You’ve been getting feedback regarding your brand coming at you left, right and center.
Some customers give you feedback face to face. Others send you emails. There is even that one customer who sent his feedback through your neighbor’s cousin.
You are overwhelmed.
You’ve tried to keep track and you can’t.
You want to know what your customers think but at the moment, you feel like you are drowning in virtual feedback and you can’t even come up for air.
You know that a more streamlined method of gathering and analyzing feedback is long overdue. So you’ve decided to come up with a survey.
But wait.
You want the survey to be done just right otherwise you could end up running in a feedback hamster wheel.
So here are a few things to bear in mind as you design your feedback strategy.
1. Decide what the survey will be about
Before designing and sending out your survey, have the goal in mind. Do you want to get feedback about a particular new product? (Transactional feedback) Or do you want to know if your customers think you are awesome? (Relational feedback).
A survey for the sake of a survey will not work. It will be nothing but a waste of time — both yours and the customers. So think long and hard about what you want to know. Brainstorm with your team if you have one. Then craft your questions.
2. Keep it short. Keep it simple
No matter how eager you are to get feedback, don’t be tempted to ask everything you’ve always wanted to know. Instead, keep it short and simple (KISS).
Short surveys show customers that you respect and value their time.
Long surveys can be very off-putting. The longer the survey, the more likely your customers will be to abandon the survey. Long surveys will also lead to false statistics.
How? You ask.
Let me explain.
The people who are most likely to spend long on a survey are those who are extremely happy with your product and services and those who are extremely unhappy.
A rule of thumb is to keep a survey at 5, one-page questions which will take at most 5 minutes to complete.
You can also go a step further and mention at the onset how long the survey will take it. This way, customers know what to expect before they start clicking or ticking.
3. Grab their attention by asking the easy questions first
Simple, straightforward questions should always be right at the top. These are questions that do not need much thinking on the part of the respondent but are important when tabulating the answers.
Without getting too technical, these questions are known as demographic or firmographic questions.
Examples of such questions are;
· Age
· Income
· Ethnicity
· Marital status
· How long have you…?
Some respondents may, however, find these questions to be very intrusive so give them an option of skipping the question(s) or have a “would rather not say” option in the answers.
4. No, No to double-barreled questions
Life is already confusing enough so do not make it even more complicated by asking double-barreled questions.
Double-barreled questions are questions that touch on more than one issue yet require one answer.
Duh!
An example of a double-barreled question would be;
Was the sales agent helpful and polite?
An agent may not have had the product knowledge and was therefore not helpful, but the agent may have been very polite.
So a yes or no to this question would be misleading. What if his answer for the first part is yes and his answer to the second part is no?
Analyzing the responses of a double-barreled question can also be a nightmare.
5. Allow responders to stay neutral if they so wish
Some things in life are not so straightforward. They are neither black nor white.
The same goes for survey questions.
Sometimes a customer may be the fence about a product or a service. For this reason, the multiple-choice questions should always have a middle ground.
For example.
Would you recommend our business to others?
The selection should always be an odd number with a midpoint that gives the customer the possibility of staying neutral such as;
1. Very likely
2. Somewhat likely
3. Neutral
4. Somewhat unlikely
5. Very unlikely
6. Comments are worth their weight in gold
Life is not always about short yes, no and maybe answers.
Customers may sometimes have things that they would like to get off their chest. Or they may have had a positive experience that cannot be expressed through preset multiple-choice options.
It is therefore important to have a comments box. Set the number of characters so the section will not be too long or too short.
7. About to send out your survey? Not so fast
You may be anxious to send out the survey and start receiving feedback. But before you do so, you may want to know what others think of it. So Pretest your questions.
Do this by sending the survey to your friends and family and asking for your feedback. They may spot something that you may have missed.
Designing a quality customer satisfaction survey is a back and forth process. It requires many edits and revisions to reach the best version.
PS: Make sure that you chose your test responders wisely. Don’t choose those who will sugar coat it just to make you happy.
Final thoughts
Imagine what it will be like when your customers click along and give you the data you need.
Imagine what it will be like to get data that is easy to analyse.
Imagine what it will be like when the whole process feels effortless and uncomplicated.
You’ve worked really hard at your brand and it is now time to kiss goodbye to the headaches of creating a survey and saying hello to awesome data that will help you hack the minds of your customers and know what they really want.