Surveys can provide great value, but to get the most out of them you need to ask the right questions.
For businesses looking to get customer feedback, customer service surveys enable you to gain insight about what your customers do and don’t like about your products, service or business overall.
Using the right enterprise survey tools and asking the right questions can provide insight into the various stages of a customer’s buying journey, their needs and purchasing drivers.
Determining demographic
Questions relating to demographics will provide you with a greater understanding of who your audience is. This may better help you understand why they respond to products or services in a specific way, the shopping habits of certain demographics, and how to provide them with increased satisfaction.
Questions about specific customer demographics can help you improve your marketing strategies and future campaigns.
This could include questions about age, location and gender. Just make sure to also include the option for respondents not to answer. Some people may prefer not to answer demographic questions, and may be put off your survey entirely and choose not to continue with it if you don’t give them an option to opt-out of answering.
Product & service satisfaction
Ultimately, when sending out a survey it’s because you want to determine how the respondent feels about your product or service. This insight will enable you to make any necessary changes and determine consumer satisfaction.
Determining customer satisfaction is one of the most important goals of a customer service survey.
Gathering customer insight about your products and services is essential but make sure to keep the focus on the customer. Rather than simply asking if customers like a product, ask about their experience with the product, their reason for buying it and if it met their needs.
You want to gain responses that will help you find areas of improvement so you can improve overall customer satisfaction and retention.
If you’ve launched a new product or service, survey tools can help gauge how your customers feel about it.
With these types of questions, provide a range of responses that will enable respondents to give you a clear indication of their feelings. Scaled questions, where customers rate their satisfaction level from 1 to 10 will provide you with a clear guide as to whether you are meeting their needs.
Would they return to/recommend your business
It’s more important than ever for businesses to maintain strong customer loyalty. This can be very challenging with so many customers prioritising the best price over brand loyalty.
Determining customer loyalty will help you ensure you are meeting the needs of your customers and provide you with the opportunity to correct any issues.
If customers don’t like something or have a bad experience with your business, they could spread negative reviews which can be detrimental. Keep in mind a customer can be unhappy with a product, but satisfied enough with the overall service that they would continue as your customer. This is why you should ask about customer satisfaction and customer loyalty separately.
While a question about whether a customer would return to or recommend your business is a yes/no type of question, you want to gain more information from responses where possible. Use scale questions to ask customers how likely it is they will be a return customer or recommend your product or service to someone else, with response options ranging from ‘very likely’ to ‘not very likely’.
What is stopping them from buying
If you’re trying to determine a point within your process at which customers are dropping off or not completing a purchase, enterprise survey tools can help businesses gain the information needed to help resolve this issue.
Ask a question about your customers biggest challenge, frustration or problem that is leading to them abandoning their purchase.
When asking a question like this, you need to think about response options. You want truthful responses, so be careful about supplying biased or limited responses.
While multiple-choice may seem like a good option for this type of question, it limits responses and doesn’t allow respondents to answer in their own words. Ideally, for questions regarding customer issues or challenges, leave the opportunity for open-ended responses to get as much insight as possible.
Anything they would like to see
You may have determined what factors are preventing your customer from completing their purchase, but it can also be extremely beneficial to ask for feedback on what they would like to see from your business.
This could include anything from specific products, changes to the business (such as sustainability efforts and technology advances), or a better online service.
Take out any guesswork, and use a survey to ask your customers directly how you can improve your service.
Asking the right questions is crucial to gaining information that will enable you to improve your business. Think about what questions will provide the most value. Keep them concise and try not to ask more than 10-15 relevant questions.
A customer service survey provides great insight into how your customers feel about your products and services, enabling you to identify any areas of improvement.
