4 Crucial Steps to Improve Your Surveys

Your customer service surveys aren't always going to be perfectly written, but find out the best tips to help you get the most out of your customer's experience.

Better customer experience will give you better results, so connecting with our customers every step of the way is integral to growth. I’m sure we can agree that when it comes to building a connection, surveys aren’t the first thing that may come to mind! However, when done right, they play an essential part of the customer experience cycle.
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Designing a survey can be a difficult task. Yes, anyone can write one; but not many can write one well enough to get a response rate that would be of benefit. Writing and executing a survey that isn’t well thought out can be detrimental: it can upset your customers, it can break the relationship you’ve already established, and it can break down your reputation. Below are integral steps to create a better survey:

1. Do Your Research
Do some research on your customers first and answer a couple of important questions about them. Once you can answer the below questions, you are ready to begin writing your survey:

• How do your customers communicate? What language do your customers speak? What words do they use?
• What method of communication do they prefer? How does your customer want to be contacted? A phone call, email, or text messages?
• What time should you contact your customer?
• What will they want in return?

2. Maintain Consistency and Clarity
When your customers read or hear your survey there should be no room for interpretation. Being as clear and specific as possible will allow your customers to be specific with you. If your scales or ratings are inconsistent, it may frustrate and/or confuse your participant (try to keep scales small). If you leave customers room for interpretation, they won’t be able to provide answers that fit the objective of your survey. If you don’t know if it’s simple enough, test out the survey with someone who knows little to nothing about your company. Did they understand?  

3. Give Customers an Incentive
We’ve all seen how many companies offer “a chance to win” incentive. Offer them to be on your website, or give them a gift card, can you afford to give them a % off their next payment? Even 5%? Another option is to send out incentive A to one segment and incentive B to another segment, and you can test out which segment responded better to their incentive.
           
4. Follow Up
Don’t let them forget about you!

• Has your customer completed your survey? Yes? Great! Let them know that you’ve listened to their feedback and that you will be making necessary changes to improve (if that is what you are willing to do). Let them know that their feedback is valued and give them the incentive you promised. Whatever you do, don’t just leave it at the incentive and a thank you message. Make your customers feel appreciated. When possible, try to give your customers a chance to give additional feedback and contact them individually if they ask for a call back.
• Did not Complete Survey? No problem. Try to understand why they didn’t answer - was it a bad time? Was it an inconvenient method? They didn’t have enough time? These answers should indicate why they didn’t fill out the survey and how you can follow up with them to try again at another time. Try a different method or try a different survey, but whatever you do, don’t let them forget about you.

 
No survey is perfect, and you can’t always catch everyone’s responses. But the better your survey, the more responses you get, the better the feedback, the better the relationship, and of course the better the results! It is a win for everybody. Contact us today to learn more about our automated voice surveys!