Written Surveys

Here are a few of the possible aspects you could measure on a longer survey:

• value of service
• promptness of service
• pricing
• complaints or problems
• confidence in your firm members
• closeness of relationship with contacts in your firm
• types of other services wanted
• percent of business you receive from your clients
• your positioning in clients' minds

When just beginning a business, you might wish to collect information about your probable opponents. This can assist you in situating yourself while you're making first contact with potential clients.

You need to get your staff and clients involved in creating a questionnaire. It's a good bet that once you start going over questions with staff and clients, you will come up with more than you need to ask. If you have a large client list and many questions to ask, divide your survey. Ask half the questions to half your clients, and half to the other. To get more complex, randomly appoint clients to forms of the questionnaire and have a few questions that both groups will have. This will give you an approximation of likeness between the halves (consistency).

You also can reveal a few of the results to the clients, which permits you to go over important issues even more.