How to Create an Effective Customer Satisfaction Survey

Create an Effective Customer Satisfaction Survey

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’ll explain how to create a

to help you collect the data and insights you need to deliver a great buying experience.

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.  

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. 

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. 

Woorise Net Promoter Score NPS template

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. Clarify your objectives

You’ll need to be clear on the objectives of your survey and make sure it aligns with your business objectives.

We’ve already talked about some of the elements that shape customer expectations in the previous section. For example, if you’re looking to improve the quality of your products, then your satisfaction survey needs to focus on asking what customers think about your product and integrating their feedback into product improvements. 

If you’re looking to improve the overall user experience to help customers proceed down the sales funnel, then your survey needs to focus on user experience at different touch points. For example, the interactions customers have with your website, your customer service agents, and your chatbot will help you know if they’re finding the information they need and whether it is useful. 

2. 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:

Website Feedback Survey quantitative response rating scale

…and qualitative responses (an open-ended question), as you can see here: 

Website Feedback Survey qualitative responses open ended question

3. 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. 

4. 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. 

5. 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. 

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