keeping it short, when you send your survey out, be clear on how many questions there are. Knowing they’re in for five questions makes it easier to open up the email and answer than it would be to face some unknown number of questions.
5. Standardize the answers. This is where many cleaning surveys run into trouble. However, standardizing the responses makes it less confusing for your respondents and easier for you to understand the results. For example, if you use a scale of 1-5, where 1 is most important, and 5 is least important, keep that system in place.
6. Make the questions answerable on a scale. This goes right along with standardizing the answers but you can only do that if your questions fit that style. For instance, “Is it important to you that we use eco-friendly cleaning products?” is a question that doesn’t quite suit your 1-5 scale. It’s more of a yes or no question. However, with a question such as, “On a scale of 1-5, how important is it to you that we use eco-friendly cleaning products?” your customer can just click a number.
7. Avoid leading questions. When asked, “Our best customers use eco-friendly cleaning products. How important are these products to you?” your recipient can’t very well say they aren’t necessary after a question like that!
8. Keep the questions clear. For your customers to answer your questions accurately, they need to know what you’re asking. For example, if you want to know about safety, you can’t just ask customers how vital safety is to them. Of course, safety is important to everyone, so this won’t give you very much information. Instead, you need to narrow it down. A better question might be, “How important is it to you that our team members are trained in CPR?”
9. Ask one question at a time. Here’s another place where cleaning surveys can trip up your recipient and give you faulty information. If you ask questions that clients can only answer on a 1-5 scale or with a yes or no, then you need to limit your questions so they are only asking one thing. Sticking with our safety example, a question like, “How important is it that our team is trained in CPR and self-defense?” is actually two questions. You’re asking about CPR and self-defense; one may be important to your clients while the other isn’t which makes it hard to get an accurate answer.
10. Include space for comments. Some customers may be content to just check off the boxes as they move through a survey, while others may have additional thoughts they want to share. While you don’t need to have a comment box after every question, you could simply add a space for comments at the end of the survey to accommodate those who do want to share more.
Bonus Tip: Have you ever taken a survey where you can’t move on to the next question until you answer the one you’re currently on? This can be frustrating and deter the participant from completing the survey. Be sure to make the process as simple as possible for your customers.
Lastly, there are numerous free and paid options for sending out surveys. SurveyMonkey is one of the more well-known, but there are several other options such as Google Forms available to choose from.
Once you get your survey results, don’t ignore the gift that you’ve received. Remember, surveys give you a relatively unbiased look at your business through your customers’ eyes.
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