How to Create a Customer Survey For Better Satisfaction
Are your customers satisfied with your services or products? Do you know what attracts them to your business or how you could improve or upgrade what you do? Monitoring customer satisfaction allows you to identify potential issues, both at the personal and aggregate levels. It also helps you boost your business over time, so how do you measure customer satisfaction?
One of the best ways is to create a customer survey to help you identify the precise information you want. However, customer surveys will only work if you ask the right questions at the right time. Creating and deploying a valuable and efficient customer satisfaction survey is essential.
This guide explains how to create a customer survey and how a virtual receptionist can help implement the regular use of customer surveys, follow-ups, and more.
What is a Customer Satisfaction Survey?
Simply put, a customer satisfaction survey is a study used to measure a customer’s perceived satisfaction with a service or product. It measures your business’ customer satisfaction score, a basic measure of how unhappy or happy the customer was with a service, product, or with particular interaction with your customer service team.
These surveys assess how your clients feel about a specific experience or your company. Customer surveys come in various forms, and you can use them to segment your customers based on satisfaction scores, measure relative customer satisfaction scores over time, or identify insights for customer experience enhancement.
The Importance of Creating a Customer Satisfaction Survey
New businesses are cropping up daily, and competition is rife. One of the key differentiators is what your clients think about you. Major companies such as Apple are doing well by considering and meeting their customers’ needs then adding requested and new innovative features to their products from this information. According to research, customers usually share positive experiences with an average of nine people and negative experiences with around sixteen people.
As a result, you must identify your customers’ problems and strive to address them before they go viral on social media or other review sites. Below are the main reasons you should create a customer survey for better satisfaction.
Insights to Improve the Service and Overall Customer Satisfaction
As stated, it’s essential to identify what your clients think about your products or services since they can inform you what it requires for improvement. It also helps you improve your customer relationship, which is crucial for your business success. Seeing in real-time how your clients feel, identifying potential problems, and acting promptly when satisfaction declines is a massive advantage to any business. Listening to your customers keeps them happy and increases their experience, which keeps them returning to your business.
Improves Customer Retention
Unhappy customers can quickly jump ship and switch to your competitors. Therefore, you must listen to them, work hard to make your product or service more customer-friendly, and create a deeper bond with them. Customer satisfaction surveys should go beyond just assessing the KPI of satisfaction to assess the factors significantly impacting customer satisfaction.
When you identify unsatisfied customers in the customer survey, you can dive deeper into what is causing the dissatisfaction and solve the problem directly. This will translate into happier and more loyal customers who will stay with you for a long time.
Informs Decisions
Customer feedback allows you to get tangible data that you can use to make significant decisions. These decisions are not based on hunches; they come directly from how your customers feel about your products or services.
Identifies Happy Clients Who Can Become Advocates
When you provide customer experience that surpasses expectations, you raise your chances of making customers your advocates. When you get feedback from happy customers, you can leverage their satisfaction, integrate them into your marketing strategies, and incentivize them to spread the positive word about your business to others. Satisfied customers are more likely to refer or recommend your products or services to their relatives and friends, which is a perfect way to stand out. Referrals are an effective and free marketing method. As per the Wharton School of Business, these customers are less expensive to maintain.
How to Create a Customer Survey for Better Satisfaction
Follow these tips to learn how to create a customer survey to improve your company, product, or service:
Set Clear Goals
For a successful customer survey, you must know the information you plan to collect from the beginning. You can start by discussing it with your employees, especially those working directly with your customers. These customers usually have better insights into your customers, what they expect or need, and if they’ve noticed any early warning signs of dissatisfaction that you should address.
For instance, if sales are dwindling in a particular business section, your survey could help identify the reason. You can use this knowledge to design your survey to check whether something has changed that makes your service or product less relevant such as a new competitor with a better offer or a feature customers no longer need.
Ask About the Overall Satisfaction and Get to the Details
Most successful customer surveys begin by asking about general satisfaction and then narrowing it down to specific details. This helps create spontaneity, which is why you should avoid starting with numerous detailed questions. Spontaneous feedback is highly valuable because it tells you exactly what your customers think about your business.
Keep Your Survey Short and Simple
You should write your surveys using simple, clear words that anyone can understand. People usually multitask when completing telephone or online surveys and are easily distracted. As a result, you should make it easy for them to follow along and answer the survey precisely. It’s also crucial that you keep it short — roughly seven minutes to complete. Anything beyond this time will see many people abandoning the survey before finishing it.
Limit the Number of Open-Ended Questions
An open-ended question is any question that leaves the respondent to give feedback in an open-text format to provide answers based on their knowledge. An example is, “What do you like most about this product?” These questions are also time-consuming to answer, have lower response rates, are difficult to compare or analyze, and give much irrelevant information.
Contact Different Customers Every Time
You can conduct surveys regularly, even weekly. Still, it’s essential not to survey any single customer more than once or twice annually. This can make them tired and possibly irritated. According to research, surveying the same customers often gives you higher quit rates and clients who request removal from your survey list.
Go Beyond Your Customer Base
Broader market research is usually conducted when launching a new product or entering a new market. In such cases, you’re only surveying a sample of customers from your target market, and only a few may have done business with you prior. However, a broader customer survey can be expensive. It may require the assistance of an expert to objectively study what you have to know.
Create a Customer Survey With the Help of a Virtual Receptionist
When you create a customer survey, your main goal is to improve satisfaction. To achieve this, you can enlist the services of a virtual receptionist to build quality customer surveys and do the follow-up. As a business owner, you have to wear many hats, and a virtual receptionist can handle your repetitive tasks, such as creating and sending customer surveys and analyzing feedback with the relevant departments. Besides, they can provide customers with the convenience of round-the-clock customer surveys, which improves customer satisfaction. Other benefits of using a virtual receptionist to enhance customer satisfaction include the following:
- Provide 24/7 customer support
- Improve business credibility
- Improve customer satisfaction
- Handle customer requests promptly
- Build a personal connection
- Automate the process
- Provide multilingual support
- Offer cost savings and scalability
- Integrate with CRM systems
- Reduce waiting times
- Provide analytics and performance insights
Customer Satisfaction Question Types and Survey Design
Here are a few examples of what types of questions you can use when creating your survey.
Binary Scale Questions
The first type of survey question is a simple binary distraction, such as, “Was your overall experience satisfactory,” or “Did our product or service meet expectations,” to name a couple. The answer options for these questions are dichotomous: yes or no.
Multiple-Choice Questions
These questions have three or more mutually exclusive choices. They are usually used to collect categorical variables such as labels and names. Multiple-choice questions help chop up your data and segment depending on the categorical variables.
Scale Questions
Most successful satisfaction surveys are based on scale questions. For instance, in CSAR scores that ask, “How much are you satisfied with your experience?” you’re supposed to rate the experience on a scale of 1-10. You can use numbers or labels such as agree, disagree, neutral, strongly agree, or strongly disagree. These questions are industry standard, and customers will understand them; they can help you segment your data efficiently and make significant decisions based on every survey response.
Semantic Differential
Semantic differential scales are based on binary statements but allow respondents to select a gradation of the score. This means that customers don’t have to just pick one or another; they can choose a place between the two points that reflect their accurate experience.
Open-ended Questions
Open-ended questions usually begin with what, how, and why to encourage a complete answer instead of a simple yes or no response, like closed-ended questions. These questions help identify customers’ value propositions and help you learn about the most important things from your customers.
In Conclusion
Creating a customer survey can help you assess your clients’ feelings about a specific experience or company. This helps you improve customer satisfaction, gain insights, provide informed decisions, and improve customer retention to help you stand out. You can also hire a virtual receptionist to help implement customer surveys to improve satisfaction and their process. Feel free to check out My Receptionist to learn more about hiring a virtual receptionist to create a customer survey, or contact us for any inquiries.