The satisfaction of customers with a company, with certain products or with individual services determines whether the customer stays with a company or recommends it. For this reason, a company should regularly conduct surveys to find out how high the customer satisfaction of individual customers is and in which areas there is a need for improvement. We show you the best practices for such surveys.
Surveys on the satisfaction of your customers should always be evaluated in a temporal context. It therefore always makes sense to conduct a survey directly after a purchase, after a promotion or after a service.
You can also use different surveys at different times. After ordering a product, you can send an email to ask about customer satisfaction with the website and the ordering process. One week after receiving the product, you can survey customer satisfaction with the selected product. A survey can also be carried out after contacting customer support.
The more detailed you can query and the fresher the customer's memories, the better and more refined the results will be.
Customer satisfaction surveys should be quick and easy for the customer to answer. Regardless of the chosen medium, you should therefore calculate the number of questions as briefly as possible.
Tests have shown that surveys with a maximum of 10 questions are most frequently accepted and used by customers. This allows the customer to answer the survey within one to two minutes and concentrate on the answers.
Longer surveys are very often canceled due to unwillingness or lack of time.
Always try to move from the big picture to the details in surveys. For example, start a survey by asking about overall satisfaction with the company. Then ask about satisfaction with the products, the website, the service or the price. If you then offer customers space for personal comments, you can conveniently and, above all, clearly accommodate many elements in a survey.
In addition, you can guide the customer directly from element to element in the survey without this appearing too jumpy or unstructured for the user. This is important so that users don't drop out of the customer satisfaction survey.
Of course, a survey with various scales is particularly easy and even automatically evaluated. Nevertheless, you should give customers the opportunity to make personal comments for some questions. This will give you a more differentiated picture of customer satisfaction and, above all, make it much easier to identify previously unknown problems.
This noticeably increases the effort involved in the evaluation, but also increases the efficiency of the surveys. A good balance between scale ratings and personal comments is particularly important. Experience shows that two fields for personal comments for every ten questions are usually more than sufficient.
In addition to the various questions on individual customer satisfaction, you should also cover demographic or social questions where possible. Surveys are only useful if you can also use their results. For example, you can use these questions to determine which services are particularly well or particularly poorly received by which target group and react accordingly.
For example, a service that is rated positively by young people and negatively by older people should be changed or only advertised to a specific target group.
This allows you to gain important insights from the survey that are relevant to the respective target group.
Customer satisfaction surveys are only useful if you respond to the criticism they contain. In the case of critical results, you should contact the customer personally if possible and thank them for their criticism and offer the prospect of improvements.
This direct feedback in particular can actively help you to improve customer satisfaction and increase customer acceptance of your company. After all, these measures show that you take customer feedback on the surveys seriously and value their opinion.