Customer Satisfaction Survey Best Practices

A customer satisfaction survey are the perfect tool to take the pulse of the customer. Every business would love to know what their customers are saying about them – what they like or dislike about a product, their user experience, the price they are willing to pay, the quality of customer support, and more. They provide you with information about whether you are exceeding, meeting or falling short of your customers’ expectations. These insights help you  make better business decisions that can impact your bottom line. Check out our new blog on how to build great call center surveys with these customer satisfaction survey templates.

That said, not all customer satisfaction surveys are created equal. Here are a few best practices to keep in mind when developing a customer satisfaction survey that can tap into your customer base’s unique needs:

Hone in on a topic

Do you want information about the quality of your product, the delivery process or the service level? Consider what your customers deem important and build out a list of the different touch points they have throughout their journey. It’s important to have a clear idea of what you want to measure and form the survey appropriately. If you want to measure satisfaction, don’t ask questions about the product features. Choose a specific topic that you would like information about and design your survey around gaining greater clarity and awareness around this topic.

Pick the right time to ask

The point in the customer journey you choose to ask your customers to fill out a customer service survey is very important. You are guaranteed to receive very different response rates and information depending on if you ask after they have received a poor service experience, completed a purchase or navigated your website. You want to ask the appropriate questions at the appropriate times – for example, if you want to get a sense of your purchase process, don’t ask after a support call. If you want to measure your support team’s effectiveness, don’t ask if there’s never been a support call. Keep this in mind when selecting the most appropriate moment to survey your customers.

Pose clear and specific questions

Effectively constructed survey questions are clear, measurable, and specific. Unless you are requesting that they write out a comment, don’t, don’t leave open ended questions. If your product is retail clothing, for example, ask your audience what they think of the quality of the material from a scale of 1 to 10 as opposed to simply asking what they think of your clothes.

Also, don’t ask if your customers had a good customer service experience, ask if the customer support representative was able to resolve their issue. If your customer responds ‘No’, you can route them directly to an agent who can address the issue. This will help you accurately measure the topic that you are most interested in measuring and also deliver a superior customer service.

Keep it short

You are already asking for extra time and effort from your customers, so keep your customer satisfaction survey short and to the point if you want to have a good response rate. Keep the possible answers to a minimum and your questions in as concise  as possible. Your customers shouldn’t be spending more than five-minutes on your survey.

Join our upcoming webinar with customer survey experts, Surveypal

A customer satisfaction survey are a great tool for opening up the line of communication with your customer at their convenience. In our upcoming webinar, we’ll be interviewing Samuli Zetterberg, Founder & CEO of Surveypal and Talkdesk customer, to explore the importance of customer insights and how they use Talkdesk to have real-time conversations with their own customers.

Surveypal helps companies better understand and create a data-driven dialogue with their customers. As such, they recognize the value of providing superior customer service and how this can impact customer loyalty. That is why they use Talkdesk – to provide real-time customer service so they can form lasting business relationships with their customers.

Join us Tuesday, September 1st for our webinar with Samuli Zetterberg to hear how Talkdesk helped Surveypal increase customer loyalty.