Diving into the Business Survey for Building Success
Diving into the Business Survey for Building Success
If you own or operate a business, you need a business survey. Although you might know plenty about the intricacies of how your business operates from the inside, that knowledge alone might not be enough to propel your company into its next round of success.
Customer feedback, customer satisfaction, employee morale, upcoming market trends — knowing all this separates thriving companies from businesses that are just one bad decision away from a crisis.
And a business survey is a shortcut to this knowledge.
In this article, we cover how companies use business surveys to operate effectively and without hesitation, and how said surveys inform critical business decisions in today’s fast-paced and uncertain environment.
Defining a Business Survey
A business survey is a survey that allows you to gather data and insights that can be used to enhance various aspects of your business.
Using business surveys, companies can either acquire new knowledge about markets and target audiences while exploring fresh opportunities for growth. At the same, time business surveys can be used to fill the gaps in the existing knowledge of company operations, boost employee performance, and optimize expenses.
Although the data gathered during such research can be used in myriad ways, we recommend setting a specific goal for every business survey to keep your insights focused and actionable.
Applications Of Business Surveys
Due to the high level of customization that surveys provide, business surveys offer a wide range of applications and can be optimized for producing all kinds of value for businesses.
Here are some of the common applications for business surveys:
- Enhancing customer personas. Business surveys allow you to learn more about your customers, their habits, and what they think about your company and products. Studies show that 82% of marketers improved their value proposition using well-developed customer personas.
- Learning more about the new markets. Expanding into new markets and platforms is one of the surest ways to grow your business, but it comes with lots of uncertainty. Business surveys help step into the new territory with more confidence and hard-proof data.
- Increasing customer retention levels. Knowing when your customers are happy with your product is as important as knowing when they are not. Use business surveys to keep track of what your customers think about your products and brand before they start turning to your competition. In addition to that, the mere act of conducting surveys may increase customer retention levels as clients feel more taken care of.
- Improve employee performance. Business surveys can be used to inspect the state of your workforce on several levels via employee feedback: employee motivation, team trust, and management efficiency. With business surveys, you can reveal issues that certain departments experience and address them before the problems affect the rest of the company.
5 Types Of Business Surveys
You can use the following types of business surveys to gain a 360-view of your business, inform your growth strategy, and enhance customer satisfaction levels.
Customer Satisfaction Survey
There are five types of customer satisfaction surveys that allow you to gauge customers’ opinions about your products and company. One of the most commonly used is the Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey, which that checks measures how much your audience is willing to recommend your products to their inner circle.
The NPS survey allows you to segment your audience into three major groups known as detractors, passives, and promoters. The more promoters your business has, the higher will be your organic growth. It’s the other way around with detractors.
Regular customer satisfaction surveys are extremely important in case your business relies on organic growth as they allow you to keep track of how happy your customers are over time and correct your course in case recent decisions stagnated your expansion.
Example question: On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?
Market Research Survey
Market research surveys are a wide group of surveys designed to learn more about the market you currently operate in or gain additional knowledge in case you want to expand into new niches.
These surveys may include demographic surveys designed to gather more data about your current and potential customers, platform-specific surveys such as e-commerce market research, technology market research, market trends research, and surveys designed to enhance various marketing-related activities, e.g. advertising market research
Example question: What are your main social media channels that you use to learn about new products?
Employee Satisfaction Survey
Employee satisfaction surveys are designed to collect information about the general feelings of your employees, their level of motivation, and any roadblocks that might be preventing them from doing their job more effectively.
These types of business surveys are often conducted in companies that want to enhance the performance of their employees or address issues during a transitional period (e.g. company-wide switch to remote work, company buy-out, or a new HR policy).
One of the variations of these surveys is an employee exit survey that aims to determine employee’s reasons for applying for a job or their reasons for leaving the company.
Example question: Are there any roadblocks that currently prevent you from operating at your maximum level of efficiency?
Brand Awareness Survey
Brand awareness surveys aim to elicit customer’s opinions and feelings about your brand.
Brand perception is an encompassing term and may be affected by many factors such as PR-relationships of your company, public stance on local and global issues, and the general representation of your brand in media.
Brand surveys help companies to reveal the current brand perception by their customers and track whether it has been recently affected.
A brand awareness survey can also reveal whether your target market is able to identify your brand, i.e., know of its existence. This is especially important when it comes to differentiating your brand from competitors.
Example question: Which of the following brands have you heard of? (Include your business)
A well-established branding policy has many benefits such as a higher number of positive online reviews, an increase in customers’ trust, and revenue growth.
Example question: Where have you seen or heard about our brand in the last several months?
Product Satisfaction Survey
The product satisfaction survey is closely related to customer satisfaction surveys, but with a focus on your product.
Business surveys that are focused on your product may help you to check whether customers know about your product, if they find your product appealing, discover how your product compares to the competition, and gather quality insights on how it can be improved in the future.
Example question: How long have you used [your product]? Or
What would you like to be improved in [your product]
The Role of Business Surveys In Growing Your Company
There’s no lack of data in our digital age, and often companies are confused and disoriented with the amount of information they gather through various analytical tools and 3rd party data providers.
But business surveys don’t add to this chaos. Instead, they allow businesses to gain a birds-eye view of their whole organization while referring to the most relevant and reliable source of truth: their customers and employees.
Insights gathered through business surveys often allow organizations to organize and enliven previously disjointed sources of data into more coherent and actionable formats.
If you want to see for yourself how business surveys can fuel your company’s growth and obtain trustful and impartial data directly from your target audience, try our market research platform, which makes it easy to create and deploy all kinds of surveys, along with analyzing them in different formats.
Frequently asked questions
What is a business survey?
A business survey is any type of survey that is conducted in order to improve or enhance certain aspects of a business.
What are some reasons for conducting a business survey?
Business surveys may be conducted in order to gain new knowledge about target markets, better understand company operations, improve employee morale and performance, and/or improve a company’s profitability.
What are some examples of business surveys?
There are many different types of business surveys, including customer satisfaction surveys, market research surveys, employee satisfaction surveys, brand awareness surveys, and product satisfaction survey
How can a business survey help a business better understand its target market?
A business survey can provide an in-depth view into customer habits, feelings, and attitudes, which can then be used to develop customer personas. Customer personas allow businesses to understand their customers so they can develop better products, services, features, and market campaigns.
How can a business survey improve customer retention?
Studies have shown that the simple act of conducting a business survey may help improve customer retention rates since customers feel that the business genuinely cares about their needs and concerns.
Diving into the Employee Satisfaction Survey
Diving into the Employee Satisfaction Survey
Whether you operate a small, mid-sized or enterprise business, a high level of employee satisfaction is a must, thus you’ll need to employ (pun intended) an employee satisfaction survey.
First, you should mull over the notion of employee satisfaction: the term itself doesn’t denote contentment among employees. Rather, it signifies the concept of whether employees are content with their needs and wishes in their job.
As such, it is treated as something to measure, as a healthy amount of employee satisfaction leads to better job performance and productivity. Conversely, poor satisfaction leads to low morale and high burnout, which inevitably lead to higher turnover rates and ultimately affecting a business’s bottom line.
But as a business, you can disentangle yourself from this predicament — or avoid it from occurring to begin with — with the employee satisfaction survey.
What is an Employee Satisfaction Survey?
This kind of survey gauges the level of satisfaction your employees have with their jobs: this includes culture, work environment, visibility and all employee relations. It is a tool best executed by the human resources department, as this team works chiefly to fulfill employee needs.
However, the intelligence derived from this kind of survey should be shared with upper management, so that higher-ups can see how employees are faring, make decisions on how to improve their satisfaction and devise plans with HR on how to better oversee the company.
Your business should periodically issue these surveys to your employees, as even the happiest of them can have a change of mood. Perhaps something in the company changed for the worse? Or perhaps, the new project management system is difficult to adapt to.
Whatever the case, your company will benefit from monitoring your employees’ satisfaction.
Why Does this Survey Matter to Your Business?
If the above explanation wasn’t reason enough to employ employee satisfaction surveys regularly, the following will. Your HR team cannot read minds, and neither can you. When your employees hit a sour note in any matter pertaining to work, it is best to correct it.
But you won’t be able to unless you know precisely what troubles your employees when it comes to their jobs.
Here are several reasons as to why you should implement these surveys, particularly in regards to unhappy employees.
- Employees’ discontent won’t be remedied if it’s not addressed and if no action is taken against it.
- If unhappy employees don’t like their jobs, they won’t bother to work as diligently as they should; they’ll start slacking and their performance will worsen.
- Discontented workers may get to the point of no return; they may decide to leave the organization. Others may follow suit, leading to high turnover.
- Unhappy colleagues can release their low spirits onto other employees and even customers.
- Dissatisfied workers may lower company morale and culture.
- Unhappy employees will feel like they get to voice their concerns with a satisfaction survey.
- The prospect of fulfillment and improving mental health may seem like a reality to unsatisfied employees when employers set up these surveys.
Questions to Ask in Your Questionnaire
An employment satisfaction survey often deals with many topics, as such, you can create multiple such surveys, or incorporate various topics into one survey. Here are a few types of employee satisfaction question types and question examples.
Questions on relationships with the supervisors and managers
- How would you rate your supervisor/manager?
- Does your supervisor give you constructive criticism?
- Does your supervisor provide your tasks in a timely and comprehensible manner?
- Do you feel that your supervisor understands your concerns?
- Do you feel like your supervisor appreciates your work?
Questions on job enjoyment and comfort
- Do you enjoy the work you do?
- Do you feel that you are valued for the job you do?
- Do you feel that you can pursue job growth in this company?
- Do you believe you’ve gotten sufficient training to solve customer issues?
- Do you feel that your job helps make a difference in the company, the niche, our customers, or the world at large?
Questions on self-evaluation
- Do you complete all your tasks before they are due?
- Do you feel that your workload is too high and that you may require some help?
- How can you improve your performance without inducing any stress?
- How can you improve your performance to help contribute to the company’s success?
- How can you improve your relationship with other colleagues?
Questions on company pipeline and goals
- Do the overall goals of the company make sense for this quarter?
- Do you have an understanding of your requirements and how they fit into the bigger picture of the company?
- Do the objectives for your team seem realistic and attainable?
- Are your own objectives clear and do they seem realistic?
- Do you have any worries about the direction the company is going in terms of goals or your responsibilities?
Questions on work/life balance
- Do you feel like you have an adequate work/life balance?
- If not, what can the company do to adapt to a better work/life balance?
- Do you think your managers take your personal family time into consideration?
- Do you feel stressed out due to long hours or hard to meet objectives?
- Do you feel that your coworkers respect your time off?
Using Employee Satisfaction Surveys to their Fullest Potential
Aside from the question types and topics above, there are many other topics that factor into employee satisfaction. You should consider all relevant topics, as this type of survey doesn’t merely reveal how your employees feel.
The value of these types of surveys is their ability to reveal your company’s own shortcomings and shortsightedness, along with ideas on how to improve managerial relationships and culture. Moreover, they can divulge how to achieve objections, set more reasonable expectations and offer better visibility.
This is to say that these surveys can give indispensable advice on how to run your business. As such, a robust survey platform is key.
Frequently asked questions
What is an employee satisfaction survey?
An employee satisfaction survey is a type of survey that is distributed to current employees of a company to understand how satisfied employees are with various aspects of their job.
Why is employee satisfaction important to a business?
Satisfied employees tend to perform better and have higher levels of productivity, which can in turn lead to increased profits and lower turnover for the company.
How can understanding employee satisfaction help a company?
When a company understands their employees’ pain points, they can make plans to address the issues. Employees who feel that their opinions are heard are more likely to be engaged in the company and perform better in their role.
Who should conduct an employee satisfaction survey?
Ideally, an employee satisfaction survey will be deployed by a company’s HR team, but the results should be shared with upper management and potentially with the company as a whole.
What aspects should an employee satisfaction survey cover?
An employee satisfaction survey can be used to understand how employees feel about a variety of topics, including overall job enjoyment, relationship with the management team, workload and performance, company goals and objectives and work-life balance.