3 Tips for A Useful Customer Survey

Written By Service Fusion

Topic Customer Feedback, Must-Haves, Tips,

Some market researchers have concluded that customers are less likely to fill out feedback surveys now than they were a decade or so ago. Why would that be the case now after all of the developments in smart technology?

According to an OpinionLab report covered by Forbes, the wide availability of online evaluation tools such as reviews on Google and Yelp, plus various social media platforms, allow most people to reach out on their own time rather than fussing with comment cards from companies. Additionally, anything that is overbearing and takes more than a couple minutes to fill out is cumbersome and easier to ignore than something quick and easy.

With that in mind, companies that take time to perfect their survey process can obtain useful customer feedback to help improve their business. In fact, the industry-leading, feedback firm SurveyMonkey collects 3 million survey responses per day for its clients, many of which are Fortune 500 companies. Surveys can work wonders for a business as long as they’re made with the modern consumer in mind. To improve your feedback process for your service business, review our following three tips for making a useful survey that actually gets a customer response.

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Understand your goals

To start building your survey, Inc. recommends that you sit down and think about why you want to collect customer feedback in the first place. Are you adding new services or switching up your field operations and want input from your costumers? Perhaps you’ve received some complaints and want to pinpoint the exact source of the problem. To develop a clear and quick survey, it is important to think about your objectives first. Your objectives will help you write insightful questions, and good questions should allow you to easily obtain and use the customer feedback to improve.

Research your customers

As Entrepreneur emphasizes, you need to understand who your consumer is and what their habits are before you can make a survey tailored to them. Aspects to consider are your customers communication preferences, such as whether they are more traditional in how they communicate or more accustomed to their phone or laptop. This will help you decide whether or not you will implement a paper survey, online survey, or both!

The different versions of your survey can also be implemented in a variety of ways. For example, if a lot of your customers visit your website, your survey could be posted there. If they are getting information about your company through a digital newsletter, that could be a good place to send your survey as well. There are many possibilities for where and how your survey is distributed to your customers. The important thing is that you are paying attention to what your customer wants!

Draft concise questions

Once you have a grasp on your overall goals and have picked a delivery method and format for your survey, you can start drafting your questions. In terms of questions, the shorter the question, the better. Chances are your customers will be busy with other things during their day, so you should try to make it as easy as possible for them to complete your survey. This means you should avoid paragraph-long prompts and attempt to keep your questions brief yet clear.

Some good questions may be, “What has been your experience with our technicians” or “What are some areas of our service that we can improve on?” Notice these questions leave room for open-ended responses so that you can uncover detailed bits of information to use for your business practices.

All in all, you want to aim for around three to five punchy prompts that are easy to answer and also allow for longer responses. Following all of these tips, you can feel confident that you’ve put together a worthwhile customer survey and be able to gather the information you need to move your service business forward.