Customer satisfaction surveys are a goldmine for businesses because they allow them to gain insights into the thoughts and feelings of their customers. This helps management develop products or services that meet their customers’ needs even better but also deliver a stellar customer experience that increases brand loyalty.
But if you’ve never run a survey before, you may be wondering: What kind of impact can customer satisfaction surveys actually have? We’ll answer all your questions in this article.
Why Measuring Customer Satisfaction is Crucial
How will you know how to serve your customers better without customer feedback? Customer satisfaction surveys are your chance to find out how your customers feel and how they think you could improve the business in their own words, which helps you increase sales and retention.
Are you meeting your customers’ expectations? Are you delivering great customer service? How much effort is it for new customers to use your product or service? By asking survey questions about customer loyalty, in particular, you can identify your best customers and brand advocates and gain valuable information from them.
How to Run a Customer Satisfaction Survey
So, what customer satisfaction survey questions should you ask to get the most useful measurement of customer sentiment?
Customer satisfaction surveys come in various forms as there are different ways to collect customer feedback and measure customer satisfaction. Decide on the measurement that works best for your business and purpose. Then, make sure you act on feedback to actually improve customer retention.
Let’s go over the steps you should follow to run a successful survey.
Step 1: Identify the Type of Survey You Want to Run
Get direction for your own customer feedback survey from these tried and tested customer satisfaction survey templates.
This is a popular measure of customer satisfaction and represents the overall customer sentiment towards the brand. A high level of customer satisfaction indicates a good customer experience. The score is calculated according to the responses to a key question “How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” and the answer is given on a scale of one to ten. Due to its simplicity, it’s a good starting point for running customer satisfaction surveys.
Another way to conveniently measure customer satisfaction is through a two-part customer satisfaction survey following CSAT. This approach gathers customer feedback initially through the question “How satisfied are you with [company] on a scale of one to five?” Then respondents are asked to expand on their answer in their own words with an open-ended question such as “Tell us a bit more about why you chose [their answer]?” It’s best to specify survey questions to a particular part of the customer journey when collecting this type of customer satisfaction score. For example, “How satisfied are you with your experience with our customer service representative?”
→Customer Effort Score (CES)
This customer satisfaction survey is focused on ease of use. After a certain touchpoint in the customer experience such as after customers interact with your customer support team or after having used the product or service for a month, a simple customer satisfaction survey question is sent out. It’s usually based on the customer satisfaction survey template of “How easy did [company] make it to [action in question]?” This customer satisfaction data improves customer experience and product development efforts.
→Post-Purchase Survey
Another specific type of customer satisfaction survey is gathering customer feedback directly after purchase. This allows valuable feedback to be collected about how the customers feel about the purchasing experience such as the website and payment process. For example, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how easy did you find the purchase process for [product]?” Sending customer satisfaction surveys so early on in the customer lifecycle supports the improvement of conversion rates and customer satisfaction.
→Product Development Survey
When launching a new product or service, it’s best to get customer feedback before going all in. Gather customer sentiments about your product development through customer satisfaction survey questions. In this case, sample customer satisfaction surveys include:
“What other products have you used in [product category]?”
“Rank the features in terms of importance to you.”
“How easy was the platform to use?”
There are different types of customer satisfaction surveys that fulfill different purposes and align with what exactly you want to focus your customer satisfaction survey questions around. Once you’ve created your customer feedback survey, your job isn’t over.
