Creating Perfect Customer Surveys

One of the best ways to help any business improve its products or services is through the use of customer surveys – as it provides businesses with an opportunity to understand the thoughts of customers. It can provide insights into which aspects of the business customers are happy with as well as highlight areas that can be improved. Taking the ‘Kaizen’ approach to continuous improvement, businesses can use the results of surveys to reflect upon their interactions with customers and make changes to meet customer expectations and demands.

With that being said, the focus of today’s blog is to highlight various ways in which a business can create customer surveys that generate valuable and actionable information.

A common mistake associated with customer surveys centres around having too many questions for respondents to complete and therefore increasing the abandonment rates. Businesses should focus their customer surveys on being concise and to the point, rather than creating a survey which is really in-depth but takes 30 minutes to complete. The best surveys are generally ones where the user can complete it within 2-3 minutes.

Asking questions for the sake of asking questions is never a good idea when it comes to customer surveys. Every question should have a clear objective and a distinct reason for being there. Since most customers will only be prepared to fill in a survey for a few minutes it is vital that businesses only ask questions which are relevant and meet the end goal. Eliminating all unnecessary questions will reduce abandonment rates and result in highly targeted responses.

A good customer survey will include a combination of multiple choice questions as well as open ended questions which afford the user the opportunity to give longer, more insightful responses. It is always recommended to start any customer survey with a series of short questions to create a sense of progress before ending with 1 or 2 open ended questions so users can elaborate on their thoughts.

Biased phrasing and loading of questions is a major problem when it comes to constructing the right types of questions in a customer survey. For example, questions which lead respondents to a particular answer due to bias or makes assumptions can generally lead to inaccurate responses from customers.

The day of the week a survey is delivered is important to maximising the response rate amongst customers. For example, recent research carried out by Survey Monkey found users typically responded better to surveys on Monday, Friday and Sunday. Therefore, having an awareness of the best days of the week to deliver customer surveys is important to maximising the open and click through rates.

Incentivising the completion of a customer survey through a discount or giveaway can increase response rates by up to 20 percent. While many businesses express valid concerns around the quality of respondents being diminished due to a ‘freebie’, research has shown this is not the case. However, it is important for businesses to make any incentive desirable for customers as well as being something which the business can afford to give away.

There are a number of popular ways that businesses can choose to implement customer surveys. For example, having a customer survey instore is a method we often see utilised by retail businesses to capture customer feedback. In contrast, many businesses are looking at delivering customer surveys via email or using a form on their website to capture customer thoughts. More recently, we have seen many businesses turn to social media as a medium to connect and engage with customers on a personal level. Choosing the right type of delivery method for a customer survey will largely be dependent on the nature of the business as well as the demographic of the audience base. The key thing to remember is to ensure the customer survey is accessible, fair and provides the business with data that can be used to improve processes.

As we have seen throughout this blog, there a number of areas which a business should factor into their customer surveys to guarantee high response rate with quality responses.

To find out how Eazi-Apps can help your business create a winning customer survey within your mobile app, please contact us today.