Friday 11 April 2014

4 Tips to a Better Customer Satisfaction Survey


Whether we are talking about a small family-operated business, a national company or an international corporation, they all share one priority: satisfied customers! Customer experience management and high customer satisfaction play an important role for the success of a company. 

Not only for turnover reasons you should know your customers and what makes them happy. A satisfied customer does free marketing for you. Their positive word of mouth can emotionally and cognitively affect other potential customers and lead them to prefer your service or product over others. Moreover, a satisfied customer can contribute greatly to the satisfaction and motivation of your employees. This creates a positive circle because only a motivated employee can really satisfy your customer, especially in the service sector. Through measuring customer experience you will get a lot of valuable information in the first place. A significant side effect is that your customer will feel important and worthy because you appreciate their opinion. This can essentially foster their loyalty.

To carry out a successful customer satisfaction survey, make sure you remember the following: 
  1. Be clear and specific – Do not let your customers guess what you mean with a question. Tell them in detail. So instead of asking “How was the service?” ask “Was the service on time?” or instead of “good”, use words like “efficient” or “helpful”. Ask only one thing in one question, for instance the question: ”Was the service on time and friendly?” should be divided in two separate questions.
  2. Ask enough questions – You will have much greater outcome if you in addition to some general customer satisfaction questions also ask questions about other factors affecting the customer experience. And remember to include enough demographical questions, so that you can compare different customer groups when you analyse the results.
  3. Keep it short –Even though it is important to ask enough questions, you should create a layout that makes the customer satisfaction survey questionnaire look short for the respondent. For example use horizontal answer options instead of vertical ones. You can also easily import certain demographical information into Webropol, so that the respondents don’t have to type in information you already know about them.
  4. Have an action plan – Have an action plan describing how you are going to use the insights you got through your customer survey to create a better customer experience. That is why it is very important to do continual surveys instead of only once or twice a year. This way you can also control whether your implementations are fruitful or you might need to change your direction.
So far you might have thought that measuring customer satisfaction is a time consuming and complicated task. No! There are some really professional tools on the market that make this process easy, fast and fun to do! Imagine an online software that only needs a few seconds to create illustrative charts of your customers’ feedback and even a PowerPoint presentation for you. All you have to do is put in the questions you would like to ask and send them to your customers.
It is at least worth a thought, if not essential for you to start engaging in online customer satisfaction surveys today. Asking for the opinion of your customer brings along lots of valuable information, free marketing, staff motivation, higher turnover and long term success! 

 
   


Laura Buchholz
MA International Development
Customer Support and Training Manager
Webropol Germany