“Survey your existing clients” is a common suggestion to help your business grow. We here at SurveyRock know how important surveying your customers is to your success and want your customer satisfaction surveys to help you gain actionable insights you can really use.
![Customer_Satisfaction_Survey](https://surveyrock-blog.s3.amazonaws.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Customer_Satisfaction_Survey.jpg)
Eliminate the guesswork and follow these five customer survey design principles:
1. Ask overall satisfaction at the start of the survey. This will allow you to measure customers’ overall impressions of your company, product or service before they start thinking of specific aspects of those relationships. Our Net Promoter Score (NPS) question and template are ideal here.
2. Use a 5-point satisfaction scale. Question scales should have descriptive labels associated with the numbers, and the top end of the scale should mean that customers are truly “wowed.”
3. Be consistent with your question wording. Consistency is critical in customer satisfaction research. Question scales should be consistent within a particular questionnaire as well as over time. The key measures of customer satisfaction, including the overall satisfaction question and those asking about specific aspects of the relationship, should all use the same scale.
4. Keep the survey short and focused. Focus on getting a read on your customers’ relationship with you. Avoid the temptation to ask everything you’ve ever wanted to know. The more ground you try to cover, the more likely it is that respondents will abandon the survey.
5. Ask demographic or “firmographic” questions. Inquiring about demographics or firmographics (company or industry type and size) enables you to analyze the data by different subgroups – such as new customers or regional customers. Consider hypotheses about customer profiles that may affect satisfaction and include questions that capture that data.
Remember that your customers’ satisfaction is tied directly to profitability – happy customers buy more and refer other customers.
Net Promoter® and NPS® are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld.
These are very golden tips! The best way to keep the response rate high as possible is to keep the survey short and sweet in addition to have clear targeted questions. I would also add that it’s important to let the customers know what’s in for them when they answer a satisfaction survey, which is that they will help improve the whole customer experience that the company provides.