One of the most frequent ways to collect customer feedback is to focus on listening during one-on-one sessions with customers which is a bit of an outdated method. To stay on a positive side, online customer satisfaction surveys provide an opportunity to poll clients with scale on questions that might otherwise go neglected or ignored. Sounds fun, right?
Here’s some fast advice: Client satisfaction surveys are only useful if you ask the proper questions, in the best way, at the perfect time without unnecessary delays. That’s why creating and launching an effective and valuable customer satisfaction survey is not an easy task.
And since the majority of the people are now connected through their mobile phones, this task is even harder – you can no longer count on people being at their home, relaxed, sitting on their computers. People have shorter attention spans, and every moment of engagement matters.
Now, we’ll go over some established methods to turn your surveys into a reliable stream of insightful customer feedback.
Why Customer Satisfaction Surveys?
Let’s first talk about why customer satisfaction surveys matter for every business today.
Customer satisfaction is one of the few tactics brands can still pull to isolate themselves in crowded and competitive markets. Today, the brand with the stellar customer experience usually wins. The reason why is because high levels of customer satisfaction are strong indicators of client and customer retention and loyalty.
Let’s not mention, bad customer satisfaction can actively harm your brand in the long run. The average American consumer will tell 16 other people about bad customer experiences and it takes brands an average of about 12 positive experiences to compensate for one unresolved negative experience. Interesting right?
1. Keep Your Surveys Short
The main purpose of every survey whether online or offline is to be clear and concise by finding the shortest way to ask a question without elaborating too much. It’s not just about cutting the character count – you also need to remove unnecessary phrasing from your questions.
It is important when picking an ideal online form builder for your survey to choose one that helps you compile everything in a concise manner. At the same time, survey length is also crucial for keeping abandonment rates low. Just think about the last time you sat around and answered a 20-minute questionnaire. It probably never happened.
2. Ask One Question at a Time
We’ve all been struck with an extensive series of questions before: “How do you like our site? Would you refer to our product? Why or why not?”
It can start to feel like you’re being questioned by a police officer who won’t allow you to finish your sentence. If you wish for quality responses, you must allow people time to think through each individual question. Bombarding people with multiple queries at once leads to half-hearted answers by respondents who are just searching to get through to the end – if they don’t leave your survey before then. Instead, create things easy by sticking to a single point at a time.
3. Make Use of Yes/No Questions
When you’re phrasing a question that has a simple outcome, try to frame the questions with a yes/no option. Multiple studies showed that yes or no queries make for great starter questions because they’re much easier for customers to evaluate and complete thus increasing the engagement rate.
The response to this question doesn’t require a scale like “valued, not valued” etc.
Simple yes or no answer is quicker for the customer and should give you all the feedback you need. Additionally, you can follow it with the next question.
4. Offer Survey Respondents a Gift
In most cases, it makes sense to entice customers to answer your survey. Variety of data shows that incentives can boost survey response rates. These incentives can appear in the form of discounts, giveaways or account credits. Your incentive should be something your brand is able to handle financially. Now you may worry that offering survey responders a freebie may affect the quality of responses, but some studies show that it mostly isn’t the case.
Examples of Effective Customer Surveys
1. Asana
Asana is aware that business professionals don’t have a lot of time to fulfill lengthy surveys so they keep it short and sweet.
2. Twitter
Another amazing example is Twitter. They make a claim to regularly ask users about all ranges of product usage and satisfaction of their products.
3. Amazon
Most visitors will simply not take time to write a comprehensive review of a product or a purchase experience they had. With the following simple and targeted survey, Amazon effectively acquires the feedback it needs to make sure future customers of this item know which size they should buy to be fully satisfied with the purchase.
In Conclusion
If you’re looking to win hearts and loyalty, customer satisfaction surveys are a potent and essential tool in your brand’s battle. With the feedback they generate, you can improve your product, service and overall customer experience – leading to increased revenue and more loyal customers.
