Improve customer satisfaction with surveys

Customer satisfaction surveys give you the insights you need to make better decisions. In fact, we’ve found that businesses who measure customer satisfaction are 33% more likely to describe themselves as successful than those who don’t.

A consumer survey will help you understand your customers’ likes and dislikes as well as where you need to make improvements. For example, what does the average customer think about your prices? Too high? Just right? How well is your staff doing in terms of customer service, or how well does your client success team understand the growing needs of your customers – and prospects? Is there anything at all about the customer experience that turns your customers off? You might even poll clients on why they stop doing business with you, how you might win them back and how you can prevent customer losses in the future.

Empower your employees to meet milestones based on client needs. And, if you’re developing a new product or updating an existing one, customers can provide you with invaluable feedback about design and functionality. Customers will often show you problems that would otherwise have been missed.

What should be in your customer satisfaction questionnaire and how can you communicate directly with customers? This all depends on your goals and what exactly you’re trying to find out or improve. Here are a few common ways that businesses use customer satisfaction surveys.

Determining product or service performance

Surveying clients who haven’t used your services for months to identify what went wrong and what you can do to win them back. A customer feedback survey can also be a good tool to obtain external feedback on employee performance and how each person’s role is tied up with client satisfaction.

Collecting product feedback

Creating an online survey questionnaire to send to customers who have just made a purchase. Did that new and revolutionary tent fabric weather the elements? The results could reveal valuable insights into how to improve product features or address design flaws.

Developing new products

Identify opportunities for new products by using a customer satisfaction survey to see what expectations aren’t met by existing choices.

Measuring customer loyalty

Surveys can help you discover your most loyal customers and influencers. Brand champions, power users, brand loyalists, brand heroes. No matter what you call them, they’re your answer to knowing exactly what you’re doing right, what to keep doing and what to start doing. Showing customers that you’re listening goes a long way.

Improve the customer experience

Customer satisfaction surveys are a great for driving regular communication between you and your customers. They can act as a reminder that you’re there – and that you value their business. Poll them on them how they’re doing and what suggestions they might have. Also consider offering loyal customers freebies or rewards for answering your surveys.

Conduct market research surveys

Do you want to develop a new service area? Do you need to make sure your marketing is targeting the right consumer niche? Get to know potential markets by first sending out an online survey to find out more about demographics, such as age, gender, income, hobbies, etc.

Establish performance goals

Now that you’ve got all of this great actionable data, you need to ensure that the feedback is implemented. Use customer feedback surveys to reach back out to customers and measure your progress over regular periods of time. Leverage what you’ve learned from this valuable data to rake in revenue and improve customer and employee satisfaction and loyalty. Compare results over time to see how you’ve improved.

Management reporting

Data from customer satisfaction questionnaires can also help managers identify key drivers and metrics they should track across departments and roles.

Keep your employees engaged

When you offer excellent customer service, you’re much more likely to find and retain customers. Make employee engagement a priority to improve customer satisfaction and your level of customer service. Regularly checking in with employees to see what makes them tick—and creating performance benchmarks—can go a long way toward keeping your customers happy.

In addition to using methodologically-sound questions in the key areas already mentioned, you’ll also want to follow these tips for creating a great consumer survey.

1. Be clear

Say you’re surveying on customer satisfaction for a hotel stay. Don’t make your respondents guess what you mean by asking generally about different aspects of their stay. Tell them what the standard should be. Ask if the room service was prompt, if the swimming pool was clean, if the receptionist was friendly, if their bed was comfortable, and so on.

2. Be specific

Don’t ask questions about broad concepts or ideas; ask about specific concepts or ideas (i.e. being “a good person” is general; being “polite to waiters” is specific). Specific questions and answers will make it easier to identify things to improve.

3. Ask a lot of questions

Asking multiple specific questions instead of one general question will not only make your questions easier to answer for your respondents, but it will also make your data easier to analyse and act on. Did your waiter let you know about the specials of the day? Did he take your order promptly? Was he able to answer all of your questions? Was he able to coordinate the timing of your courses? Just be careful not to ask too many questions. We’ve seen consumers’ response rates go down when answering surveys becomes a burden.