What makes customer satisfaction surveys so important?
There’s a good chance your marketplace is as competitive as ever, with established competitors and upstart underdogs always looking to take a bite out of your market share. Reputation is vitally important, and part of maintaining a good reputation is listening to your customers. Just as employee satisfaction surveys give you the chance to improve the working experience by giving you perspectives you may not be aware of, customer satisfaction surveys offer your customers the chance to provide you with timely feedback on issues affecting your success from the perspective of someone using your products or services. Businesses that do not solicit or pay attention to customer feedback do so at their own risk, as small issues can mushroom into gigantic problems very quickly. Customer satisfaction surveys give you the chance to act on problems that customers have with your products and services and/or notice trends in what people seem to like or dislike. They also offer the opportunity to notice trends and tailor your offerings accordingly. Customer satisfaction surveys are also much more cost-effective than paying for market research or conducting focus groups.
Online reviews mean a lot to potential customers, with many searching the internet to learn more about companies before giving them their business. If they see that your company has persistently poor reviews, with many customers complaining about similar things, it’s a sure sign that you do not listen to your customers. This can turn people off from patronizing your business, which can lead to losing money.
How to create a customer satisfaction survey
If you want to create an effective customer satisfaction survey that will yield useful data and insights, it’s important to strike a balance between asking the right questions and not going in to too much detail. Some customer satisfaction surveys only ask a handful of questions and do not allow feedback from customers beyond choosing a score between 1 and 10, while others ask far too many questions and take up way too much of the customer’s time. They end up abandoning the survey because it is far too involved for something they are volunteering to do for you. You should therefore begin by identifying the information that is most important for your company to leverage, which is demographic information.
The data you receive won’t be effective or useful if you can’t identify who specifically feels a certain way. If younger customers feel your products are too expensive, for example, but older customers feel they are priced just right, and your goal is to sell more product to younger customers, asking for demographic data in your survey is crucial. Some companies also ask about gender, income level, whether or not the customer has children, etc. The information you want to elicit will depend on the industry you’re in. For example, if you sell car parts, it is probably irrelevant whether a customer has children in their household.
You’ll also want to consider the scale with which you ask customers to evaluate your company or products. Some customer satisfaction surveys ask customers to rate on a scale of 1 (bad) to 10 (good), while others use subjective terms such as strongly disagree, disagree, neither disagree nor agree, agree and agree strongly. This is usually in response to a vaguer subjective statement, like “I feel I get good value from (your business)”. The numerical scale is often used when asking a pointed, more qualitative question, such as “rate the service you received from the associate you interacted with”. The questions you ask, and the scale you ask customers to evaluate you on depend on the goal you have in mind with your survey, such as improving customer service or adjusting operations. Some companies rely on customer satisfaction surveys to evaluate their employees, others use them as opportunities to improve quality or consistency, while others use them as an opportunity to identify blind spots or solicit new ideas from loyal customers.
How to make customers want to fill out your survey
A good way to make sure your customers want to volunteer their time to fill out your surveys is to incentivize them. Many people are familiar with surveys on the back of fast-food receipts. These surveys typically offer the customer a discounted or free item in exchange for providing their feedback. Other common ways to incentivize participation are to offer a discount code and to be transparent about how the data is used, such as in the development of new products or services based directly on feedback.
It’s also important to consider timing when asking customers to fill in your survey. Some companies, especially those with an e-commerce presence, interrupt the purchase flow by asking customers if they will consider completing a survey after their purchase. If the company’s e-commerce site is the main issue customers have, the satisfaction score would be low because it is solicited at a pain point. Conversely, if the survey comes a day or so after a purchase is made, the customer might’ve forgotten about the poor e-commerce experience and will provide feedback with a clearer mind. Customers also dislike having to manually fill out customer satisfaction surveys, such as with a pencil and paper that gets dropped into a box, or having to answer questions in-person. Providing customers the chance to candidly provide feedback online is often best.
There are a number of software platforms and online services that can conduct satisfaction surveys for you, and some will even distill the research findings into actionable outcomes such as improving hours of business, training employees on customer service, offering a wider range of products or targeting your marketing to a specific demographic. This is often much more convenient than doing it yourself, and since these companies specialize in this sort of thing, they will create user-friendly surveys your customers will want to fill out.
It’s important to listen to your customers, and surveys are one of the easiest and most effective ways to do so. Define the goals you wish to achieve by soliciting feedback and query your customers accordingly. It won’t be long before you see the positive results of taking the time to do so.
