Best Practices for Designing Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Best Practices for Designing Customer Satisfaction Surveys

If you’re unfamiliar with creating a successful customer satisfaction survey, or even if you are—but need some guidance—this article has all the tips and tricks you need.

If your company provides poor customer satisfaction, your business will gain a bad reputation, and you won’t be able to expand it to make it the success story it could be. On the other hand, when you take active steps to improve customer satisfaction, you can make your company stand out in a crowded marketplace and achieve the success you want.

One of the best and easiest ways of gauging how satisfied your customers really are is to conduct a survey.

With valuable customer feedback in hand, you can focus on the ways in which you can improve the customer satisfaction that your business provides.

Define the Purpose of Your Survey

The first step is to define the purpose of your survey.

Sure, it’s about understanding how satisfied your customers are. But to gauge that, you need to break down key areas of your business and come up with the right questions.

Look at everything you want to address in the survey before you begin to phrase questions in the right way.

Only Ask Questions That Fulfill Your Goals

Following on from the last point, make sure you only ask questions that fulfill your goals.

Every question you ask should have a well-defined purpose. Get rid of any questions that don’t actually need answering.

For instance, don’t waste your time asking customers how quickly they feel it takes to get through to a customer support agent if you can already access reliable data about that from the customer help desk software you’re using.

Only ask relevant and important questions that pertain to the purpose of your survey.

Keep Your Survey Short and Avoid Using Jargon

One reason for only including the most relevant and important questions in your customer satisfaction survey is you’ll want to keep your survey short.

Customers will be put off completing surveys that take up too much time, so avoid surveys that take longer than around fifteen minutes to complete.

Your questions should also be worded concisely to avoid confusing their intent.

And make sure you don’t use unfamiliar words or jargon in your questions. The last thing you want to do is confuse the respondents.

Choose the Best Format for Your Survey and Ask Questions in the Right Way

You need to decide on how you’ll deliver the questions throughout your survey. For example, will you use a question and answer format, or will you use multiple choice or star-rated scales? You could use a combination of methods.

When it comes to the questions themselves, ensure you ask open-ended questions, which enable customers to give you more detailed feedback than they would be able to do with scales and multiple choice alone. You can then gain more valuable and in-depth insights.

It’s a good idea to lead up to questions that require more thoughtful responses, as people can be put off completing surveys if the first question requires a lot of thought. So, create a sense of progress throughout the survey.

Furthermore, avoid using loaded questions. For example, instead of writing a loaded question like “Do you agree that our customer contact methods are more diverse than most of our competitors?”, ask, “What do you think about our customer contact methods?”

The former will provide you with pretty useless information, whereas the latter can provide you with valuable insights.

The Takeaway

Quite simply, when you follow the best practices for designing customer satisfaction surveys, you can gain the information you need to improve the customer experience.

So, ensure you spend time crafting your surveys in the right way to get the most out of them and gain customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Now, check out these tips for retaining your customers.