Developing a customer satisfaction survey is a great way to uncover what customers love about you, and where you can improve. Creating the survey itself, however, can be time-consuming and challenging. Are you asking the right questions? Are you asking too many? How can you optimise the survey to uncover some great insights for your business?
To uncover the journey your customers go through, you can ask questions strategically. Surveys help you retain and acquire new customers but you don’t want to put that responsibility on their shoulders. It’s your job to ask the right questions to achieve the most helpful insights.
To help you build your customer feedback survey we’re going to outline a few key questions you can ask and a structure to follow. Let’s begin!
When building your customer satisfaction survey there are a few golden rules you should follow to get the best results possible.
Understanding the difference between open and closed questions will help you construct the question to suit the answer type you’re after. But what’s the difference between the two?
A closed question example would be: “Did you floss today?”, an open question would be “Why is flossing important?”.
A leading question guides the customer to a certain response. These questions can be very influential in a customer survey. These sound more like statements that seek affirmation than actual questions. An example may include: “Your experience with us was satisfactory, correct?” or “There were no negative aspects of your experience with us, were there?”
These imply a fact that hasn’t necessarily been established as true. By answering the question, your respondent confirms the assertion you’ve made, even though they may not have provided that information themselves. An example may include: “Your previous supplier was unsatisfactory, how much better is our service?”
Now that we’ve covered some basic rules we can share with you a few examples to get you started. We’ll focus less on the design and more on the questions themselves.
The purpose of a service satisfaction survey is to highlight where you met, exceeded or fell short in servicing that customer’s needs. These are generally used when a customer has engaged with the customer service team or has had a non-sales communication with the company. Questions that can be asked include:
With all of the above questions, you can have a dependent field that asks for additional information if you wish.
A product satisfaction survey seeks to identify improvements that can be made to a product or the customer’s use of the product. It can work best to check that the reality met the marketing promise and that there are no quality control issues that need to be ironed out.
The shuffler type response enables you to list a number of features and have the user rearrange them in the order they find most appropriate.
An experience satisfaction survey is similar to the product satisfaction survey but cares less about physical attributes and more about emotional/psychological. With this survey type, you might focus more on the sentiment expressed about the experience and the lasting impression it has left.
In all of the above feedback survey templates the questions are:
Each makes it possible for the business to see what they’re doing well and opens up insights that only a customer can offer. These can then be used to improve the business, or help to attract new customers. It’s important to note that while it’s tempting to ask as many questions as possible there is a fine line between being curious and taxing on the respondent.
To start with, why not pick 5 essential questions that will really help you get a sense of what the customer is experiencing. You can always add more if you find there’s a good response rate. To improve your customer feedback process with intuitive and simple software try Review Tui. Launching later this year you can register your interest and be the first to find out more by clicking the button below.