7 Important Tips For Creating Awesome Customer Surveys

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Customer surveys are a great tool to determine how customers feel about a brand & its products or services, but designing a survey that customers would respond to is one thing, while designing a survey that would yield actionable insights is another.

When designing surveys, it is important that business owners and CX professionals avoid costly mistakes that could render the survey useless and its data unreliable. To create meaningful surveys that customers would respond to, there are important factors that you must consider, such as – What you ask, How you ask, When you ask, and How often you ask. In this post, I will share tips on you can implement to create awesome customer surveys

#1. Define Your Goal

Before you set out surveying customers, you should have a goal you’d like to accomplish. What do you intend to achieve with your survey?

Are you trying to measure customer satisfaction or the customer perception of a new product or service, or trying to determine customer loyalty & advocacy rates?

Depending on your goal, the type of questions and length of the survey will vary. Once you’ve determined what you would like to learn from the survey, the next thing to do is create questions that would lead to the information.

#2. Ask Clear & Specific Questions

Every question you include in your survey should have a purpose & must be relevant to your goal. If a question fails to meet these criteria, it should be eliminated. For instance, if your goal is to measure how satisfied your customers are with your products or service, then don’t add unnecessary questions such as –

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Who is the coolest celebrity you’ve ever met?
How did you hear about us? 

Such questions will not help you realize your goal and increase the likelihood of respondents abandoning the survey midway. Stick to questions that give you insights about your goal.

#3. Choose A Delivery Medium

Different mediums are available to deliver customer surveys, from face-to-face to telephone & online surveys (Email, Social media, etc). Your medium of choice will have an impact on response rate and quality – for instance, some organizations still carry out Telephone surveys, but customers find it intrusive and do not like to be interrupted, they prefer to complete surveys at their own pace.

Email is quite popular among online survey mediums, but if you fail to adhere to spam laws, many of those emails might end up in a spam folder.

Photo by Bruno Cereva on Unsplash

Social media platforms like X (former Twitter) enable businesses to create polls that customers can respond to in less than a minute, this is in addition to many other online platforms such as SurveyMonkey & Polldaddy that can help you create a customer survey.

Taco Bell X Poll

Online surveys deliver better results than telephone surveys as you can reach customers quickly and on their schedule without interrupting or taking their time. I would recommend a combination of Face-to-face surveys where possible & online surveys for best results.

#4. Keep It Short

The higher the number of questions in your survey, the more likely customers will abandon it midway. Remember, you’re asking the customers for feedback; don’t make it look like an assignment.

Are you looking to gather valuable insights from your customers through surveys but overwhelmed by the intricacies of survey design and analysis? Look no further!

Let me design your surveys

I can hardly think of anyone looking forward to spending 20 minutes filling out surveys.  In a study of about 100,000 surveys with 1-30 questions by SurveyMonkey, they discovered that –

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“The more questions you ask, the less time your respondents spend, on average, answering each question. When your respondents, in methodological terms, begin “satisficing”—or “speeding” through a survey—the quality and reliability of your data can suffer. On average, we discovered that respondents take just over a minute to answer the first question in a survey (including the time spent reading any survey introductions) and spend about 5 minutes answering a 10-question survey.”

Customer service expert Jeff Toister in his article on Characteristics of a Powerful Customer Survey recommends using these 3 questions whenever possible –

  • How would you rate (product, service, experience)?
  • Why did you give that rating? (open text response)
  • May we follow up with you if we have additional questions?

 

Kelechi Okeke
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