Customer surveys are a great way to engage with your customer. Whether the aim is to get their opinions on your existing products or services, look for areas in need of improvement, see whether there is a market for a new idea, or just to check in and see what they’re concerned about at the moment, a customer survey can get you the information you need in an easily digestible form.
Asking your customers what they think is one of the best ways to make sure your ideas are worth implementing. If you decide that customer surveys are the way to go, there are a few things to keep in mind:
- Be very clear about what you want to achieve
It’s really important that before you even start writing questions that you’re very clear about what you want to find out. It’s very easy to get carried away and start creating questions to cover a range of things but doing so will only muddy your results. Make sure each question has a specific point and make sure that all questions flow in a logical way within the field you’re questioning.
- Keep the number of questions to a minimum
If you make a survey too long, people won’t feel they have the time to take the survey. With that in mind, it’s a good idea to tell people how long the survey will take in your email, and to have a progress bar if the survey is more than a couple of questions long
- Don’t have too many free-text questions
These are my pet hate in surveys and I see them a lot. I understand that you want to give the respondent an opportunity to give their views, but too many free text questions make me feel like whoever designed the survey couldn’t be bothered coming up with options. If you must give people an opportunity to enter in their own answers, have an “Other” option with a text box.
- Be careful not to use leading questions
Make sure that your questions don’t subtly direct people to certain responses. For example “Is the service too expensive” will probably get mostly Yes answers. Whereas if you asked “What do you consider to be a reasonable price for the service” then give a couple of options, you’re more likely to get a more honest range of answers.
- Offer a small reward for completing the survey
If you want to get a lot of responses, you need to offer something. Whether that’s a lead magnet, access to the survey results (assuming they are not confidential) or a discount on products or services. You’re far more likely to get completed surveys from people who have an incentive.
- Give the customer an opportunity to ask for what they want or make any other comments
If you’re going to ask customers for their opinion, it’s always nice to give them an opportunity to tell you something you didn’t ask. You may be focussing on one aspect of your business, but find from customer responses that it’s something altogether different that is important to most of them.
Once you’ve got the survey all set, send it out to your customers, follow up with one or two reminders if necessary and then you can sit back and watch the responses come rolling in. The more effort you’ve put into constructing the customer survey and creating useful and to the point questions, the more responses you should get and the easier it should be to collate and analyse the data, making customer surveys well worth the effort.
