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:
- Was your experience satisfying?
- Did our product meet expectations?
- Did this article provide the answer you were seeking?
- 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.”
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.
