How to Create Effective Customer Satisfaction Surveys?

Answer 1

It doesn’t have to be long, expensive, or time consuming. Use these tips to create an effective customer satisfaction survey for your business.

Customer satisfaction surveys can be written with a number of different objectives, and the objective will determine which questions you ask in the survey. A clear, specific objective will also give you the most useful feedback. For example, if you want to know how easy your website is to navigate, ask questions specifically about the website’s ease of use as opposed to questions about overall customer service.

Instead of only asking yes-or-no questions in your survey, employ a variety of different question formats. Examples of question formats include a rating scale, multiple-choice questions, open-ended questions and polls. Customers could, for example, rate their overall experience on a rating scale, and then go into detail about their experience in an open-ended question box. Using open-ended questions will give you more in-depth feedback, though this feedback may be much more difficult to quantify.

When choosing which questions to ask in your survey, make sure they relate to the objective of the survey and are worded simply to avoid confusion. A shorter survey is also more likely to get completed, so try to stick to a limit of around six questions. At the beginning of the survey, inform the customer of how long the survey will take to complete, what the objective of the survey is and how the feedback will be used.

You want feedback from all of your customers, whether it’s good or bad — the point of a survey is to get honest reactions to your business practices. By trying to tip the scales in your favor — for example, only sending surveys to customers you know are satisfied to get more positive reviews — you will bias your feedback, which won’t truly help your business. Remember that even bad feedback is good, because you can use it to improve.

The most effective time to distribute your survey is right after the customer’s transaction. If the customer just purchased an item on your website, give them the link to the survey right after checkout, or email it to them shortly after. By asking for immediate feedback, you show the customer your genuine interest in their opinions, which will be fresh in their mind.

Your survey and its results are worthless if you don’t analyze and apply them. Be prepared to sift through the results of your survey, analyze them and use them to implement new business practices or improve current ones. You should also consider acknowledging customers who gave negative reviews to make up for their less-than-perfect experience.