This article features:
- Why customer satisfaction surveys are important?;
- Key elements of customer satisfaction survey designs;
- Common mistakes when building a satisfaction survey template;
- Mobile-ready app for hassle-free reporting and timely feedback; and
- Downloadable, customizable and free customer satisfaction survey templates.
Why Customer Satisfaction Surveys are Important?
Conducting customer satisfaction surveys is the most valuable step to improve customer retention and increase satisfaction. Furthermore, these tools help businesses to:
(a) ensure the quality and delivery of products that would satisfy their customers;
(b) gather negative and positive information that could help them improve their business marketing strategies and sales;
(c) understand the problems with their products and/or services to meet customer expectations; and
(d) improve customer engagement and retention.
Key Elements of Customer Satisfaction Survey Designs
Designing your customer survey templates needs to be simple and effective to engage your customers to take time in giving their feedback. Below are the key elements 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 depending on the metrics you want to measure. If you are asking for ratings, it is advisable to use words rather than numbers as response options (e.g. “Strongly agree” to “Strongly disagree). This would help your customers to easily determine which of the choices best represents their answers.
The customer satisfaction form should also allow open-text feedback. This would let your customers give personal responses to how they felt about your products or services. Open-Text feedback would help you determine new strategies for marketing campaigns.
Limit your survey to a reasonable number of questions
The key to effective customer satisfaction surveys is asking the right questions. The shorter it is, the higher the probability of customer engagement. It is recommended to limit your survey to about five minutes to be completed, otherwise, if it requires to be 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.
Common Mistakes when Building a Satisfaction Survey Template Questions
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. Below are common mistakes to watch out when building your customer survey template:
- 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.
Example:
✖: “You have heard of iAuditor by SafetyCulture, haven’t you?”.
✔: “Have you heard of iAuditor by SafetyCulture?”. - 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.
Example:
✖: Did you enjoy using our product and services?
✔: Did you enjoy using our product?
✔: Did you enjoy our services? - Mandatory questions
You should never ask your customers to fill out a mandatory field. 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.
Example:
✖: Please include your comments and suggestions*
✔: Kindly include comments and suggestions if applicable - 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.
Example:
✖: How old are you?
✔: Age: [18-25], [26-35], [36-45], [46 and above] - Complicated questions
Writing complex and complicated questions that require calculations, thorough explanation, and research would definitely drift your respondents away. Keep your customer satisfaction survey simple and easy to answer.
Example:
✖: How responsive (or unresponsive) is our staff in resolving your issues?
✔: Did our staff get back to you in a timely manner?
Designing the appropriate customer survey template is necessary to build connections with your customers that will help you to achieve your business goal and other benefits.
How do you Create a Customer Satisfaction Survey with iAuditor?
In this digital era, customer surveys can be carried out in various forms. One popular way to gather feedback from customers is done online through email, website, or an app. However, most of the time this ends up being bothersome to customers so they end up unanswered.
Digital kiosks are a great alternative to traditional online surveys and paper forms in capturing customer feedback. Having customers fill out feedback via an onsite digital kiosk can help you capture relevant and timely feedback.
iAuditor by SafetyCulture is used by businesses worldwide to capture real-time data and improve their product and service offerings. Building a customer satisfaction survey with iAuditor is made easy and can be set up in just minutes. You could either build one from scratch with our drag-and-drop template builder, download and edit an existing one from the public library, or have your existing survey forms converted to a smart digital template.
Whichever you choose, keep in mind the key elements of designing customer satisfaction surveys mentioned above. Following these elements will not only help make your surveys effective and engaging for customers, but it will also help you capture valuable insights that you can use to improve customer retention and satisfaction.
To help you get started, we have provided 8 digital templates of customer satisfaction surveys that you can download and edit.
Featured Customer Satisfaction Survey Templates
Hotel Customer Satisfaction Survey Questionnaire
Use this checklist to collect data on customers’ booking process and hotel experience. The form can be used to record data on the reason and process for booking, factors that may contribute to better sleep, and feedback about the foodservice. Lastly, it also allows customers to rate their overall stay and their likelihood to recommend the hotel to family and friends. iAuditor is ideal for data gathering because it utilizes cloud-storage for your hotel customer surveys. Set triggers that send notifications to the staff so that customers’ concerns can be addressed immediately, positively impacting customer experience.
Restaurant Customer Satisfaction Survey
Food businesses should not only focus on the quality of food that they serve but also on the entire customer experience, from the convenience of reservations to the actual dining experience. This restaurant customer satisfaction survey offers a brief evaluation of the restaurant premise, the ambiance, service staff, food quality, and the overall customer experience. iAuditor promotes better survey experience because the survey can be done on a mobile device, iPad, or tablet instead of using a piece of paper that can get crumpled, wet, stained, or ignored. With iAuditor you can set the scoring for responses and analyze data through iAuditor’s Analytics.
Customer Satisfaction Product Survey Template
Know the product ratings through iAuditor and determine how customers perceive the product’s quality, value, and user experience. Identify areas for improvement by using collected customer feedback with this template and use the data for business planning and for market research purposes.
Service Center Customer Satisfaction Survey Form
This checklist aims to determine how well your staff performed during the service. The customer will evaluate the staff’s quality of work, timeliness of work completed, and provide their impression on how their need was addressed. Help enhance the overall performance of your service team and promote better customer experience with the use of this template.
Hotel Customer Satisfaction Survey Template
This hotel customer satisfaction survey form focuses on the experience of the customers during their stay. It asks general questions about the service experienced, the quality of the food served, the availability of facilities, and staff assistance.
NPS - Customer Satisfaction Survey for Products
This checklist contains slider fields to let the customers rate a product, service, or company. The rating system can be modified from the preset zero satisfactory rates to an exceptional or excellent customer satisfaction rate of 10 on this template. This also covers customer profiling that you can use for possible product research and focused-group study purposes.
Mcdonald's Customer Experience Visit Checklist
Take a look at this Mcdonald’s Customer Experience Visit Checklist, converted using iAuditor, intended for conducting customer satisfaction surveys.
