What is a Customer Survey?

While active listening during one-on-one sessions with clients is one of our favorite ways to obtain customer feedback, customer satisfaction surveys allow you to poll people on questions that might otherwise go unaddressed.

But here's the thing: customer satisfaction surveys are only useful if you ask the correct questions, in the best possible way, at the best possible moment. As a result, creating and delivering a useful and effective customer satisfaction survey is no easy task.

Why is it vital to conduct a Customer Survey?

Let's start with why customer satisfaction surveys are important in today's corporate world.

In crowded and competitive marketplaces, customer satisfaction is one of the few levers brands can still use to differentiate themselves. In today's world, the brand that provides the best customer experience usually triumphs.

As soon as you get access to the data of the customer survey, you can actually take impromptu actions to improve the latter. Get yourself the best feedback and proactively work towards the issues. 

This means- start turning the negative feedback to positive ones. Take the suggestions very seriously and improve the overall services that you provide.  This will help you increase your sales, lead to a better retention rate and hold loyal customers. 

Customer Survey & Related Practices 

1. Keep it brief.

The most important goal is to be clear and succinct, finding the shortest manner to express a question without obscuring its meaning. It's not only about minimizing the number of characters in your inquiries; you also need to eliminate superfluous language.

At the same time, keeping survey abandonment rates low requires a longer overall survey length. Consider the last time you sat down and eagerly completed a 30-minute survey. It's unlikely to have happened.

2. Create intelligent, open-ended questions

Although it's tempting to stick with multiple-choice questions and scales, open-ended inquiries that allow customers to spill their true feelings onto the page can yield some of the most informative feedback.

Nothing, on the other hand, makes a survey seem more scary than a large text box next to the first question. It's ideal to start with simple questions to establish a sense of progress. Then provide those who have made it to the end of the survey the chance to elaborate on their responses.

One method is to use a basic introduction to get people to commit to a question, then follow up with an open-ended question like, "Why do you feel this way?"

3. One at a time, ask a question.

"How did you find our site?" "How did you find our site?" "How did you find our site?" Do you have a good understanding of what our product does? "Can you tell me why or why not?"

It can feel as if you're being questioned by someone who won't let you finish your sentences. Give folks time to think about each question individually if you want quality responses.

When you bombard individuals with many questions at once, you'll receive half-hearted responses from people who are just trying to get to the conclusion — assuming they don't desert you before then. Instead, keep things simple by focusing on only one important issue at a time.