What is a Customer Satisfaction Survey?
A customer satisfaction survey (or client satisfaction survey) is a useful tool to measure engagement with a product or service offering. These are commonly used across businesses, including retail, hotels, restaurants, and services, to gauge customer experience, identify improvement needs, and prevent customer attrition.
Importance
Conducting customer satisfaction surveys is the most valuable step to improve customer retention and increase satisfaction. Furthermore, these tools help businesses to:
- ensure the quality and delivery of products that would satisfy their customers;
- gather negative and positive information that could help them improve their business marketing strategies, sales, and overall product management;
- understand customer problems; and
- improve customer engagement and retention.
Surveys are also an important tool to spot training gaps like handling complaints or following through, measure the performance of your retail site or team, collect and incorporate new ideas, and allow you to tie performance incentives to survey feedback scores. Moreover, these surveys provide valuable insights, which you can apply in environmental analysis, service operations, and business strategy plans.
Requirements for Creating a Customer Satisfaction Survey
Designing your customer survey templates needs to be simple and effective to engage your customers to take time in giving their feedback. Below are 5 key requirements you should consider in creating your customer satisfaction survey designs:
- Define the survey purpose and give clear instructions: Your business should clearly state the purpose and intent of the survey to inform your customers of what they are signing for. By providing clear and simple instructions, it would help your customers to proceed with the survey even without your assistance.
- Use the most concrete language possible: Customer satisfaction surveys should be comprehensible and easy to understand. Avoid using jargon, abbreviations, or any internal business terms to prevent customers’ confusion and different interpretations.
- Use appropriate response choices: Choosing appropriate responses should be clear yet open-ended, depending on the metrics you want to measure.
- Limit your survey to a reasonable number of questions: The key to effective customer satisfaction surveys is asking the right questions. It is recommended to limit your survey to about five minutes to be completed, otherwise, if it requires being a little bit longer you have to set your customers’ expectations.
- Ask customer’s overall rating: An overall customer rating can give you a summary of your customers’ journey. It benchmarks the majority of customer responses, which allows you to compare your business to your competitors over time.
What to Include in a Customer Satisfaction Survey
Asking the right questions is a crucial aspect of a good customer satisfaction survey. It allows you to evaluate customer’s experience, sentiments, and level of satisfaction. Some questions to ask your customers in your free customer satisfaction survey are the following:
- Was the shop’s appearance pleasant?
- Was the service or product they were looking for available?
- Was their request addressed properly?
- Was the staff friendly and accommodating?
- Was the price of the product reasonable?
- Did the cashier serve them in a timely manner?
- Overall, was the customer satisfied with their visit?
At the end of the survey, an additional space should be provided for the customer to share other thoughts, concerns, and opinions that may not have been addressed by the earlier prompts. This can help give a deeper understanding into possible points for improvement.
After, include a section for the customer to affix their signature. This ensures that the customer is aware of their comments and concerns being shared, verifying the authenticity of their answers.
Here is an answered sample customer satisfaction survey form for reference:
Customer Satisfaction Survey PDF Report Sample | View Template
FAQs about Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Asking customers to complete a satisfaction survey can be quite challenging, so here are a few tips on how to increase the chance of getting them on board with the survey:
- Use engaging subject lines – Make sure that your subject line will already catch the attention of the intended audience.
- Personalize your greeting – It is ideal to indicate the customer’s name while still staying true to your company’s brand and tone.
- Tell them why they’re getting the invite – Expound on why they’re one of the chosen audiences for the survey, and offer further background into the goal and objectives of the endeavor.
- Emphasize the benefits – Highlight how satisfaction surveys keep your company in line with the preferences of customers like them.
- Show gratitude – Do not forget to thank the respondents for their time and effort in completing the survey.
In this digital era, customer surveys can be carried out in various forms. One popular way to gather feedback from customers is through the use of digital kiosks that allow customers to fill out free feedback and satisfaction forms.
With a tool such as SafetyCulture, businesses could either build one from scratch with a drag-and-drop template builder, download and edit an existing one from the public library, or have existing survey forms converted to a smart digital template.
Some common mistakes when creating a customer satisfaction survey include the following:
- Using leading questions: These questions can drive your customers to one answer over another because of the way it is worded. This would create confusion with your respondents.
- Formatting inquiries as double-barreled questions: This is a two-part question but you are only giving your customers one response option. With this type of question, you are not giving your respondents the chance to have different answers for the issue or question.
- Creating mandatory questions: This would lead your respondents to leave without answering your survey. Giving your customers the option to skip what they want can make them feel comfortable and remove the pressure of having to finish the survey.
- Asking intrusive demographic questions: Demographic questions are important to know your specific market, but you should avoid asking specific questions that would put your respondents in an uncomfortable situation.
- Utilizing complicated questions: Writing complex and complicated questions that require calculations, thorough explanation, and research would definitely drift your respondents away.
Jona Tarlengco