Survey research methods are the bread and butter of the market research industry – for good reason. You can often gain something of value just by asking people what they think. Of course, survey methods do have their shortcomings.

Customers don’t always know what they think or how they behave. And even when they do, getting them to tell you can be quite costly. Nonetheless, every marketer finds good uses for survey research on occasion.

Watch out for overly general questions or ratings. Any measure based on a survey that asks customers to “rate your overall satisfaction with our company on a 1 to 10 scale” isn’t much use. What does an average score of 8.76 mean? Sure, that’s pretty high. But are customers satisfied? You didn’t really ask them. I favor asking a series of more specific questions, such as, “Was it convenient and easy to do business with us?”

Then track progress on these specific measures in a repeat survey after you make changes to see whether you’ve improved in ways that customers notice.