10 Steps to Create Effective Customer Surveys Part 2

Recently, we looked at the first five steps you should to take in order to create effective customer surveys. Today’s post will outline a further five best practices, from timing considerations to implementing changes in your company.

6. Timing:

   You need to determine when to start your survey, and how often you will administer it. You may want to survey directly after your customers have used your product or service, in order to capture fresh perspectives. Alternatively, you may decide to survey all of your customers a few times a year. The survey timing depends on your business type, customer base, changes in your products or services and resources. Ask yourself: “When do I need the feedback from this survey?” to help determine the best possible timing.

7. Pre-test:

   Now that you’ve written your questions and designed the survey, it’s time to pre-test it. The purpose of pre-testing is to gain feedback on the survey tool. This gives you the opportunity to see if the questions are clear and whether the survey length is optimal. Once you’ve pre-tested, you can then revise any ambiguous questions or alter the survey length.

8. Administer survey:

   At this point in the process, you’ll have already determined how you are going to survey your customers and when – potentially using a powerful but easy-to-use solution such as BlueX. If you’ve decided on a personalized email survey now is the time to distribute it. It is important at this stage to consider an incentive or bonus aspect for those who take the survey. In exchange for completing the survey or sharing it on social media, you may decide to offer your customers a discount. Remember, filling out the survey should be worthwhile to your customers, but the integrity of the process should also be protected – with the right questions presented to prevent people with no experience of the service taking part purely for the incentive.

9. Analyze results:

   Now that you’ve collected your feedback it’s time to review and analyze the results. You need to verify the data, summarize the results, evaluate the performance of the product or service, and generate a report.  It is advantageous to use an online survey system like Blue/Surveys to quickly view results and generate reports. Using this kind of a platform allows you to avail of high-performing pre-build templates, a rich set of question types, and enhanced survey logic, helping you easily spot trends in the data, and administer either a customer or staff survey.

10. Take action:

    The final step in the effective customer survey process is to share the findings and implement changes. You will likely want to share the feedback throughout your company and make recommendations for change. Do the survey results indicate that you need to make improvements to your product? Does the feedback show your customers are not having a positive experience with the services you provide? These surveys represent individualized company performance reviews – crystalizing that particular customer’s experience. You can respond by choosing to prioritize and implement necessary alterations to your products and services to keep your customers satisfied. By working promptly with the insights that a survey can provide, you can ensure you make the changes needed to best respond to this survey data.

Ultimately, surveying can lay the foundation for making important changes to how your organization trains and manages the employee experience. This is a stepping stone to building an organization that is altogether better focused on experience management and truly valuing the customer experience. 

Learn how to easily create insightful online surveys that add value to your organization.