Surveys have been around since the days of black and white TV and are still as useful as they were back then when it comes to getting down to the nitty-gritty of customer satisfaction… or dissatisfaction… Not only do they tell us what our customers love about us, but they also provide unfiltered feedback loops from the people who buy our goods and services.
Further, making inspiring creations that resonate with a fast-changing market requires florists to live outside of their creative bubbles. The way new trends come and go, and how they affect the floral preferences of brides, couples and millennials, for example, makes floral customer surveys important in keeping abreast and staying relevant.
Yet, for all their value, floral customer surveys may, at first, appear like yet another administrative task on your long list of things to do. Fortunately, polling your customers is much easier than the days when smiley faced ratings cards and inconvenient phone calls from after sales reps were all we had to go with.
The benefits of conducting floral customer surveys
Consider how a beard brand managed to generate over 150 000 leads from a successful market survey and you might be convinced that floral customer surveys are worth the time investment. When it comes down to it, customer feedback loops are phenomenally important to understanding your market and its experiences with your brand.
Use surveys to build better business partnerships.
Not only can you use them after a sale, but you can proactively leverage floral customer surveys across the year, during specific seasons or before and after events to name a few. You could even use surveys to engage suppliers and other business partners about factors that may be of interest to your respective relationships.
Meet the floral customer survey 2.0
If you’re about to call up your local printing company to order a batch of smiley face cards, then hang up. Software based survey platforms like SurveyMonkey and Typeform are just two companies that are making it incredibly easy to conduct your next floral customer survey. All it takes are basic computer skills to set up a survey and you can also take advantage of the many templates that come pre-built with these software platforms.
Platforms like Survey Monkey make market reconnaissance easy.
From event surveys to customer satisfaction polls to marketing questionnaires, companies like SurveyMonkey and Typeform make it possible to get your feelers out into the ether in practically no time. Check out this basic florist survey which takes you just a few minutes to set up in SurveyMonkey.
Asking the right questions
Understanding what you want to learn from your floral customer survey is important since a well executed survey can answer virtually any question a business may have. Are you looking to spot holes in your pre-sales experience or are you worried that your flowers arrive in less than stellar condition by the time they reach your customers?
Asking smart questions will yield smart insights.
Do you want to survey the market before a big holiday or are you looking to get insights on price sensitivity around a certain stem? Maybe surveying your employees’ feeling and ideas about their jobs might help to create a better work environment or better experience for your customer?
Work your way back from the problem and base your questions on what comes out of your discovery sessions. Talk to your employees to help inform the questions you’ll be asking. Once armed with your list of questions, you’ll be ready to upload them to your survey tool of choice.
Let your floral POS do most of the work
Your floral POS should be able to make the challenge of distributing your survey a simple matter. Also, your floral POS is a fantastic resource when it comes to mining for customer data. Use the information you already have in your floral POS system to inform you of the kinds of surveys you should run.
For example, you could poll last year’s events customers for an insight to their collective sentiment on your services, or probe business-to-business customers about their expectations for the year ahead and so on.
Your floral POS should help you distribute your new survey.
With a floral POS system like Hana, having access to a wealth of customer data will make it even easier for you to organize your customers according to the type of business, products or services you typically do with them respectively.
Starting with a small survey is probably the best way to test the waters and not get tangled up in an overly complex questionnaire. We suggest checking out a few options online before choosing the right tool for you but be sure to make floral customer surveys a part of your arsenal as it can yield invaluable insights on your customer, product, brand and business at large.
