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How to Craft the Perfect Customer Satisfaction Survey

 

 

 

 

Let’s start with the most basic question…What exactly is a Customer Satisfaction Survey?

While they can come in many different forms, customer satisfaction surveys are used to gauge how your customers feel about your company or reveal details about an experience with your company. This knowledge is crucial and knowing how your customers feel about your product, services, and team is imperative to understanding how to grow as a company and improve customer experiences.

Why Conduct Customer Satisfaction Surveys?

If you don’t allow your customers a place to complain, you risk them doing so to all their friends, family, or anyone who will listen. And this negative feedback can break a business. It’s been said that angry customers will tell 9 of their friends about their bad experience. Regardless of the specific number, you know that you’re much more likely to talk about a frustrating experience than a mildly positive one.

How do you Create a Successful Customer Satisfaction Survey?

There are several different styles of questions that can be asked on a Customer Satisfaction Survey.

The first type is a simple Yes/No distinction:

  1. Was your experience satisfying?
  2. Did our product meet expectations?
  3. Did this article provide the answer you were seeking?
  4. Did you find what you were looking for?

The benefit of this is its simplicity. Most customers will only spend a few minutes filling out a survey so you want to gather as much information as you can before they lose interest and abandon ship.

Scale Questions

While Yes/No questions are easiest and quickest to answer, they do not provide the meaty responses that tell you how customers really feel. Almost all popular satisfaction surveys are based on scale questions.

Ask a question like “How satisfied are you with your experience?” and provide a scale. The survey scale could be comprised of numbers or you could use labels, such as “strongly disagree, disagree, neutral, agree, and strongly agree.”

survey

 

There are many pros to using scale questions.

  • It’s pretty standard and your customers will completely understand what to do when presented with the question.
  • You can very easily segment your data to make decisions based on individual survey responses.
Open-Ended Questions

While scale questions are important, they still don’t allow for qualitative insights. In other words, they don’t get at the “why” of an experience, only the “what.”

Open ended questions allow customers to speak freely about a product or experience and allow you to gain more feedback regarding what needs improving or what is working well.

Some examples include:

  • What do you like most about our new product?
  • What changes would most improve our new product?
  • What other products would you like to see in our store?
  • Would you recommend our products to a friend/family           member?
  • Is there anything else you would like us to know?
Following Up on Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Now that you’ve got insights on your customer satisfaction levels, what do you do with the data?

Follow up with survey respondents. The most important and oftentimes most-ignored step in a successful customer satisfaction survey campaign is contacting the valuable customers that complete your satisfaction survey. Making sure your team acknowledges and thanks anyone that completed the survey is critical to ensuring that customers will continue to provide you feedback — because it’s about building trust and showing them value.

You can’t always change your methods or practices to please all customer feedback, but you can address every piece of feedback that comes through in some way. Providing a response, even if what the customer is requesting is not something you will do, is always better than no response at all.

One of the biggest mistakes is putting all that effort into data collection and analysis, and then not acting on it. We collect data to make informed decisions in order to grow our business.

Ready to get the ball rolling? Start with a simple survey and ask customers how their experience was.

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Hot Transfer For Customer Feedback

 

If you use a customer feedback program, you know the value of post transactional feedback from your customers. You provide a link to a feedback survey at the bottom of the receipts, on your website, and possibly even through POP signage.

 

How do your telephone customers provide feedback? You may want to consider a “hot transfer” program to incorporate into your existing feedback program.

 

Here’s how it works. Say you have a phone based feedback program in which customers call a toll-free number to provide feedback. Depending on your telephone system, this toll-free number can be programmed into your system so that once a call with one of your customer service representatives is complete, it will transfer the call to the feedback survey.

 

Sounds great, right? I’m sure you are also thinking of a few issues that may arise with the hot transfer system. Let me see if I can address them below:

 

1. Employees won’t transfer the call to the feedback service for all calls, especially the ones that don’t go so well: the hot transfer system will automatically transfer calls to the feedback service as soon as your employee ends the call – they do not have control over which customers get into the feedback system. Since every call will have the opportunity to provide feedback, this is not something you need to worry about.

 

2. Customers will be annoyed by this system: not at all! Customers, as you know, love giving feedback. It shows that you care about their experience and want to do better. Like traditional feedback programs, of course not everyone will want to participate. You can set your phone system to throw an automated recording (along the lines that you do for recordings: “This call may be monitored for quality control…”) that asks customers to press 1 if they would like to provide feedback at the end of the conversation. This not only makes them aware that you’ll be asking about their experience and make them more aware of the details of the call, but it gives them the option to participate or opt out.

 

3. Customers won’t provide negative feedback for fear the employee will know who left the feedback – after all, they typically have the customer’s account number: customers are opting in to take the survey prior to the call taking place. Yes, they can hang up if they change their mind, but assuring customers that their responses are completely confidential can help in obtaining negative feedback. You want to encourage this group as their feedback is what can best help you to improve.

 

If you haven’t considered the hot transfer method of customer feedback, or if your current provider doesn’t offer this service, please let us know and we’d be happy to help! You can leave a comment below or email us for more information.

 

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