Editor's note: Joe Hopper is president of Versta Research, Chicago.
Who would think that old-fashioned paper surveys, mailed through the U.S. postal service, are a good way to conduct customer satisfaction research? Not us – until our firm faced a rather difficult need for research and we could think of no better way.
To our happy surprise, it worked! And not only did it work but it easily outperformed other modes of research typically used these days. Our traditional paper-based mail survey got a 25% response rate – with no additional attempts, outreach or reminders.
A seemingly super-simple customer satisfaction survey is now one of the most interesting and memorable research efforts of my career.
Here is the story of that survey – why we did it on paper, the problems we solved, the steps we took to conduct it and why it succeeded beyond what we had hoped.
We hope it provides some valuable insights for you about how to design and execute surveys when facing situations you may have never encountered before.
Our client was Devon Bank, a Chicago community bank located in an urban neighborhood that continually transforms as new waves of immigrants settle into the city, assimilate and make way for new populations from other countries. Its retail customers speak over 30 native languages besides English. They come from countries in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Latin American – a true melting pot of cultures, languages and religions from around the world.
The bank did not have good e-mail addresses or phone numbers for most customers and, even if it did, we worried about a research firm reaching out to them in today’s political climate. What the bank did have, of course, were postal addresses being used every month for sending account statements.
On top of that, Devon Bank is small. With only 4,000 customers in the specific market we wanted to survey, there w...