It is Critical to Know Exactly What Your Customers Think
Here at Davidson Belluso, customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal. It is also the main purpose of our project surveys. Client surveys are used to generate feedback from our new clients, for the most part, but they can also relate to existing clients as a check-in. Either way, the feedback is very critical whether it is good or bad.
Online customer satisfaction surveys provide the feedback you need to keep customers happy and loyal. Surveys provide insight to business owners on how they can improve their business, products, and overall customer experience. Here are just a few questions you should already know or you should be thinking of on a regular basis. What are your customers saying about you? Do you want to improve customer loyalty? Bottom line, customer surveys help provide the feedback your business requires to make better decisions.
Before I get into discussing steps for creating the most effective survey, let’s take a moment and identify more clearly the benefits of generating customer satisfaction surveys:
It Can Help Improve Customer Satisfaction and Retention
Customer retention is the biggest reason to generate surveys on a regular basis. It will determine if your customer is happy with the products or services you are delivering before you lose their business. A happy customer is a returning customer. Customer satisfaction is the best indicator of how likely a customer will make a purchase in the future.
It Can Help Improve a Product or Service
It allows you the opportunity to listen to your customers and create a product or service that they actually want to buy. Ideally, all companies want to excel at fulfilling their customers’ expectations and needs.
It Can Create Insight for a Better Customer Experience
In order to create an amazing customer experience, you need to simply ask your customers what it was about that experience that they found memorable. Hopefully, their experience is better than your competitor’s so that they will ultimately remain loyal. It is much easier to retain existing customers than to win new business. This is your opportunity to stand out from your competition. By keeping your customers happy the possibility of generating future referrals is much more likely.
When creating your customer satisfaction survey, be certain to include the following:
Define your goals. What do you want your survey to accomplish?
Select an online survey tool and template. Please select from a variety of online tools that can help you create a customer survey.
Create clear questions. Below are 6 tips to help make sure your questions are efficient and on topic.
- Be specific. Being clear allows your respondents to not have to guess what you mean to say. Keep in mind our goal is to identify things to improve. To better encourage feedback on ways that might need improvement, however, though the survey questions should be specific, survey recipients should have the opportunity to remain anonymous as it is proven that respondents provide more honest feedback that way.
- Ask between 5-10 questions. You don’t want to overwhelm your respondents with too many questions. Most survey tools have a variety of question types to select from.
- Cover all your answers. Simply make sure there is an answer for everyone or provide a text field to add comments.
- Create an enticing subject line. Almost everyone with an email suffers from overload on a daily basis. Research indicates that most recipients only spend a couple of seconds deciding whether or not to open an email, and that decision is largely based on the email subject lines.
- Create a call to action. The call to action, or “CTA,” is an appeal to viewers that invites them to do more than simply read the piece, but take some additional action. A successful CTA results in a conversion. Conversion is getting someone to respond to some kind of a call to action. Most of the time, it involves a click or tap on a button. There are literally thousands of different types of CTA. It is up to you to decide what action or response you want the reader to take.
- Review and send. Proof, proof, proof! You don’t want a stray comma or misspelled word throwing off an otherwise engaged respondent.
In my role working on new business development, I understand the importance of customer satisfaction feedback. It is imperative that both our new clients and existing customers feel we delivered our services and met, or better yet exceeded their expectations. Every business should implement customer surveys as part of its best practices.