What do your clients say about you when you are not around? Never mind the one-on-one communication ... what do your clients REALLY think of you? What are they telling others about your company?

Does the thought of this make you a little nervous? If you care about building a successful business on the web or anywhere else, this is the kind of feedback you need from clients on a regular basis. Our little company depends solely on referrals for our business, so if our clients are not raving, our phones aren't ringing!

Often times we think of surveys when doing website testing or helping a client implement new features. Just as they are effective at gathering feedback for those uses, surveys are also a powerful way to hear what your clients are thinking, but may not be willing to say. If you come up with good questions, it is also guaranteed to point out things you can do better.

So early this year, I swallowed my pride and got in touch with every person we worked with over the last two years. I asked them to participate in our first annual client survey. All responses were completely anonymous and confidential. The survey consisted of 34 total questions. Most of them were multiple choice (rate from 1-5), and some were open-ended requesting specific feedback.

After all was said and done, about 35% of our clients filled it out. Each of our 1-5 rating questions (5 being the best) got either a 4 or 5 over 85% of the time, which I was very pleased with. Some questions had too many 2's and 3's, and I am now much more aware that we have to do better on those things. Either way, the 1-5 rating questions were a great way to observe overall client satisfaction with a solid number.

I'm really glad each section of our survey also had a text box for specific comments or feedback. I went through and read every single comment. Some of them were encouraging, and some of them were downright mean. Read them with an open mind and "customer is always right" mindset, which means making excuses is a waste of time. Just do better! The best responses included helpful suggestions, which we immediately implemented as part of our business.

Overall, I am so glad we went through with the client survey. We found some things we can do better, and probably never would have known about without the survey. We also set a benchmark, which is something we can look to improve on in coming years.

For our survey we used http://www.survs.com. They just launched their service publicly, and I had an incredibly positive experience using it. I have also heard nice things about http://www.surveymonkey.com. It's ugly, but is the current industry leader and seems to have additional features.

To view a copy of our survey in full, check out this page: project83.com/survey.