And the Survey Says...

Yesterday we wrapped up our most comprehensive customer survey to date. We're pretty excited! The results of this survey are eye opening and will provide fuel to get us to the next level.  

Needless to say this was a pretty important project for us and will pay dividends as we look ahead at new features and improving the customer experience. Since it was a big deal, we decided to give away some prizes in a drawing to everyone that filled out the survey: About $1250 worth of prizes... (5) Mantix x10 Elite Shooting Performance Systems!  

We got nearly a 17% customer response rate, which is FANTASTIC. The typical response rate for online customer surveys is 6-8%. So, the purpose of this post is to announce the winners and analyze some of data.

Winner's Circle

Here are the FIVE Winners of the Mantix X10... (Last names omitted for privacy - but if it sounds like you check your email!).

Steven P., Edgewater , NJ

John H., Clarkrange, TN

Dustin G., Overland Park, KS

Jameson S., Roebuck, SC

John L., Durham, NC

Congratulations to all of the winners! I'm sure that MantixX will be a fun and efficient way to improve your shooting skills!

We appreciate everyone who took the time to complete the customer survey. Now on to some of the survey results...

Preliminary Results

On our customer survey we had 26 questions with a mix of multiple choice, ranking, and fill in the text type questions. It will take us a while to comb through all of the text based questions but for some of the others, I can hit the highlights now.

Customer Satisfaction

Overall Satisfaction with AmmoSquared... is GREAT!  I'm very happy to hear this. Here's how that looks:

Similarly, we also saw a total of 96% answer Likely or Very Likely to the question, "How likely are you to recommend AmmoSquared to others?"

Also FANTASTIC, we must be doing something right. :)

How are customers using AmmoSquared?

There isn't just one way of using AmmoSquared. Different strokes for different folks as they say. This is a great question and highlights the GOALS of our customer base as they use our platform.

In case you can't read that tiny text, here is how customer goals break down:

46.8% - Store ammunition securely off-site until needed.

33.3% - Get ammunition delivered on a regular basis.

13.7% - Use ammunition as a form of investment

6.2% - Other

In another similar question we asked: "What motivates you to choose AmmoSquared for at least some of your ammunition needs?" Customers could choose multiple answers (which is why the percentages don't total) These are the top three motivations that surfaced:

82.3% - Ease of Purchasing (AutoBuy)

63.3% - Ability to Stay on Budget

56.4% - Online Stockpile Management

In the meat and potatoes of the survey we asked a lot of questions about the various features we offer and how customers rank them. I'll summarize some of that data instead of copy/pasting all of the hard to read charts.

Top Three Favorite Benefits:

Ability to Set a Fixed Budget for Buying Ammo

Online Ammo Management

Automatically Purchase Ammo via AutoBuy

Top Three Favorite Features:

Set and Adjust your Budget and/or Frequency

Set and Adjust Caliber Percentages / Quantities

Request Shipment Anytime

I don't know about you, but I'm seeing a theme developing. This will really help how we communicate with folks in our marketing and what features and benefits we emphasize. The overwhelming consensus is that CONVIENENCE / EASE OF USE and BUDGET FRIENDLINESS are the main themes our customers value.

Fun Stuff

Here are some charts that are fun because they ask about different aspects of ammunition...

Military Surplus ammo got pretty high marks. We've carried it in the past mostly for hard to find calibers. (I remember we had some 30 Carbine surplus from South Korea that was good stuff.) We don't carry it often though. Good to know it could, under the right circumstances, be an option for us in the future.

Reloads seem about nearly 50/50 with some people being okay with them and others disliking them. We still won't carry remanufactured ammo (aka "remans") for fear of: 1) pissing off half of our customer base, 2) dealing with issues of a small manufacturer / reloader and, 3) them not being price competitive with factory new ammo. So for those reasons "I'm out."  

Let's move on to Aluminum cased ammo, shall we, and see how it fares...

As we can pretty clearly see, the majority of customers don't think too highly of aluminum cased ammunition! It is even worse than remans, wow! Personally I don't mind aluminum cased ammo, but I'm sure if I were reloading again I would. Believe it or not, I have a 10mm that loves the stuff but chokes on some brass cased ammo. Go figure. Different strokes... but at least we know where our customer base stands on this topic.

Word Clouds

Lastly, I'll leave you with a couple of "word clouds" generated by our survey software. These are fun because they show the words people listed the most. The more something was listed the larger the word. (The coloring is just for contrast and doesn't have significance.)

Here is the word cloud for the question: What brands of ammunition do you like the most?

There are a lot of good brands in that word cloud. It will help us prioritize some of these if we know they are crowd favorites. Many of these we are sending out today so that is good. Take note of Winchester...

And then here is the opposite question: What brands of ammo do you dislike the most?

Honestly I think some people might have misread this question, unless some people really don't like Federal and Sig Sauer? There are the usual suspects here like Tula and Wolf but Winchester was mentioned enough that it rose to the top of the list. Digging into the comments little bit, it seems like the white box specifically is the most listed.  It could be that the old Winchester USA "white box" got a bad reputation that has been hard to shake. They have new products out now so it will be interesting to see if they still deserve the bad rap they received in the past.

Again with the different strokes. Some brands are listed on both the most LIKED list and the most DISLIKED list. Go figure.

Preliminary Thoughts

I will be doing another version of this blog post with more survey question analysis. Especially as we dig through the text based responses. Those will take longer to "mine" for insights and hidden gems.

We will be taking all feedback and input into consideration. It will help guide us in many areas, especially new feature development, ammo purchasing and new customer messaging. Our team appreciates everyone that took the time to complete the survey. Also, in case this is the first time you've heard about this, this survey only went out to existing active customers. We have plans for more surveys of different groups and for different purposes, so if you weren't included in this round don't worry we'll likely catch up to you in the future!