Using Surveys to Track and Improve Customer Satisfaction

Using Surveys to Track and Improve Customer Satisfaction

If Tolstoy were writing about customer service, perhaps he would have written, All happy customers are alike; each unhappy customer is unhappy in their own way. Satisfied customers are getting what they wanted from your product or service. They will become your promoters and brand evangelists, recommending you to their friends, family, and strangers on the internet through online review sites. Dissatisfied customers, on the other hand, have hit a snag somewhere during their interaction with your brand. The same tools that allow your promoters to sing your praises also create the possibility for unhappy customers to vent their frustrations loudly and publicly. The key to turning a negative into a positive and improving your customers overall satisfaction is catching issues that might trigger such venting and addressing them as quickly as possible. Surveys are a powerful tool for keeping tabs on how your customers are feeling about your product or service. Regular surveying opens a channel of communication that runs directly from the customer to those in your organization who can make the changes. These changes will make your service better, which will in turn increase customer satisfaction. It s simply good business to use customer satisfaction surveys! These changes will improve your service, which will increase customer satisfaction, which increases revenue. Cap Gemini finds that customers with a strong attachment to your brand deliver a 23% premium over the average customer in revenue. So, the happier your customers, the more they ll spend with you. All happy customers are alike; each unhappy customer is unhappy in their own way.

Before You Survey Surveying your customers is one of the best ways to measure and find trends in the aspects of your service that are causing trouble before they become large-scale problems. Before you send out that first survey asking for feedback, there are two steps that you have to take behind the scenes: 1. Know Your Purpose Respondents are more likely to answer surveys when there is a perceived benefit. In the case of Customer Satisfaction Surveys, the perceived benefit is potentially driving real improvements to your products and service. By establishing your survey s purpose for example, improving the features of your software and sharing that purpose with your respondents, you increase the likelihood that someone will respond. This isn t a difficult process. In fact, it s as easy as adding an introductory message to the first page of your survey stating how you want to improve and that all responses are valuable to you. 2. Be Ready to Act All of the constructive feedback in the world won t help your business if you re not ready to act. If an unhappy customer fills out a survey venting about a problem and it doesn t generate a response, you ve compounded one negative experience with another. Instead, set up a system to handle the customer feedback you receive. Someone should be in charge of reviewing the completed surveys, passing along the findings, and, if necessary, reaching out to customers directly to respond to their questions or concerns. In our hyper-connected world, customers want to be heard. Being able to respond is the first step toward taking a negative customer experience turning it into a positive.

Keys for Designing a Customer Satisfaction Survey When you create a new survey in SurveyGizmo, you automatically have access to our library of templates, including one for Customer Satisfaction Surveys. While you can use this template right out of the box, we recommend customizing the questions and logic to fit with your business and goals. You will get the best results if you keep your survey direct and to the point. Aim for an average completion time of under 2 minutes. Any surveys that take longer than 11 minutes to complete result in significant abandonment rates. While your wording may vary, these are some key questions you should be asking: Based on your past experience with our business, how satisfied are you with our products and services? (Scale 0-10 where 0 is Not Satisfied and 10 is Very Satisfied) What were you the most satisfied with in your last experience with us? What were you the least satisfied with in your last experience with us? What could we improve in order to increase your satisfaction with our products and services? These questions get to the heart of why a customer is satisfied or dissatisfied with their experience and are open-ended enough to offer you unscripted suggestions for improvement. It s almost always better to ask for direct, actionable feedback rather than to only ask respondents to rate their experience on a Scale of 0-10. While nice to know, a numerical score won t tell you what actions can be taken to improve that score. When responses start to roll in, reply! Reaching out to customers who have had a negative experience gives you an opportunity to perform customer service recovery and, hopefully, stop a negative review from circulating around the internet.

Getting the Best Response Rates A number of factors influence whether or not people will take your survey. To get the most out of your customer service surveys, keep these five factors in mind: Audience Frequency Timing Perceived Benefit Audience Does your customer survey actually pertain to all of your customers, or just a portion of them? If your survey is about a particular product or service, make sure it isn t sent to people who have not experienced that particular aspect. Always segment your customer list to include only those to whom the survey pertains. This will earn you a better response rate and, more importantly, it will give you better data. When surveying about a particular product or service, it s good practice to use screening questions at the beginning of the survey. These questions, with disqualifying logic, will ensure that people don t waste their time or skew your data if they don t actually have experience with the product or service you re collecting data on. Frequency While it s important to collect data from your customers frequently, it s important not to overdo it. If you are planning on conducting multiple surveys, you may want to survey only a portion of your customers with each one. To avoid survey fatigue, a good rule of thumb is to survey your customers no more than once every three months. Timing Any touch point is a potential opportunity to solicit feedback, but the timing of your survey is key. In general, survey response rates are higher and more accurate if they are administered within 24 hours of the customer interaction, which is when the experience is still fresh in the customer s mind.

For product feedback, consider a longer period of time so that customers have time to try the product. If you know your customer typically uses a product within two or three days of purchase, wait until day four to ask their opinion. Perceived Benefit Respondents are more likely to respond if they believe their feedback will result in real improvements. Introduce the purpose of your Customer Satisfaction Survey at the beginning to let customers know their feedback will be seen and acted upon. Distributing Your Survey You outlined your customer satisfaction survey, now you have to find customers to take it. In planning your distribution methods, think back to your survey s purpose. If you want to know what a customer thought of a product, send them your survey in a follow up email a few days after a purchase. This will give them some time to play with the product and get to know it. In this example, you want to make sure that the person you email has actually purchased the product or service you are asking them about. Use disqualifying logic early in your survey to make sure that the right people are answering. This will improve your response rate and the quality of those responses. If you are looking for feedback on your online shopping experience, then a website intercept will be an effective means of getting responses in the moment. While it s important to ask for feedback often, don t overdo it. Remember: website intercept survey shouldn t appear every single time a person clicks on your site, just as you shouldn t send an automated email to every one of your customers every single week. That s a surefire way to annoy and alienate your customer base.

Reviewing Your Results Your responses are great material for driving incremental improvements because they give you a window into your customers wants, needs, and pain points. To get the most out of the feedback, however, you need to be able to look at all of your data as a whole. This can be a challenge when you are using multiple textbox question types. Open Text Analysis is a tool that reads all of the text that customers type, and then tells you how often particular words or phrases appear. Because the process is automated, the results can give you insight into patterns that might not be obvious to a human reviewer. The SurveyGizmo team, for example, is always on the lookout for the words bug and error. Note: Because Open Text Analysis is such a powerful tool, it is currently available on Pro and Enterprise accounts. Survey Well, Survey Often If you are only sending out Customer Satisfaction Surveys once a year, you are missing out on a lot of good opportunities to connect with and receive feedback from your customers (and prevent negative reviews from polluting your online reputation). Don t feel like you have to ask the same questions every time you survey your customers. Adapt and experiment. Consider your current goals and objectives: Hoping to improve a particular aspect of your business this quarter? Wondering why a new product or service is underperforming or exceeding expectations? Need to solicit feedback to find new opportunities for services, products, or features? Planning on updating your website or online store? Just want to check in and see how you re doing? All of these are great reasons to reach out to your customers through a Customer Satisfaction Survey.

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