A customer survey is a fantastic tool for making sure you keep up to speed with the wants and expectations of your target market, as well as exposing any areas of your customer service that you might need to improve. But have you ever received one that took so long to complete, or asked such difficult questions, that you gave up halfway through?
Don’t deter your customers from providing you with valuable feedback. Instead, follow these customer survey best practices to get as much engagement as possible.
Tell your customers why you’re asking for their opinion
If people are aware of your goal, they are more likely to feel comfortable responding to your survey, and you have a better chance of getting focused, helpful feedback.
Keep your survey short and to the point
Ask the minimum number of questions you need to obtain the information you want. While a survey might seem like a convenient time to gather customer information, if you pad it out with unnecessary questions that don’t seem relevant to your topic, you risk losing your customer halfway through.
Leave the demographic questions until last
Customers might feel a bit affronted if you immediately ask them about their income or gender. Start your survey with easy, light questions and work your way up to the more personal ones.
Use mainly close-ended questions
In a survey, close-ended questions are those with a multi-choice answer range for the customer to select. They are quick to answer and deliver data that is easy to quantify. Open-ended questions require your customer to respond in their own words. While this can result in unexpected and valuable responses, they also take a lot longer to answer. If you’re interested in open-ended responses, you can often put an optional comment box beneath a close-ended question in case a customer has something specific they want to mention.
Keep it balanced and unbiased
Make sure your questions don’t lead your customers toward a particular response or give them no option to provide a negative response. When using multi-choice questions, provide a balanced scale – for example: great, good, average, poor, terrible.
One question at a time
Be careful not to request feedback on more than one thing in a single question. For example, “Is our store easy to find and open at convenient hours?” may be difficult to answer for a customer who can find you easily but not during the times that they want to shop.
Take your survey before sending it out
Once you’ve put your survey together, take it yourself to get an idea of the customer experience. Make a note of how long it took to complete and any questions that came across as irrelevant or difficult to answer so that you can update it as necessary.
Respond promptly to strong survey feedback
Once your survey responses start coming in, be sure to address any strong negative feedback immediately and personally. Similarly, it’s nice to send a personal thank-you to anyone who offers you a compliment!
For more great tips check out our other blog posts
