Conducting a customer satisfaction survey in-house vs. outsourcing
Introduction
Customer satisfaction is one of the most important metrics to track if you want to build a sustainable business. Conducting customer satisfaction surveys happen to be the most effective way to measure it, but you might still be hesitant regarding how to do so. You will find here all of the pros and cons of conducting a customer satisfaction survey yourself versus outsourcing it.
1. Conducting a customer satisfaction survey in-house
Conducting a customer satisfaction survey in-house has some pros and cons. Here are the implications of conducting the survey yourself.
First of all, if you conduct your survey in-house from start to end your costs will most probably be lower than if you outsource it, depending on the systems you will use.
Depending on the tools you will use to create the survey you will most probably have limited engagement compared to an outsourced survey system because you need specific tools to create an engaging survey and improve the response rate.
You will be able to create a survey that is flexible and adaptable to your needs with personalized questions for your business, but this also means that this will be very time-consuming. In fact, you will have to search for a lot of different questions to ask your customers, then to send the surveys yourself and finally to collect and analyze the data.
Not only this will take you a lot of time, but this also implies that you have to find the metrics that matter and gather the data in an actionable way according to these metrics. The fact that you’re collecting the data manually makes it difficult for you to have a general view of the data compared to a system that organizes it for you on a dashboard.
In the end, this solution is possible but is only suitable for small businesses, it is not a scalable solution. In addition to the time it takes and the workload it involves it is just impossible to use this system if you have a medium to large business.
2. Outsourcing a customer satisfaction survey
Now let’s have a look at the implications of outsourcing with a customer satisfaction survey program specific to property management businesses.
First of all, the cost of outsourcing your survey system will be upfront, whereas if you create it yourself it will cost you time (which is actually likely to be more costly). If you’re interested in knowing the costs of not implementing a customer satisfaction program read this article.
The main advantage of using a customer satisfaction program specific to property management businesses is that it is made specifically for your industry, therefore even if it is not specific to your business it is still industry-specific.
This way, the questions are already designed for your business and you can start using them right away.
It’s definitely a time-saving solution, it’s an automated system specifically designed for engagement. You will therefore have a higher response rate than with an in-house survey. And this is a very important point since it’s risky to make important decisions for your business based on sparse data.
It’s a system designed for ease of use so you get notified about important events and get reports sent to you. The data is processed and organized according to the metrics that matter, this way you have a global view of the actionable data through a user-friendly dashboard.
And last but not least, this is a scalable solution that is suitable for every business regardless of their size and that you won’t have to change as your business is growing.
Conclusion
Through this analysis we can see that outsourcing your surveys has many more pros than cons. Especially when you take into consideration the potential costs of doing it wrong. These costs of doing it wrong are similar to not running any customer satisfaction program at all.
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Interested to know how we helped a company save over $150K annually with our customer satisfaction programme?
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Max Oliviero is helping Property Managers grow profitable and reputable businesses. He is the Founder of Umanest. Connect with Max on LinkedIn and Facebook.
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