What is the best tool for customer satisfaction surveys?

Tracking and measuring your customer’s satisfaction is the best way to know what you’re excelling at and where you need to improve. Keeping your customers happy is crucial to success and encourages customer loyalty, so developing a strategy to perfect it is crucial. You can survey your customers to gather helpful information from them, but knowing what to ask and why is a challenging task. Fortunately, there is a wide range of platforms available to support your customer satisfaction efforts and useful tools to collect or analyse the responses. In this blog we’ve put together a summary of all there is to know about making a winning strategy for your customer’s satisfaction. 

Customer satisfaction tools are helpful, but not the whole story

With the customer experience (CX) industry growing, there are numerous platforms dedicated to making it easy for businesses to manage customer feedback. These platforms, such as Review Tui, AskNicely or Survey Monkey are designed to make customer feedback simple and valuable by collating and analysing survey responses. The most useful tools are often more of an investment, but that pays off when your customers are happier and more likely to repeat purchases with you. 

Customer satisfaction tools help you to: 

• Develop customer surveys that are appealing and user-friendly.
• Collate information in an accessible and logical manner.
• Process data using statistics, analysis and common patterns.
• See the patterns in your customer’s experience, and where they aren’t fully satisfied.

However, there’s more to it than just gathering data, you then have to know what to do with it, and how to ensure you’ve collected everything you need. That’s where strategy comes in, and it’s not a step you can skip over. Without clear objectives for your customer satisfaction campaign, you’ll find choosing the right method, channels, timing and questions can be a lot more difficult. Even if you do go ahead with a campaign without implementing a strategy, you’ll struggle to define success at the end of it. 

Strategising for customer satisfaction

Developing a customer satisfaction strategy doesn’t need to be complicated, in fact, often the simpler strategies are more effective. It’s often worth sitting down with a few key players in your business, including the customer service team to discuss all the factors of your current customer’s experience. You’ll find many of your team will already have received feedback from customers and be able to give helpful insights into how your customers are feeling. Once you’ve discussed the overall customer satisfaction of your business, it’s time to decide what you want to change. If your customers are often complaining about a particular issue, what could you do about it? If customers are frequently leaving positive reviews about something, how can you ensure that trend continues? 

Some key things to consider are: 

• What do you want to achieve with your customer satisfaction strategy? 
• Do you want the information received to be fed back to senior management? 
• Do you need analytics? 
• Will you use it in marketing? 
• Try making a list of all the things you need a customer satisfaction tool to do.

Customer-first culture

Retaining customers and encouraging customer loyalty is a crucial part of good business, and keeping revenue high. That’s why more and more businesses are focusing on their customer’s experience (CX) and improving their processes. Companies that have good CX are seeing nearly 6 times more revenue than their competitors with poor CX. That’s because it costs an estimated 5 to 25 times more to attract new customers than to retain an existing one. So by investing time and resources into your customer experience, you can make the most of current customers and ensure your business is able to thrive. We’ve put together a list of practical steps to take to improve your customer experience so that you can get started today. 

Highlight it in your mission statement. Every company has a vision and summary of its values for employees to aspire to. Putting customer satisfaction at the centre of that is imperative to getting results in your customer experience. 

Be proactive. Incorporate your customer experience goals and strategies into everyday practices. By educating and equipping your employees effectively you can ensure the strategy is filtered through everyone in the company, not just senior management.  

Ask customers for feedback. Use surveys and other customer feedback tools to get information straight from the source. Your customers are the most valuable resource when talking about CX because they have personal insights you can’t get anywhere else. 

Ask your employees for feedback. Ground-level employees such as those dealing with customers directly are also a valuable resource. Asking your employees can give you a clear idea of how happy your customers are, and highlight any problems that frequently arise. From this, you’ll be able to address the problems and ensure processes are operating at their best. Your employees have a direct impact on the satisfaction of your customers, so investing in their happiness is well worth the time. 

Make your customer experience feel natural. Prioritise organic communication with your customers to ensure they feel heard and understood. Too many customer service interactions feel automated which makes the customer feel more like a statistic than a valued customer. Make sure your customer service processes feel personalised and authentic to make customers feel comfortable. 

Popular customer satisfaction tools

There is a range of helpful tools that can support you in your customer satisfaction strategy but knowing which one to choose can be daunting. The best tool will be a blend of reliable software, efficient processes and a culture of valuing the customer’s perspective. To help you make an informed decision, we’ve put together a list of the most popular customer feedback and CX platforms all in one place. 

10 popular customer satisfaction tools

• Survey Monkey 
• AskNicely
• Review Tui
• Retently
• Hotjar
• Typeform
• Survio
• Qualaroo
• Survey Sparrow
• GetFeedback
• Parlor

Some best practices to remember when developing a customer satisfaction survey are to keep it short, use open-ended questions, be consistent throughout the survey and avoid making assumptions. Some customer satisfaction platforms will give you tips throughout the process to ensure you get the most out of your survey responses. Even if you’re unsure where to start, it’s always better to implement some kind of strategy than no strategy at all.  

Making your customer satisfaction strategy simple

Perfecting your customer experience is far easier with support, that’s why Review Tui has a variety of helpful information for generating the best possible surveys and analysing the results thoroughly. Using the right strategy, you can develop a culture within your business where customer feedback is valued and acted on at every level.  

Download our guide to implementing a customer feedback strategy to find out how to make the most of your feedback responses. You can also sign up for Review Tui to get early access to our tool which gathers customer feedback for free.