Throw Out the Customer Satisfaction Surveys and Go Talk to Your Customer.

Customer satisfaction surveys are interesting tools if you are a history buff. The information that they don’t provide is how your organization is perceived by your customer and what contribution they feel you are making to their organization. We retain our customers when they are not only satisfied, but loyal. The best way to check in on customer loyalty is a good, old fashioned conversation.

We recommend that these interviews be conducted annually, or more frequently, if appropriate. Generally, five senior managers from the client organization must be interviewed in order for you to have a true picture of their perception of the relationship. The interviews should be conducted cross-functionally.

The following questions can be used to generate a lengthy very productive “chat” with key individuals in the accounts that are critical to your company’s success going forward.

Please select the questions that you feel are most appropriate for the customer and contact that you are interviewing.

	What are your company’s three most significant objectives over the next 12 months?
	What role does your department/division play in achieving these objectives?
	With regards to _________ (your area of expertise, for example, sales productivity), what is it that your organization does best today?
	Two years from now, what would you like to be doing more of or better?
	Assuming that you are able to make these changes, what measurable outcomes will you have attained?
	What alternatives are you considering to help you to accomplish these objectives?
	What barriers do you anticipate that you will face?
	What are the three most significant changes that your organization is experiencing in each of the following areas: marketplace, product line, competitive positioning, market strategy and tactics and in your organization?
	Describe the optimal relationship that you would have with an organization that provides ________ services.
	If that type of relationship is a ten out of ten, how would you score the relationship that we have with your organization?
	What kind of things are we doing that make us a _______?
	What kind of things should we do more of or better to increase our rating.
	How would you describe the impact or contribution that our company makes to your organization.
	What percentage of your expenditures for ________ are you currently spending with our company?
	What kinds of things could we do to increase that percentage?

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