The best way to know the pulse of your customers toward your business is by asking for their feedback. As much as face-to-face interactions can provide you answers, a customer survey is also one of the best and most used data gathering method. However, asking questions is not as simple as it sounds.
Designing a comprehensive customer survey is about knowing and understanding your customers’ feelings and experiences, suggestions, and expectations towards your business. And so, each question should be carefully crafted and asked to the right people, at the right time. When a survey is done properly, you will acquire actionable insights and improve the quality of data collected. On the other hand, poor survey design can lead to lack of responses, misleading results, and missed opportunity to improve your business.
For a successful customer survey design, here are some tips that can help you formulate effective questionnaires.
Determine Your Goals
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Designing a customer survey does not start by crafting questions already. Before anything else, you must establish the end result that you want the survey to give you. Is your goal to find out how satisfied your customers are with the company’s customer service department? Or maybe you want to know the insights of your consumers toward a new product or service you released. No matter what the purpose of your survey is, it should be clear to you in the very beginning. Knowing what your objectives are means that you will be able to craft the right questions.
Here are some common goals that a customer survey targets:
- Customer service feedback
- Social media presence
- Satisfaction on products and services
- Opinion towards new released products and services
- Sales and marketing experiences
After you decide the goals you want to achieve, consider which one will be prioritized. This way, you can start designing the survey already. In addition, each goal should have a separate survey. Mixing everything in a single questionnaire might give you less accurate results.
Know Your Target Audience
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When you already determine the purpose of your survey, the next step is to identify the right people to align your goal with and ask the questions to.
- What are the demographics of these people?
- What are the psychographics of these people?
- Identify what kind of survey will suit them best
- When is the right time to ask for their response?
Segmenting your audience means that the result of your data is more accurate. Since the questions only apply to certain individuals, you will get answers that are more honest and result driven. Moreover, knowing your buyer personas will help the sales and marketing division to create specific plans to attract them, moving forward.
Types of Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Identifying your demographics also means that you have to identify the type of customer satisfaction survey that will suit them best. Each survey type will give you different results, so it is very important to know which will really fit the people you will be asking the questions to.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) Survey
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The NPS system which have been used across all industries aims to understand customer satisfaction and loyalty. It only asks one question, “How are you likely to suggest this product or service to your friends or colleagues?”. Then, a follow up question asking for an explanation behind the score given is asked. The answer through the form of a rating assesses the quantitative and qualitative response of the consumer.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) Survey
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This type of survey asks two questions: (1) How are you satisfied with the product or service? And (2) Open-ended question supporting the first answer. The first part of the question provides respondents with options from 1 (very dissatisfied) to 5 (very satisfied). What makes this survey more detailed is how you can specifically pinpoint what area you want to ask for a rating. For example, you can ask “How are you satisfied with the taste of Nescafe black coffee?”. Instead of just a general inquiry, this survey can give you a particular result and detailed view regarding the customers’ experience.
Customer Effort Score (CES) Survey
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CES survey measures how much effort did the customer use to complete a certain action. Using this survey will help you identify how easy or hard a particular process flow in your business takes place. Asking such questions will make you more aware as to how important fast transactions are to your customers. Since the satisfaction of the consumers also depend on how effortless their experiences are, you can right away determine what area should be improved on to reduce frustration and disloyalty towards the business.
Keep It Simple and Short
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Probably one of the reasons why you keep on getting negative data results from your customer survey is how your questions are formulated. People have short reading attention span. The moment they set their eye on long questions or texts, the tendency is that they will skip reading and just choose an any answer. It may seem that you should formulate long texts to cover everything you need to ask but doing so will only hurt you in the end.
The usual mistakes that survey creators do is to squeeze two or three questions in one. Instead of creating compound or complex sentences, try to keep keep it in the simple structure only. This way, your respondents will not be confused on what are you really trying to ask. Formulating 5 to 10 questions each survey is already enough. Remember, the longer your questions are means that you will be taking more time off from your respondents. Additional seconds or minutes can irritate them and may affect how they respond to your questions.
Moreover, you should focus on close-ended questions like multiple choice or checkbox questions instead of the open – ended ones. These type of questions are easier to answer and provide you with measurable data to analyze. Since open – ended questions ask the respondents using their own words, some may not be comfortable as to how they write or they cannot put into words what they want to say. When this is the case, some would just skip that part or come up with random answers just to fill out the blank.
Provide a Reward
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Although this part is completely optional, it is suggested to give a token of appreciation to the people who answered your survey. Letting them know that they will get something in return will keep them interested and probably take the survey seriously. Incentives don’t have to be anything grand or expensive. If you are conducting your survey online, you can attach a gift voucher or discount voucher to your shop. For personal surveys, you can do the same or give a drink or food to your respondents.
Customer survey looks simple at first glance. But in reality, it takes planning, time, and effort to come up with a comprehensive questionnaire. Remember to consider these tips when formulating your surveys the next time around.