We live in a world where nearly 90% of consumers utilize online reviews to influence their buying decisions. It has never been more vital to acquire this helpful feedback to build more excellent reviews for your business. Who better to provide that feedback than your current customers?
A customer survey is a list of questions to current customers concerning the products and services they purchase. The purpose of these surveys is to assess customer satisfaction while gaining valuable feedback and information from the individuals who use your products.
These surveys will help you understand why some customers leave or abandon their conversion and even determine the quality of your customer service.
Consistently collecting this information will enable you to know precisely where to improve your products and services, readjust your priorities, and potentially prevent the impact of negative reviews on your business.
Identify Goals
The way to avoid bombarding your customers with random questions is to have a game plan. The better you understand the population you are targeting and the overall purpose, the more likely you will get results.
To define a goal, start by asking the following questions:
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- Which customer experience metric do I want to measure?
- Why do I want to measure that?
- What information am I trying to highlight?
The SMART acronym from George T Doran says the goal must be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Defining these parameters as they pertain to your plan helps set you up for the best outcome.
A great metric to establish is a customer satisfaction score. Satisfaction scores are key performance indicators that measure a customer’s satisfaction with the products or services. You find this by adding all positive question responses and dividing them by the number of collected responses. Calculating this after each survey will enable you to quickly identify trends or problem areas.
Questions
Develop multiple-choice questions as well as a few open-ended inquiries that enable the user to write their feedback. Do not ask questions that are too complex, lead the user, or that do not address your business goals.
Here are some example questions you could start with:
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- Which of the following words would you use to describe our product?
- How would you rate the product’s value from 1-10 (10 being the highest)?
- How well does our product meet your needs? (1-10)
- How responsive have we been to your questions or concerns about our products?
- How well did the demo/chat answer your product questions?
- What motivated you to sign up for our product?
- Were there any technical issues that could have prevented you from buying?
- If you could change just one thing about our product, what would it be?
- What can we do to make your onboarding experience better?
- This product helps me accomplish my goals. Answer scale: 1 to 5, Strongly disagree to Strongly agree
- How easy was it to navigate our website?
- Compared to our competitors, is our product quality better, worse, or about the same?
- How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?
- May we contact you with follow-up questions?
- What else would you like us to know?
Make sure to keep questions short, clear, and concise. No one wants to spend over 10 minutes on a survey, and therefore, keep your survey under 15 questions to get the most customer engagement.
Distribution
Thanks to social media and platforms like Survey Monkey, distributing confidential surveys is easy and should be performed regularly. For example, transactional surveys are prompted immediately after a transaction has been completed.
Consider the timing. When examining your audience, when would be the best time to deliver the survey? Some survey-takers respond more often on the weekend, and others may answer first thing on Monday. Understanding your industry and customers is essential in distribution.
You can also encourage responses by giving customers an incentive to take the survey. By offering a week of free services, gift cards, or products, you’ll significantly raise the likelihood of getting feedback.
Some companies even give charitable donations in exchange for survey responses. Allowing your customers to help others can produce a loyal audience willing to participate in future surveys.
Conclusion
Customer surveys can be a powerful tool for reaching your clients and gaining information to secure new patrons. Requesting, analyzing, and implementing this feedback is essential to improving your business and ensuring customer satisfaction.
It is also helpful to remind your audience that the purpose of the survey is to make your product or service better for them. Customers like to be heard and are left with a good feeling knowing you are striving to be better. Showing customers that you’re listening goes a long way.
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