How to Create a Customer Satisfaction Survey
Today’s business landscape is more competitive than ever before, which means that customer feedback has become a vital tool for any organisation. Customer satisfaction surveys play an important role in maintaining and improving customer satisfaction, allowing you to gain insights about your customers and find out what opinions they hold about your brand.
Once you’ve gathered information about how your customers view your brand, the next step is to use it to optimise and personalise the customer experience. Get in touch to find out how Red Letter Days Corporate can help you boost customer satisfaction and earn repeat business.
What is a Customer Satisfaction Survey?
A customer satisfaction survey is a questionnaire that asks people how they think and feel about a particular business. It’s used by companies to gain insights into different aspects of a product or service, such as its branding, performance, or overall customer experience.
Feedback from these surveys can then be used to find areas of improvement and gain an advantage over competitors. This is not only beneficial to the company but also to the customers they serve. In fact, 77% of consumers view brands more favourably if they seek out and apply customer feedback
A customer satisfaction survey can help you:
Ultimately, a customer satisfaction survey produces invaluable feedback about your company that can be used to improve the business and boost performance. The more satisfied your customers are, the greater the chances of growing your business.
How to Conduct Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Now you know what a customer survey is, it’s important to understand how you conduct one to achieve the best results. The steps below outline how to produce a customer survey, so you can gather insights to inform best practices at your company.
1. Set Clear Objectives
It’s important you define your survey objectives and understand what you want to achieve. It’s obvious that your primary objective is to find out more about your customers and what they think, but try to dig a little deeper and be more specific in your goals.
For example, common customer satisfaction survey objectives may include:
2. Define Target Audience
The next step is to decide who your target audience is. This will largely be determined by the objectives you’ve set and whether there is a specific segment of your customer base you want to target.
You could segment your customers by:
Alternatively, you may want to get feedback from a broad range of customers across a variety of segments or your entire customer base.
3. Design Your Questions
Relevant, well-worded questions are the keys to unlocking your survey’s full potential. It’s vital you provide clear, unbiased questions that are not only easy to understand for your customers but also support you in your goals to gather as much insightful feedback as possible.
To do this, you should consider keeping questions specific and concise, using a combination of open-ended and closed-ended questions, yes/no questions, and consistent rating scales where applicable – avoiding leading questions and assumptions.
As a guide to get started, here are 10 customer survey example questions:
- On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your experience using this product?
- How likely would you recommend this company to others?
- Are you likely to use this brand in the future?
- How can we improve your experience with our company?
- What one word would you use to describe this company and why?
- How long have you been using our products?
- Why did you choose our company over others?
- Rate your level of satisfaction when using our products
- What’s your main priority when using our products?
- What’s working for you and why?
4. Structure the Survey
There are various formats you can choose from for your customer satisfaction survey, all of which have their own set of advantages and disadvantages. Whichever format works best for you, it’s important to make sure questions are ordered in a logical, coherent fashion to avoid any confusion.
Some of the most popular ways to conduct surveys include:
5. Choose a Survey Tool
If you do choose to go down the online route, then you’ll need to select the right survey tool for your needs. Survey tools allow you to conduct your customer survey quickly and accurately, while keeping costs low and ensuring the survey is easy to understand.
Choosing the best survey tool can be a minefield, so we’ve listed a few of our favourites to help your decision-making.
6. Pilot the Survey
A survey pilot allows you to test that the survey works as intended, both in terms of functionality and the feedback you receive.
It means you can detect issues with how the survey has been constructed and distributed, and if there are problems with the way the feedback is collected. By highlighting these issues, you’re then able to improve the customer satisfaction survey to ensure the final version is the best it can be.
7. Collect the Information
Next, you’ll need to collect all the information you’ve received as feedback. Data collection is relatively straightforward if you use an online tool to conduct the survey, while in-person and over-the-phone survey methods will be more time consuming.
Whatever survey format you choose, you must ensure you have robust data collection practices in place and you are fully prepared before you start receiving survey responses.
Another important consideration is the Data Protection Act 2018, which controls how personal information is used by organisations, businesses, or the government. Make sure you familiarise yourself with this and put processes in place to comply with it.
8. Analyse the Data
The penultimate step in conducting a customer satisfaction survey is analysing the data. This crucial step allows you to make sense of the results and present them in a way that’s easy to understand. If you nail this step, then you’ll find that acting on the results and using them to your company’s advantage is a lot simpler.
According to SurveyMonkey, one of the leading online survey tools, the six steps to calculating survey results are:
- Analyse the results using your top survey questions.
- Determine the sample size to ensure the survey is statistically viable.
- Filter your results using crosstabulation.
- Benchmark your data against previous data, competitors, or other products and services you offer.
- Crunch the numbers accurately.
- Make some conclusions to help guide your response to the survey results.
9. Act on Survey Results
Finally, it’s time to start actioning your findings from the survey and improve your business offering. When acting on the feedback, it’s important to have the customers’ best interests at heart, so you can effectively come up with ways to improve customer relations.
How you react to the feedback will depend on your objectives, but here are some ideas to set your creative juices flowing.
- Apply the customer feedback to your products and services and look for ways to improve.
- Show you care by providing incentives and offers that are tailored to individual feedback (we can help create bespoke packages to improve the customer experience).
- Follow up on survey results and reach out to customers to discuss any concerns they might have.
- Offer a prize or discount to customers who have successfully completed the survey.
- Use your findings to motivate and incentivise staff at your company.
How Red Letter Days Corporate Can Help Improve Customer Satisfaction
Now you know more about the pivotal role a customer satisfaction survey can play in building customer relations and boosting business performance, contact us to find out how we can help to further improve customer satisfaction.
A positive customer experience is the bedrock of any successful business and you need to ensure that your customers know you care. While good quality products and services are integral to this, the role of incentives such as corporate gifting should not be understated.
While most customers are increasingly not as loyal to just one business, they are loyal to what your business stands for. Ultimately, customers want to see that you share their beliefs and it’s reflected in your products and services and the way you interact with them personally.
If you want to strengthen your customer loyalty to retain and attract more consumers, then get in touch with a friendly member of our team to see how we can help.