While customer survey is a useful way to gather a large volume of data in a very short span of time, creating a useful customer survey is not an easy task. Companies must be careful while creating a customer survey. You can also ask for the help of your call center service provider in creating the perfect survey. Having experience in conducting numerous surveys, call center service providers possess a deep understanding of what a successful customer survey should look like and can help you with not only creating such surveys but also see it become successful.
When it comes to creating the perfect customer survey, Fusion CX has a set of ten rules. Using these 10 easy tips it has helped a number of businesses achieve their desired results. What to know about them? Read on: –
1. Keep it Short
A short survey is often a successful one. Your survey should be clear and concise. You must find the shortest way to ask questions that get you the total answer. Eliminate superfluous phrasing, reduce the character count and try everything you can to keep it short. A short survey often has the lowest abandon rate. After all, no one wants to answer a questionnaire for 30 minutes and more.
2. Ask questions with a purpose only
Don’t hesitate about cutting unnecessary questions from your surveys. Every question in your survey must have a clear purpose and a good reason to be there. If not, chuck it out. If you can monitor the channel through which the customer came to your site, do not hesitate to cut it out of the survey. These questions make the survey lengthy and make customers abandon the survey.
3. Create open-ended questions
Sure, multiple choice questions look tempting, but to get insightful feedback open-ended questions are your best bet. It will allow you to know what your customers are really thinking. But do not ask questions that may come with a big, lengthy answer. It’s best to take on brief questions first to create a sense of progress, and then give your customers the opportunity to elaborate on their thoughts.
Fusion CX plans a question with a simple introduction, and then follow up the answer with an open-ended question such as, “Why is that so?”
4. One question at a time
Bombarding your customer with so many questions at once is never a good idea and yet we see it in many such surveys. It feels like being interrogated by someone who won’t want to listen to you. For quality responses, your customers need time to think and you have to give them that. If you keep asking multiple questions at one go, you will get half-hearted answers because at that point your customer is just looking for a way to get to the end.
5. Make scales consistent
We often come across surveys that have very confusing usage of common scales under a different context.
For example – initially, you are to rate an experience between 1-5, with 1 being “Poor” and 5 being “excellent”. Later in the survey, you are to evaluate the importance of certain things, in which 1 means the most important and 5 means less so.
This is utterly confusing to a customer. A customer may completely miss the change and give an inaccurate answer to the same.
6. Avoid loaded questions
Do not ask questions with a bias in their phrasing that may lead respondents towards a particular answer. It will not get you the result you are looking for. Clip the language that can influence a respondent’s thinking into answering in a certain way.
For example – “What do you think of our award-winning popular children book series?” is not the way to ask questions in surveys. You would get a far honest answer if you ask “what do you think about our children book series?”
While the first question in the example will earn you supporters who tell you what you want to hear, the second question will get you closer to the real scenario. So, in case you want to get a real picture, stir clear of those adjectives and specialties unless absolutely necessary.
7. Use Yes/No questions
If a question can be answered in yes/no, try to frame the question that way. These close-ended questions make great starter questions for a survey as they are easier to evaluate and complete.
8. Avoid assumptions
If you create questions assuming that all the customers are knowledgeable about something, you will have problems. Keep a check on your language and terminology and stir clear of industry jargons, references, and acronyms.
Rather you can ask customers about their opinion on one subject and ask them to be specific. It will get you a far better response.
9. Timing matters
Time is crucial in a customer survey. In most cases, companies conduct customer surveys once per quarter. But waiting that long to know the pulse of the customer does not seem enough. You need to conduct small but potent surveys at regular intervals to get the real picture. Alternatively, you can gather the idea by looking at customer satisfaction rating and other metrics.
10. Entice them with bonus
Enticing the customers with an incentive can increase the participation rate. It can be a discount, account credit or a giveaway. One may think that incentive may influence the quality of responses, but it is likely not to be the case. Also, see whether you can financially handle the incentive and then proceed.
These are the ten tips that Fusion CX follows for improving customer surveys on behalf of its clients. Numerous of our clients benefitted from our deep insight into customer survey domain.
