Usually, when a distributor loses a highly profitable customer, it’s unexpected. If the distributor knew that a key account was dissatisfied with the quality of service he or she was receiving, that distributor would have addressed the situation much sooner.

During the survey boom of the 1980s, distributors — along with manufacturers and other business owners — began taking steps to preempt the loss of customers by sending them satisfaction surveys. When interpreted correctly, survey data gave these distributors numerous improvement ideas. Perhaps one customer was waiting too long for deliveries. Maybe another didn’t know whether to contact the sales department or the maintenance department with problems. Distributors used the information they collected to fix mistakes and hold on to those key accounts.

But over the past 20 years, many distributors have concluded that surveys also have inherent problems: they can be expensive, excessively complicated or poorly marketed to the most profitable customers. Fortunately, now there are smarter ways to survey customers, including software programs that give distributors the ability to surmount those obstacles.

“There are so many avenues now to get a robust survey with good functionality,” says Marc Emerson, practice manager for Indian River Consulting, Melbourne, Fla. “The right software package will allow you to keep a database of customers on hand and organize that database according to specific survey data. It can also alert you to which customers need to be reminded to fill out a survey and which don’t. The biggest advantage, though, is probably that an electronic survey is just a fraction of the cost of a mail survey.”

Getting Started
Once a distributor decides that getting detailed feedback from customers via a survey is valuable, the next step is to set a basic timeline for putting the survey together. According to Corey Rudl of Entrepreneur magazine, this can be done in the following five simple steps:

Step 1: Define your objective.
Step 2: Write effective questions.
Step 3: Format your survey.
Step 4: Choose a distribution method.
Step 5: Persuade people to participate.

First, there are copious reasons to conduct a survey of customers. Tracking customer satisfaction, improving business practices, identifying core competencies or simply letting your customers know that you’re listening — these can all serve as the impetus for a survey.

“Often, if there’s an problem, it’s not because a salesperson is doing anything wrong,” says Tim Feeheley, president of JanPak, a jan/san distributor based in Davidson, N.C. “It’s because something in the customer’s business has changed and the distributor is unaware. Without doing some kind of survey, you’re not going be able to keep up with those changes that are affecting [their] business.”

Step 2 is to write effective questions; while some distributors say that multiple-choice questions provide more data and are more likely to be filled out, a well-crafted question that requires an open-ended answer can have a bigger impact on business practices, says Lanny Schuster, president of United Sanitary, Baltimore. “Just asking, ‘How can we improve?’ can open up the door for tremendous insights from customers about how you’re running things. Simply asking that question has gotten us fantastic relationships with our customers.”

Whether the questions are open-ended or not, distributors need to have the courage to ask their customers the hard questions, says Feeheley.

“The most important thing, before you even decide what kind of survey to do, is to encourage — even demand — that both inside-sales customers and outside-sales customers have the chance to rank how our salespeople are doing on a scale of 1 to 10,” he says.

As far as survey content, JanPak categorizes questions in a strategic way, allowing customers to specifically identify areas of excellence and areas that need improvement. Under “sales service,” the company asks customers to rate their JanPak sales rep in areas such as keeping the price book current and responsiveness to requests.

After formatting questions in a logical order — Step 3 — distributors arrive at the technology aspect of conducting an online survey, Step 4: choosing the best distribution method.

E-mail, Website or Other?
Compared to traditional methods, such as mail or phone surveys, there are great advantages to conducting an online survey. One significant advantage is cost.

“With an online survey, there are no postage costs, no envelopes and no paper or printing costs — like with a fax,” says Emerson. “You also don’t have the potential problem of something getting lost in the mail, because the information comes back instantaneously to the distributor.”

There are two ways to conduct online surveys: through e-mail or a website. Surveying customers via e-mail requires very little work and almost no money (assuming you already have e-mail), according to Rudl:

“Obviously, the biggest advantage to doing your survey by e-mail is that it’s free. You can design your survey in just a few short hours, e-mail it to your customers, and start receiving results within hours.”

There was a time when the majority of companies weren’t using e-mail or the Web, but that isn’t the case anymore, adds Emerson: “It’s a lot different than it was even five years ago. Five years ago, you would get a sample bias when you did an online survey, because you would only get responses from the few people who were using it. Now, everyone is using e-mail.”

One drawback to e-mail is that a distributor is often limited to a plain-text format, but that’s often best for professional surveys anyway. Another issue is that most people who use e-mail delete close to 100 messages per day, especially if they come from an unknown source.

“With the online survey program that we use, the message comes from an actual person’s e-mail address, which the customer can respond to,” says Emerson. “Even though it goes out to hundreds or thousands of people, it’s important for the message to be from an actual person.”

Hosting a website is a good alternative to e-mailing customers, because it allows the distributor to include HTML enhancements, such as color and graphics, that will entice the customer to participate in the survey (Step 5). But unfortunately, there are drawbacks to this as well.

“The do-it-yourself ,Web-based survey can be really difficult to implement unless you’re prepared to hire a programmer or you have advanced programming skills,” writes Rudl. In addition, most off-the-shelf software for customizing a website costs at least $300, and many programs far exceed that.

However, if a distributor does have a programmer or IT professional, conducting a survey through a hosted website might be a good choice.

A third option is to have a third-party survey provider host a website. “If you’re planning to survey more than a few hundred people, a third-party survey provider is the route I’d personally recommend,” writes Rudl. “You’ll get all the benefits of a fully customed, dynamic survey with real-time tracking and analysis of your results without the programming headaches and expenses.”

The downside to surveys hosted by a third party is that they often contain hidden costs. For example, some survey providers will quote a price for 500 or 1,000 responses, but then they’ll charge a dollar or two for every response over that “quota.” A really cheap third-party survey is probably too good to be true, so expect to pay at least $500, depending on how many customers you want to survey, and how elaborate you want your program to be.

Once a distributor has decided on the best online method for his or her company, designed the survey to make it appealing to customers, and gotten data back from respondents, it’s then time to parse through that data in a way that will accurately aid the company’s goals.

Making It Make Sense
Statistically, there is a lot of science behind interpreting survey data correctly, says Emerson. “If you’re going to have 1,000 responses, then you’ll always have a 3-percent margin of error,” he says. “Most times, you won’t get half of your survey questionnaires back, and you’ll be lucky to get even 25 percent back. In that case, you’re going to need to send out 4,000 questionnaires just to get 1,000 responses so you can get to the 3-percent margin of error.”

There are a variety of software package for interpreting survey data — some with more bells and whistles than others — so there are also a wide range of cost options. However, for a high-quality software package that will enable the user to compile survey data into meaningful cross tabulations and entice customers to fill out questionnaires thoroughly, a distributor can expect to pay as much as $5,000.

SPSS is a popular software package that is compatible with Microsoft Windows and fits that price range. “It’s a statistical package that will give you all the correlations and crunch all the numbers from here until Sunday,” says Emerson.

The most current version of SPSS is 13.0, which is the base program that contains multiple methods to analyze survey data. Several features allow the user to organize responses according to the value of the customer, something that is increasingly important for distributors, says Bruce Merrifield, president of The Merrifield Consulting Group, Chapel Hill, N.C.

“If you’re selling to a mature industry like the jan/san industry, you need to think about who are the customers that are continually running your business,” says Merrifield. “With retail customers, it might make sense to just survey all of them because they’re weighted pretty equally, but distribution isn’t like that. If you’re going to do a survey, then there are probably 15 major accounts that you need to analyze critically.”

ON SITE

WorldGBC Unveils Green-Info Website
Keep up-to-the-minute on international green building news with the World Green Building Council’s (WorldGBC) new website. The WorldGBC seeks to make sustainability a core value in the building industry. The site is designed to be a global portal for the dissemination of green building news, in addition to being a source of sustainability data and opinions about green building practices and developments worldwide.

IRCG: Specializing in Distributor Tech
With an understanding of distribution and an eye for technology trends, Indian River Consulting Group, Melbourne, Fla., has all the tools to help improvement-seeking distributors get a handle on their options for starting an online survey.

The company’s website offers access to editorials and articles about other distributor technology applications, in addition to survey technology.

Major Industry Events Listed
You can find more than just jan/san events for distributors at CLEANLINK. You can also find dates and contact information for events that cater to your customers — from university cleaning managers to building service contractors. Click on CLEANLINK’s calendar for industry-wide happenings.




POSTED ON: 5/1/2005