Last night, I was reading a post by my friend Himanshu. He has written about his experiences in conducting a customer survey on the streets outside a busy mall in Pune. When I was reading it, I remembered my initial days with my previous company. As we had just joined the Sales and Service department, among the top of our assignment list was a requirement for us to study and analyze customer satisfaction. Me and my best friend Roshan, who incidentally happened to work with me in the same company in the same function, had one hell of a time in Bangalore. We went to Cubbon Park, where couples come to spend some ‘quality’ time together. We went to Majestic Bus Stand and City Railway Station parking lots, where most people are ‘almost going to miss a bus or a train’. We went to the busy MG Road, only to realize that MG Road was way too posh for the customers that we were looking for. Three full days of toiling, sweating, hard work yielded us not more than 38 filled questionnaires.
A couple of months back, when I had met Roshan over lunch at Inorbit mall in Mumbai, we saw a couple of people in the food court handing over survey forms to people having their food. When we saw that, we relived the days that we had spent in the dusk of 2006.
Taking a customer feedback is indeed difficult. Especially when you do it in an unstructured manner. The hit rate is not more than 10%. If you ask 10 customers for their time, hardly 1 or 2 will oblige. It really sounds so trivial to them, that sometimes you need to listen to their abuses, foul language and what not. Of course some of them politely refuse, but that number is a limited few.
Yes. It actually feels bad to go and ask someone to spend time for you on your survey, especially when someone is out on a weekend to spend some good quality time with someone very close to them. You actually feel that you are invading into their privacy and feel guilty about it. When these surveys are conducted professionally (that involves a lot of cost), it may give better results, but when it’s done in an unstructured manner, its way too far from giving you the desired results.
Having learnt all these, and having personally experienced these things over the last couple of years, whenever someone, be it a college student or a salesman, comes across me asking for a survey, I make it a point to answer it honestly if I am not too busy. If 5 minutes of my time, can help someone with his work, I would rather do it. I know how frustrating it is, when you are frequently turned down by people. And I ensure that at least in my case, the person doesn’t feel the same. It’s always a nice feeling to help people!!
So next time someone comes to you for a feedback or a survey, unless you are really too busy, please spend some time to fill in that questionnaire. The poor chap will thank you for his life. And if you are really busy, refuse politely. He is most likely to have heard abuses from lots of other people. So a few calm and composed will do a world of good to him.
1 comment:
Nice post man...
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