To turn potential buyers into raving fans, you need to treat customer satisfaction as a critical element of your business operations.
Doing this will help you know what works for your customers—and doing it consistently will ensure they are satisfied with your product and brand interactions. You’ll also earn loyalty from your customers and cement your position as the go-to brand in your niche.
On the flip side, unsatisfied customers are bad for business. After a bad experience, 97% of your customers will not do business with you again, therefore limiting the number of customers you can acquire through your marketing campaigns.
A customer satisfaction survey helps you know what elements of your product you need to work on to improve it and what you need to do to deliver a great buying experience across different touch points.
In this article, we will provide you with practical tips on how to create an effective customer satisfaction survey.
What is a customer satisfaction survey?
A customer satisfaction survey is a set of questions that you ask your customers to gauge their level of satisfaction with your business.
Woorise is the easiest way to create lead generation landing pages, forms, quizzes, surveys, viral giveaways and popups to help you grow your business from a single platform. Explore templates
These questions allow your customers to share what they think and feel about your products and brand interactions. Customer satisfaction is not only reliant on the quality of your products and the brand experience you deliver, but also your customers’ expectations before they interact with you.
These expectations act as the benchmark that defines their level of satisfaction. Your customer’s previous experiences, your reviews, industry standards and trends, the promises you make, and your prices all influence what customers expect from you and, by extension, their level of satisfaction.
Here are a few examples of instances where your customer satisfaction survey will help you know whether you’re meeting your customer’s expectations:
Identify customer needs
A customer satisfaction survey will help you understand whether you’re meeting customers’ expectations and, if you’re not, what you need to avoid disappointing them. For example, 60% of customer support teams provide omnichannel support.
If your competitors lack this and prompt customers to switch brands, then a customer satisfaction survey will help be proactive about using different channels to support your customers.
What other customers are saying about you
The quality of reviews you have will determine whether a potential customer chooses to buy from you or not. If they choose to buy from you, you need to know whether you lived up to their expectations.
Your prices
Prices and the promises you make also shape customer expectations. A higher price point means that customers expect more from you. That means you will want to know what your customers think about their purchase and address any instances of buyer remorse.
What makes a good customer satisfaction survey?
Before we dive into the tips for writing an effective customer satisfaction survey, let’s first break down the key elements that make a good customer questionnaire.
Clear and specific objectives
The first key element of a good customer satisfaction survey is having clear and specific objectives. Your survey should have a clearly defined purpose and specific goals that you want to achieve through the survey. For example, you can set a few objectives to measure, such as overall customer satisfaction or the effectiveness of your customer service team.
Relevant and well-crafted questions
Next, make sure to have relevant questions that customers can identify right away. For example, create questions that give insights into what your customers think and feel about your products or services. Make a statement about whether your products have solved their problems or they have issues with them. When crafting a question, avoid biased language because it often leaves a bad impression of your brand.
Short and concise
A good customer satisfaction survey should also be short. People are busy, and the last thing they want is to spend 20 minutes filling out a survey. The longer survey will drive people away from giving honest feedback. Keep your survey short, focused, and to the point. That way, you’ll be more likely to get a higher response rate.
Different ways to measure customer satisfaction
The method you choose to measure customer satisfaction depends on the kind of customer feedback you’re looking for and the business objectives you want to achieve. There are three basic ways to measure customer satisfaction:
Customer satisfaction score
This is the most common way to measure customer satisfaction. You calculate the percentage of satisfied customers by taking the number of customers who said they were satisfied with your company’s product and dividing it by the total number of customers you surveyed.
Customer effort score
This is a more recent method of measuring customer satisfaction. It reflects the effort customers have to put into receiving their product. The lower the score, the higher the level of customer satisfaction. Customer effort scores can help you improve your checkout and onboarding process by helping you identify the hurdles you need to get rid of.
Net Promoter Score
This score measures how likely customers are to recommend a company’s products to their friends and anyone else they care about.
The responses from your Net Promoter Score fall into three categories:
- Detractors (0-6): They won’t recommend you to anyone. These customers aren’t always happy or satisfied with the product.
- Passives (7-8): They’re happy with the product, but won’t necessarily recommend you to others.
- Promoters (9-10): They are satisfied with your product and they will happily recommend you to others.
Steps to create a customer satisfaction survey
There are several ways to conduct customer satisfaction surveys. Popular ways of conducting customer surveys include sending out a survey via email, your website, or in-app popups. Here are the steps to follow when creating your customer satisfaction survey:
1. Understanding your audience
First and foremost, it is crucial to know who your audience is and understand their traits and behaviors. You need to find out who you’re targeting and what their needs and expectations are before designing the survey. That’s because understanding your audience will help you write relevant and meaningful questions to them, and when they find the questions relatable, they will have an easier time responding to your survey.
If you don’t learn what your audience needs, you waste time writing irrelevant or confusing questions that eventually don’t get many responses. The lack of the target audience’s understanding often leads to a low response rate and inaccurate results. For example, if you’re targeting millennials, you should avoid using outdated terminology that may be unfamiliar to them. They won’t give honest answers when they don’t understand what the survey is about.
That’s why you should always begin your survey by identifying your target audience. Start by looking at your existing customer base, and answer questions like: what are their demographics, interests, and behaviors? You can also conduct market research to gain a better understanding of your target customers. Once you have a clear picture of who your audience is, you can start writing your survey questions to meet their needs and expectations.
2. Setting objectives and goals
Setting objectives and goals is critical when designing a customer satisfaction survey because they provide direction and focus for any business to achieve. A survey goal ensures the questionnaire is targeted and relevant to your business’s long-term needs. If you set an objective, you can write questions that easily align with your purposes.
So, how do you define your survey goals?
Identifying your survey objectives and goals requires careful planning to say the least. Without a thoughtful plan, you may ruin the whole survey operation because it simply doesn’t meet your needs: gaining honest customer feedback. This is why you don’t put an irrational objective in your survey. Instead, create goals that are measurable and achievable.
For example, here are some examples of what survey objectives could be for some businesses:
- Measure customer satisfaction with the quality of our products/services.
- Determine the level of customer loyalty to our brand.
- Identify areas of improvement in our customer service.
You can then design questions for the first goal by including a rating-system review that allows people to just tap their feeling towards your products/services on the number of stars they want to leave. This is a simple yet entertaining survey method to urge customers to leave feedback on your business.
3. Choose the type of survey to use
There are different types of surveys, but the most popular fall into two broad categories:
Quantitative survey
This survey type measures attitudes and opinions on different topics. A Likert scale survey is a quantitative survey that has five- or seven-point scales that respondents use to answer questions about a topic, with “strongly agree” at the top and “strongly disagree” at the bottom.
Qualitative surveys
This survey type is used to measure attitudes and opinions on topics, but it also looks at how people feel about their experiences with them. You can get qualitative feedback by asking open-ended questions that allow customers to share their thoughts and feelings about your product and the experiences they have with your company.
Ideally, your customer satisfaction survey will be a mix of both qualitative and quantitative questions. You can ask customers a few questions about themselves to ease them into the survey and one or two questions that will provide you with qualitative information.
This website feedback survey is a combination of questions that require a quantitative response (a rating scale), as seen here:
…and qualitative responses (an open-ended question), as you can see here:
4. Determine how long your survey will be
The length of your survey will depend on what you want to know about the customer and what type of information you need from them.
Some surveys may only take a few minutes while others may take hours depending on the content and number of questions asked.
When designing your questions, you want to avoid asking too many questions. Too many questions lead to survey fatigue, meaning you may not get the feedback you need to improve. Or, your respondents won’t provide you with any feedback at all.
With customer satisfaction surveys, you want to limit yourself to four questions or fewer. For example, you can have one open-ended question, and the rest of your questions meant to collect data will help identify customer segments that are providing you with feedback.
5. Formulate your survey questions
Knowing what questions to ask is one thing. Knowing how to formulate these questions is another.
A common pitfall to avoid is using leading and loaded questions. Formulating your questions to lead your respondent to provide specific responses means that you’re not going to get constructive feedback.
Examples of leading questions:
- How do you feel about our wonderful product?
- What do you think about our excellent customer service?
You may have a great product and a team that goes above and beyond to provide support even outside business hours.
However, these questions coerce the customer into shaping their feedback based on how you described your product and support when asking the question instead of what they think. Any attempt at offering honest feedback leaves them feeling guilty.
On the other hand, loaded questions generalize the customer’s experience or put them in a bind meaning that they cannot provide honest feedback. They’re also confusing to your customers and they end up feeling compelled to choose from the options available.
Examples of loaded questions:
- Every element on this page works as you expected, right?
- Do you still like using our product?
Both questions assume that customer responses are binary. It’s either they like you or they don’t, which isn’t always the case. Customers who find such questions are pushed to lie because there is no other option which affects the quality of feedback that you get.
Here’s how to avoid that to formulate the balanced questions:
- Have someone else go over your questions: A fresh pair of eyes will find it easy to spot bias in your questions so that you can address it before sending out your survey.
- Use simple language that resonates with your customers: Your customers use a specific tone and style when explaining their problems to you. Listen to your sales calls to tune into their tone and word choice then use it in your survey questions to reflect how they speak.
- Provide a way out: To avoid pushing your customers up against the wall by forcing them to answer your questions in a specific way, include neutral answers to questions such as (I prefer not to answer or All of the above or None of the above).
- Use conditional logic: This allows you to show your customers relevant questions depending on the answers they provide in the first few questions. It gives them space to provide you with the kind of feedback you need based on what they think without coercion.
6. Designing your survey
When you’ve done writing the survey, there is another step to optimize it: designing. Looks always catch the attention first before the message. Whether you like it or not, if your questionnaire isn’t visually appealing, people don’t bother checking it out let alone taking the survey honestly.
A well-designed survey can help you captivate audiences, achieve a higher response rate, reduce respondent fatigue, and increase the quality of your data. By using appropriate fonts, colors, and graphics, you can create a visually appealing survey that is easy to read and understand. That’s why designing your survey is as important as structuring it.
The design of your survey can significantly impact the response rate. Customers always prefer an attractive and user-friendly survey to a plain-looking one. Here are some tips for designing your survey:
Keep it visually appealing
Your survey should be visually appealing, with a professional look and feel. Use a clean and simple design, with easy-to-read fonts and colors, such as Arial or Calibri. Make sure to avoid using fancy or decorative fonts that might be hard to read.
Keep it user-friendly
Make your survey user-friendly by keeping it short and easy to navigate. Use progress bars to show respondents how far they have progressed through the survey. You should also check whether your survey is compatible with different devices, such as smartphones and tablets.
Use images and multimedia
Using images and multimedia can make your survey more engaging and memorable. However, it’s essential to use images and multimedia relevant to your survey questions. Use contrasting colors for your questions and answer choices to make them stand out. Also, use graphics sparingly, as they can distract from the survey questions.
7. Pre-testing your survey
Lastly, always pre-testing your survey so you can find potential issues before you distribute it. Pre-testing your survey is also a crucial step to ensure that your questions are clear, unambiguous, and relevant to your objectives. You can then gain valuable insights into how well your survey is designed and whether the questions are effective for your audience.
Before distributing your survey, select a small group of respondents who match your target audience. Ask them to complete your survey and provide feedback on the clarity, relevance, and ease of use of your questions. This will help identify any issues with the survey design or questions.
8. Send out your survey and analyze your responses
With your questions ready, pick a channel to deploy your survey. In addition to helping you design your survey, Woorise integrates with other tools in your tech stack to help you deploy your survey.
It integrates with email marketing tools such as MailChimp, ActiveCampaign, HubSpot, ConvertKit, Aweber among others so you can deploy your survey with any of these tools.
Use the Zapier integration to set triggers that go off and send a survey once your customers complete a specific action, such as making a new purchase or renewing their subscription.
You can also use chatbots to send out a survey to collect feedback on how useful its responses have been to your customers in an effort to find ways to improve it.
Once you’ve collected your feedback, analyze it to identify major themes. Use a word cloud to analyze your open-ended responses to help you see what customers are talking about, and narrow down what you need to focus on.
Your quantitative responses will provide you with averages that reflect a specific customer segment. That should provide you with useful insights into who responded to your survey and the type of feedback they provided.
Conclusion
Take a look at how often you go back to buying from your favorite brands and recommend them to friends, family, and strangers online. You’ll quickly notice that customer satisfaction is the cornerstone of delivering a great customer experience.
We’ve talked about how to create a customer satisfaction survey, what shapes customer expectations, and how to formulate your questions.
The questions you ask will determine the number of responses you get and the quality of responses you get. And to do that, you want to ask balanced questions that provide your customers with the freedom to provide you with comprehensive feedback.
To get started with your first customer satisfaction survey, use any of these survey templates from Woorise and tweak the questions to align with what you need.
