According to PwC’s Future of Customer Experience, more than one third of customers quit a product or service right after a single bad experience. After two bad experiences this figure doubles. If you then also take into account that unhappy customers are way more likely to share their experiences with fellow users, the impact of customer feedback becomes even more apparent. Needless to say, customer satisfaction and listening to the voice of your clients is key. Even more so today with crowded markets and high costs for customer acquisition. To grow and sustain a company in the long run, there’s no getting around customer satisfaction surveys – from customer satisfaction score and net promoter score to customer effort score.
This blog post is all about how to make sure that customers are happy. To do so we first need to identify customers that aren’t satisfied with our product or service, then we need to figure out what it is that they don’t like and finally it should be our main priority to fix those issues in order for the customer not to churn. Fixing issues and getting into direct contact with customers could also mean that you might even be able to turn a negative into a positive situation and improve your product quality overall. Let’s start with a couple of best practices when it comes to customer feedback surveys.
7 Best Practices
1. Keep it short
There are two things to consider here. First, your customers offer you their opinion on your service or product so you might as well make it worth their while. The more questions the survey contains, the more likely users are to abandon the feedback form. Secondly, the individual questions should be concise and easy to understand, too.
2. Ask one question at a time
Make sure you don’t overwhelm your users with seemingly never-ending feedback forms. When setting surveys up, it is therefore important to use a tool that lets you choose if you want to send all questions in a single page form or one by one. With Gleap, for example, you can simply activate or deactivate the respective toggle. Still, remember to keep questions concise.
3. Don’t ask loaded questions
Asking loaded questions to lead your users into a certain direction, does not do you any good. On the one hand, you will get biased answers and on the other hand, your users will see right through you. Under no circumstances do loaded questions lead to constructive feedback that helps your team and product.
4. Consistent ratings
In most cases customer satisfaction surveys contain ratings, e.g. CSAT questions on how your users would rate their satisfaction with your service or product. The scales you offer to answer these kinds of questions should be consistent throughout the survey. To give you an example: In the first question of a survey you’re asked to give your overall opinion based on a scale from 1 to 5 where 1 is very satisfied and 5 is not satisfied at all. Later in the survey you’re asked to give your opinion on the significance of certain features again on a scale from 1 to 5 where this time 1 is not significant at all and 5 is very significant. Confusing, right? Besides it being confusing this will also most likely lead to false answers by customers. Hence, ratings and scales should be consistent throughout the survey.
5. Allow open text feedback, too
Enough talk about ratings. It is very important that you also give users the chance to elaborate on their feedback in well-phrased, open questions. Usually, these questions deliver amazing insights into how your customers use your product or service. Again, make sure that you don’t overwhelm customers with lengthy input fields or too many open questions.
6. Timing is key
Timing is important and depends on the goals of your survey. When tracking broader strategic metrics such as NPS, you could for example run them quarterly. Most companies only ask customers for their feedback once a year. I strongly suggest running customer satisfaction surveys more often than that. Especially if you offer a product or service with regular updates. With these kinds of surveys there’s one other thing you should consider and that’s when to run them. This survey monkey study found that surveys sent on Monday, Friday and Sunday generally perform better.
Secondly, if you’re looking to monitor services or actions users perform on your page, it might be a very good idea to send the survey right after the action is completed. Say you’d like to know how easy a user found the booking experience on your hotel booking platform. I’d suggest running the survey right after they’ve completed their booking. The key takeaway of this best practice is that if you don’t send the survey at the right time, customers might not bother to answer your questions.
7. Optimize for mobile
With more and more people using mobile devices, your survey really must be optimized for mobile. This should be an easy win to further boost your response rates.
Customer Satisfaction Survey Template
In our Gleap survey section we have a pre-built customer experience template that you can use as a starting point for building your survey. This way your survey will be up and running in no time. We recommend starting with a simple 1 to 5 rating asking how users would rate your service, product, etc. Next, you could use another rating to find out if they agree with the fact that your product or service offers all the features they need. We then suggest ending your survey with an open question asking for the reasons behind their rating and if they have additional input. That’s it. Quick and easy.
Pro Tip: Find more information on how to use Gleap surveys and our various templates in our documentation.