TABLE OF CONTENTS Personal interviews involve interviewing customers face to face but can take many forms.
Exit interviews are conducted as people complete their customer experience. Customers can be surveyed as they leave a shop, finish their meal in a restaurant or check out of a hotel.
Customers can also be interviewed during their customer experience. This can be very cost-effective if customers have time on their hands, such as waiting at an airport or travelling on a train.
In-home interviews are convenient for consumers.
Business customers can be interviewed at work at a time convenient to them.
Street interviews can be used in situations where a large part of the population falls within the target group.
Whilst the most common method of personal interviewing involves writing the respondents' answers onto paper questionnaires, there are alternatives. If speed is vital, computer assisted personal interviews (CAPI) can be used. Interviewers are provided with palm top computers from which responses can be downloaded daily. With enough interviewers, a large survey can be conducted within days. Long interviews (typically in the home or the office) can be recorded so that the detail of customer comments can be captured more efficiently. However, although appropriate for depth interviews at the exploratory stage, this is not a common occurrence at the quantitative stage of customer satisfaction surveys. At this stage, interviews will usually be short (typically 10 minutes and no more than 20), and most questions will be closed. To decide whether personal interviews of customers...
