Customer Experience | 8 MIN READ
Customer Satisfaction Surveys: The Complete Guide
This is the most comprehensive guide you would find online on customer satisfaction surveys. It includes examples, templates, best practices and more.
Customer Experience | 8 MIN READ
This is the most comprehensive guide you would find online on customer satisfaction surveys. It includes examples, templates, best practices and more.
If you are running a customer-centric business, then knowing your customer satisfaction becomes too important. Your customer has to be completely satisfied with the value they are driving from your product. While they are using the product and you are practicing your own customer success initiatives, sometimes there is a gap between the two. You might not know what your customers feel about your product and your brand. Hence, customer satisfaction surveys are important to get both the parties on the same page.
Customer satisfaction surveys are nothing but the sets of questionnaires designed for your customers to answer through which you can understand what they think of your product, brand and customer support.
When it comes to customer satisfaction, you can not rely on your own subjective opinion. You need to drill down your customer on many specific areas to understand their perspective of your product. There can be many points that show up during these surveys which illuminate you of your practices towards customer success. These findings must be then converted to actionable steps that you can deploy for further enhancement of your customer experience.
In today’s business world, especially in SaaS businesses, companies are more dependent on customers to stay subscribed for long-term. The customer loyalty and retention are impossible to achieve if the customer is not happy with your service.
When their expectations are getting fulfilled through your brand then they help you attract more business. And the inverse of this fact is also true. When the customers are getting poor experiences from your brand, they tell more people about it and that harms your business a lot.
Through surveys you can get the pulse of your customers and that gives you data to act upon. You can take proactive steps to improve their experiences with your product. This would help you achieve better retention rate, loyalty, sales opportunities and reduce churn.
There are many ways to measure your customer experience but the most commonly used metrics in surveys are these three:
When you are designing a survey there are several points you need to take care. You have to create a well structured survey around those points. You must avoid just getting started without a proper plan. Let’s look at those points in detail below.
Before you even begin creating the survey, you must know in advance towards what end you are building one. What actions do you want to take based on the data you would gather? How would it improve in the growth of your business? These are few of the questions you must ask yourself before creating the survey. It will help you align the further steps to fulfill the goal identified in this step.
Based upon your goal, you must choose the right audience towards which you want to direct your survey. For example if you want to improve your product’s experience then you must direct your customer satisfaction surveys to the end users. Your CRM must be having the contact details of many stakeholders of your client’s company. So, you can’t send your survey to all of them. Hence, choosing the right audience would be the second step towards designing your survey.
You must decide the ratio between statistical questions and qualitative feedback you want to get from your customers. Then based on that you must decide the kind of questions to include in your survey. Below are categories of questions you must choose from:
Once you have designed the survey, you must send it at the right time. Usually the best time would be when they have achieved a milestone in customer journey and your relationship evolves into the next stage. You can also conduct annual customer surveys to keep this as a regular process in your evolution of the business.
While the categories mentioned in the above section is helpful, there are few examples that you can use to get more clarity on the kind of questions you can include.
While few points of best practices have been covered above during the design of the survey, there are few more steps you must take to enhance the efficacy of your customer surveys.
There are many templates available online for this kind of survey but the very few best templates are mentioned below:
Originally Published July 27th, 2020, Updated July 28th, 2020
Shoeb has over 12 years of experience in architecting and developing software applications and creating digital marketing content. He has worked with globally competitive CMMI Level 5 European organizations in the BFSI domain. He has also worked with SaaS-based organizations in developing the marketing content that has helped them win multi-million dollar deals.
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