To ensure the success of your business, you need to understand what your end product—whether physical items or a service—means to your clients. To do this, you should consider surveying your customers regularly. Customer feedback surveys help you understand how satisfied or unsatisfied your customers are with your products, services, or specific interactions. This all plays an imperative role in improving customer loyalty.
Are you looking for effective tips to improve the survey experience for your customers? Continue reading to learn how to design great customer feedback surveys.
Include Easy to Understand Questions
Every researcher aims to make the most out of each and every question that is sent to respondents. If your goal is to gather the maximum amount of information from your customers, you need to word your questions clearly. Make sure that all questions are simple and easy to understand so that respondents will know specifically what you are requesting.
Include Open-Ended Questions Sparingly
Open-ended questions can bring lots of great insight but should be included sparingly. Lengthy surveys consisting of numerous open-ended questions is a sure-fire way to bring about survey fatigue on behalf of your respondents. So, consider making the bulk of your survey standard closed-ended questions (e.g., multiple choice) and have no more than 1-2 open-ended questions.
Don’t Include Questions that Have Difficult-to-Interpret Responses
To receive detailed feedback from your respondents, make sure to avoid questions that will yield difficult to interpret responses. For instance, asking any questions in terms of a percentage relies on personal estimates being made by the customer. As a tip, pilot test your survey with laypersons and inquire as to the ease of interpretability.
Order the Questions According to the Respondent’s Experience
Consider the flow of the questions to yield a high volume of complete responses. The order of the questions matters to walk the customer through their entire experience. At the beginning of your survey, use questions that can make the respondents familiar with the survey, then follow them by questions that focus on the complex topics, lastly end on demographic items. Furthermore, to ensure the right question flow, perform a trial run before wide distribution.
Allow for Feedback on the Survey
Something that is often overlooked within many surveys is providing the opportunity to share feedback on the survey experience itself. Why? In addition to providing insight for future surveys, it also demonstrates genuine care for your customers. As most people would rather their survey be completely anonymous, a final question can be asked for contact information (optional, of course). There are many ways you can respond. You can contact them via email or give them a call. If you ask for their mailing address, you could even send a handwritten note, possibly with a small gift or a come back incentive as a thank you for their input.
Start New Programs for Customers such as a Board of Customers
If you want to build a strong relationship with your regular and top clients, consider developing a board of customers. It is a great way to get feedback quickly and validly from a trusted group. You could setup special respondent groups within your survey tool of choice and regularly send pulse surveys.
Mark Most Personal Questions as Optional in the Survey
As much as we researchers prefer to gather responses for all items, when it comes to including personal questions in the survey, make sure to keep these questions optional. Many respondents simply don’t feel comfortable in sharing personal details—especially those that may be considered identifiers (e.g., gender, age, or income). Making personal questions compulsory for respondents can make them feel uncomfortable and may significantly affect their response data. Consequently, they may end up leaving the survey before completion (we don’t want that, right?!).
Keep the above-mentioned tips in mind while building and distributing a customer feedback survey. To provide a better survey experience, consider using an online survey tool. You can find many tools available online that will best suit your demands and needs.
Are you searching for the best online survey services? Get in touch with Ambivista to learn how you can discover new insights to transform your organization.
