Yaro Starak wrote a bit about his experience with a merchant who sent him a post-sale customer feedback follow up and I’ve decided to stress a bit on this subject.

Mailing a customer after the sale and asking him/her to rate from 1 to 5 their experience is a … “so, so” strategy. It just doesn’t give you enough meat to improve your current marketing program.

Yes it helps build a relationship but if the mailing you’re doing is to gain knowledge about your customer and use it to further improve your marketing strategy then the “rate us 1 to 5″ won’t work. It will only help you pat your self on the back if you get a total score of 4.5 out of hundreds of responders. Yei !

“We got a total score of 4.5, wow, great, so what do we do now? We keep doing what we did.” Hmm …. ok.

Whenever I structure a customer feedback/questionnaire besides asking to rate their experience (which is OK to monitor major customer relations problems) I like to ask questions such as … what made you do this, what made you do that? What was your priority, what was most important to you from the following benefits, etc. Something that we can take and use for future targeting.

Keep in mind that you should NOT make your customer feedback form look hard to fill out. This means no more than 5-7 questions. Short sentences (questions) and easy to understand layout. Oh and don’t make people use their own stamps (I’ve seen this before).