Benefits of Eliant vs. Internal Surveys

We live in a DIY culture – there are shows, magazines and classes ad nauseum on how to do everything yourself.  However, when it comes to customer satisfaction, leave it to the experts to help you learn what your customers really think about your homes.   The following are just a few insights on the differences between internal and external third-party survey processes:

 

• Response rates on builders’ internal surveys are problematic. Most builder’s maximum response rate hovers around 40-50% on an internal survey. Eliant averages over 70% now. Many of our clients are over 80%.

 

• In fact, one builder tried many versions of an internal survey, never got a decent response. After years of trying, they finally moved over to Eliant. They are now averaging over 71% and are DELIGHTED!

 

• Internal surveys cannot offer any benchmarking. Eliant offers regional and national comparisons versus many major private and public builders.

 

• Eliant – in conjunction with the Marshall School of Business – helps you identify the most important issues on each survey. Some issues have more impact on home owners’ referrals than others. We share best practices with all our clients – particularly about these ‘Referral Driver Issues’.

 

• Eliant offers your management team self-selected subscriptions to all reports. All members of your team are automatically sent reports covering their areas of interest without their needing to ask what their scores were last week or last month.

 

• Clients are able to add any questions they desire in order to fully customize each survey. We have a shorter list of ‘core’ questions which will be used for benchmarking, and a group of custom questions selected by each builder.

 

• We now allow each home buyer to select one of 16 languages in which to take the survey.

 

• We typically have a large number of Chinese, Spanish, Vietnamese and Hindi surveys submitted. This multi-language program helps increase our survey response rate.

 

• Cost of internal surveys: How much will you spend in labor & benefits, IT-efforts, space, software to conduct the internal survey, calls to buyers to remind them to respond, programming to develop the survey, and send out reports to your managers on an ongoing basis, etc. We estimate that internal hard/soft costs will easy exceed Eliant’s annual fee! Isn’t it worth a small premium to get the industry’s premiere program and not have to worry about the internal hassles in doing this yourself?

 

Bottom Line: This is not about surveying. Anyone can send out a survey. The issue is the quality of the response and what you DO with the response. Eliant is all about helping you to improve your customers’ experience, not simply collecting information.