There’s always a bit of trepidation that comes with asking your customers to explicitly tell you how you’re doing at the job they’re counting on you to do. [related]
Certainly, you want them to be honest with you so you know if you’re meeting their expectations—or if you’ve lost touch with what they actually want.
But that honesty can often lead to a fair amount of self-reflection, particularly when you learn about the things your customers want that you don’t do.
The good news is we fared pretty well overall in the 2019 Commercial Integrator Readers’ Survey.
The not-so-surprising news is there are definitely things we aren’t yet doing the way our readers think we should. Those are areas we can sharpen our focus and hope for different results in the 2020 version of the survey.
About 62 percent of those who took the survey say they’re likely to recommend Commercial Integrator to a friend or industry colleague who’s looking to learn more about the industry.
Almost one-third are neutral in that regard and less than 6 percent say they wouldn’t recommend us—except maybe to their worst enemies.
Almost 65 percent of respondents called CI “the single most relevant and useful information resource” for improving their businesses, far and away the leader among our media brethren.
Just under 80 percent of readers’ survey respondents say they became aware of a product or service as a result of reading about it on CI, and almost 70 percent say they’ve visited an advertiser’s website as a result of interacting with us.
That’s good news for us—and the companies who pay a lot of our bills.
More from the 2019 Commercial Integrator Readers’ Survey
We finished a distant third behind show guides and show websites or apps as the resource our readers turn to most often when prepping for an industry trade show or conference. Clearly, we have some ground to make up there to make sure you’re as ready as possible to make the most of your experience.
Survey respondents say they like the staff, our coverage and the variety of topics they find on our site and in our monthly magazine. One reader particularly enjoys that Commercial Integrator “focus[es] on the business aspect of AV integration—how to be more profitable, how to scale, how to gain customer loyalty, etc.”
Other readers want us to include more dissenting opinions or to focus more on digging deeper into some of the industry’s biggest topics with wide-ranging investigative pieces. We could also do better at creating more “must-read” pieces and writing more case studies on successful installations, according to our readers.
I’m not smart enough to figure out our overall grade based on the results of the 2019 Readers’ Survey, but I know I’m going to focus my time on the areas where readers say we could do better. I’m confident in our ability to improve or maintain in the areas you liked and think we can boost other areas too.
Thank you to those who took the survey. I hope you like what you see in the next 12 months.
