Customer surveys can help you gather critical intel on what opinions your customer has about your business. Furthermore, they can help you to develop products which are in line with the needs of your customer and as we know our customers are crucial to the success or failure of our business.
The benefits of creating a customer survey are that:
- You will know which problems in your business to prioritise.
- You can see if the changes you made in your business have had a positive or negative effect on your clients.
- Your customers will feel heard.
- You will be able to see what causes customers to leave and work at changing it so you can retain more customers.
With these benefits in mind, let’s look at how to set up a customer survey
STEP 1: What is the goal?
When you start to create your customer survey, you need to understand what goal you want to achieve in your business. Do you want to know what your weak areas are? Do you want to know if a change was successful or not? By clearly defining a goal you will be able to create a survey that will lead to implementable steps for your business.
STEP 2: What questions do you need?
There are many styles of questions you can use in a survey. Here are three to consider:
- Multiple choice questions: This is where you ask a question and give the customer a set of answers to choose from.
- Scale questions: This is where you ask for a rating for a specific product or service you deliver.
- Open-ended questions: In these questions, you give the customer the chance to use their own words to describe how good or bad they think your offering is.
When asking a question make sure that you are asking about one thing at a time. This will ensure there is no confusion in the answers you ask.
STEP 3: What tool should you use?
There are several tools available. Check that you pick one which can grow with you as your business grows. You could use SurveyMonkey, Zoho Survey or Google forms.
STEP 4: What to do with the information you collected?
When you finished your survey, it is important to use the information you have got from your customers. As much as customers love the opportunity to be able to give feedback; if you don’t implement the feedback or say thank you for taking the survey. It could harm your brand.
Another element that you could use from your survey is if you received positive feedback on your services. You can contact your customer and ask them if you can use the feedback in promotional material for your business.
STEP 5: How often should you send out a survey?
Try to create a survey annually or bi-annually depending on how often you want feedback from your customers. By keeping the past surveys and evaluating them against one another you can see if your business is improving or not and you can see how changes in your business have affected your customers’ perception of your brand.
Proudly brought to you by the NSBC