Research method
Sales / Customer Service Survey
A survey sent by email to members of the sales team and/or the customer service team. These surveys gather insight from the internal teams who interact with customers every day, uncovering customer motivations, FUDs and frictions. This tribal knowledge from sales and customer service can then be applied to improve the website.
When to reach for it
Sales / Customer Support surveys are an effective method when running exploratory research.
Sales / Customer Support surveys can be particularly useful when looking to develop or enhance ideal customer profiles, or personas. Speaking to sales teams can help you understand customers (and potential customers) key triggers and motivations for seeking out your product or service. You can also use sales interviews to uncover the primary barriers to conversion; the reasons why potential customers don't convert.
Customer support/service surveys are effective when looking to understand customer's key issues or frustrations. This type of data can be useful when focusing on retention for subscription products/services. This activity can also identify key questions that users have that could be answered on the website.
Strengths and limits
Pros
A customer survey allows you to gather large samples of data, which isn't possible when running customer interviews. Customer surveys can also be used alongside customer interviews to increase the depth of insight.
Customer surveys allow you to gather both qualitative and quantitative data, depending on the types of questions you ask.
Cons
An insightful customer survey is determined by the questions you ask. you need to avoid leading questions, and also ensure questions are not multifaceted as this can cause difficulty in analysis.
There could be some bias in this data, given that it is internal data (and could be a negative reflection on internal teams).
This data about what is important to customers, or customer pain points is being filtered, e.g. it is not coming directly from the customer.
It can be a challenge to code and analyse large sets of qualitative data.
Practical considerations
Tool
The survey could be built in a range of tools, including Google Forms, TypeForm, Survey Monkey, etc. There are plenty of free tools available for this activity, so there's not really any need to pay for a tool, unless you have more bespoke needs, e.g. large data sets, custom question logic, etc.
Sample Size
The goal of this activity is to gather quantitative insights, therefore the sample size should be relatively high. However, it is unlikely you will achieve a similar sample size to a customer survey (approx 300 responses) depending on the size of the organisation and number of employees in the sales / customer survey teams. As such, you should aim for gathering the biggest sample possible, given the size of the teams.
Common tools
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Recipes that use this method
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