5 Steps To Building An Effective Customer Survey For Small Businesses

Happy and satisfied customers are the heart and soul of any business. They are what moulds your growth from a funnel into a flywheel. The success of any business is a direct outcome of their customer’s satisfaction. In the fast-moving world, where customer retention is of essence, the understanding of what your customers want is unparallel and are now leveraging the customer surveys to gain an edge over their competitors.

What is a customer satisfaction survey?

A customer satisfaction survey is a set of questions mapped out to help businesses determine their customers’ perspectives, feedback, and viewpoints about the brands’ products and services. Customer satisfaction surveys allow companies to improve products strategically, optimize user experience, and catalyze their business’s sustainability and growth. When well-designed and perceived efficiently, effective customer surveys serve as an excellent mechanism to ascertain customers’ opinions about your brand and business.

So, before you start bombarding the google search engine, how can you create an effective customer survey? What software should you use? And what makes a good survey, and more, we have you covered!

To help you ensure that the time and resources you invest in creating and running surveys pay off and you get a reasonable response rate, here are a few of the best practices you should consider.

• Define the purpose

Defining the purpose of your survey and identifying ‘Why’ is a cardinal step as it has the potential to dictate every decision you make. Having a clear and attainable purpose will help you design the questions specifically tailored and customized to suit your goals. It’s the end goal of the survey against which the survey’s success can be compared.

• Keep it short and concise

While you may be deeply committed to your survey, the same cannot be expected from your customers. Fishing for responses in a world of distracted individuals possessing blurred attention spans, a long trail of questions will not only affect the focus but can also influence the completion rate of the survey. To further keep the responses within the scope of your goal, it is essential to inform them about the purpose of the survey. Finally, respect your customer’s time and stick to the couple of minutes you had requested for.

• Pique interest with Incentives

A little bait goes a long way. Requesting your customers to fill out the survey might be a big ask but encouraging them to do so in exchange for discounts, offers, gift cards, or sweepstakes — can prove fruitful. However, as appealing as it might sound, it may have a downside where people would fill out the survey form for the offering and not provide honest responses. So, defining a targeted customer base can help you gather accurate and genuine answers.

• Make every question count

The idea behind the survey is to gain meaningful insights, so each question should add value and relate directly to the purpose of the survey. Even the questions need to be designed clear, carefully worded and specific, eliminating the room for any confusion. Having straightforward and short questions enhances the accuracy of responses. The question’s wording needs to be focused, non-leading and far off from bias.

• Avoid industry Jargon

Another tip that goes a long way is the use of language and terminology that is easily understood by your customer base. For example, maintaining a plain and straightforward tone by avoiding the use of industry jargon have the potential to keep your audience hooked to your survey, gathering honest responses.

• Give your customers a voice

It is also essential to write survey questions that motivate customers to share their valuable feedback. While the quantitative questions can be more appealing as it demands less thought and time, the open-ended survey is equally important to interpret what additional actionable opinions are.

• Make them feel heard

A good survey is completed when you act upon the responses and feedback you have received. Elevate the customer experience by contacting them about their input and rectifying the issue. At the same time, offer incentives to let the customer know how much you value their opinions and recommendations.

Bottom Line

Creating an effective customer survey is a great way to earn customer loyalty, make informed decisions, and turn your clients into advocates for your brand.

So, let’s skip to the best part, as our team of highly professionalized experts at Market Xcel are here not only to simplify the process of creating effective surveys but also to make the entire experience seamless.