It’s always important to think about how you can improve your customer satisfaction surveys. Most surveys are littered with errors that drag down your response rate and the accuracy of your data.
I will be moderating conversations about Voice of Customer next week at the Operations Summit.
It got me thinking, it’s practically a given that every company will issue a customer satisfaction survey as part of their Voice of Customer program. But it’s NOT a given that every customer survey will improve customer satisfaction and improve customer service.
Think about your own satisfaction survey for a moment. Are you collecting accurate data? Is the data actionable? Are you able to identify clear gaps and opportunities to improve customer satisfaction?
Customer listening programs often suffer from a host of flaws and biases. In fact, in our recent study of point-of-purchase surveys we found that the largest US retailers pack their surveys with tired, biased, and often irrelevant questions.
3 Most Common Survey Flaws
When clients come to us with their surveys, these are the common flaws:
- They are so long they alienate customers.
- They force customers to choose from irrelevant multiple-choice options.
- The customer verbatims never get properly analyzed.
Good surveys produce good data, and good data reflects the experiences your customers actually have with your company. Good data also shows where you need to improve.
6 Steps to Improve Your Customer Satisfaction Survey
This 6-step process will improve your customer satisfaction survey immediately. You’ll have a survey that gets to the heart of customers’ expectations, their perceptions, and how they feel about their experiences with you.
Step 1
Evaluate your current survey(s) and map your unknowns.Work through your current survey(s) to identify irrelevant questions and biases. Check for:
- Neutrality: Are your questions impartial so you don’t force the answers you want?
2. Engagement: Are questions conversational, so that customers want to respond?
3. Relevance: Are you employing branching logic to ensure you’re maintaining relevance with customers throughout your survey?
4. Sampling Biases: How well do your respondents actually represent your customer base?
5. Actionability: Are you asking for information that can be put to use?
Next, take a step back and consider what you don’t know—where might you have gaps in your understanding of customers’ journeys? Are there areas from your previous surveys that were inconclusive?
Step 2
Tailor your language. Think about your industry and customers. How would your customers describe their experiences with you? Ask your team:
- Who are our customers? How engaged are they?
2. What words do they use?
3. What’s most relevant to them?
A classic example comes from the hospitality industry. Hotels often ask about quality of “housekeeping” on their surveys—but when customers open their hotel room door, they aren’t looking for “housekeeping,” they’re looking for “cleanliness.” Tailoring your survey’s language to match the customer’s is how you uncover the best data about how customers really feel.
Step 3
Develop branching logic. Consider your customers. Have you done a persona study? Does each persona interact with different touchpoints? For example, don’t force an end-user to click mindlessly through questions specific to distributors; it will result in junk data.
Step 4
Draft your questions. Iteratively. If you think a survey can be built in a day, you’re wrong. You’re asking customers to spend their valuable time taking your survey, so you’ll need to spend your valuable time building it.Questions should be put through detailed development and rigorous review processes. Return to step 1, and vet your newly drafted questions against the list of common problems. Then edit, and edit again. In fact, we recommend getting internal AND external feedback on your survey questions—before you edit one last time.
Step 5
Code and analyze the data. Once you’ve got your survey responses in, it’s time to find the signal in all that noise. Hopefully you have a large, statistically-significant, set of respondents, so your findings are predictive and forecastable.As part of your survey analysis, it is critical to code the open-ended comments. And by code we don’t mean simply read or make a word cloud. You need to scientifically parse and categorize the comments because this is how you bring that data to life in meaningful, actionable ways.
Step 6
Present your findings—graphically. To get your team on board with your Voice of Customer results, curate your metrics down to a simple few and incorporate infographics. Use a dashboard to get everyone involved with the data and next step actions.Some great customer experience metrics that we advocate for include: Quality of Customer Interaction™, Customer Effort, Competitive Edge, and Persuasion Scores.
Not all surveys are created equally. In fact, many customer satisfaction surveys are disengaging and result in inaccurate data. But our 6-step process, gives you the framework you need for stellar customer feedback surveys that will improve customer satisfaction—one that collects accurate customer feedback, motivates teams to improve in specific ways, and shows customers their voices are heard!
Interested in how Interaction Metrics could help you improve your customer satisfaction surveys? Reach out today.
