We all understand the joy of a delightful customer experience. Everything works as expected, staff are friendly and helpful, and we feel appreciated. Unfortunately, we also know the frustration of bad customer service - being on hold for an hour then having the line disconnect, or finding out from tech support that the sales desk gave the wrong information. Do you know what sort of experiences your customers are having? Getting customer feedback is valuable data for making decisions to improve your business. Read on to learn tips for customer feedback surveys which will give you the information you need to stay ahead of your competitors.

 

Best Practises for Surveys

Like most things in business and life, there are right ways and wrong ways to do things. To make the most effective use of your valuable time and energy, follow these best practises for surveys to gather information about your customer experiences. 

Tip #1 Start with the end

Rather than starting with questions, think ahead to what sort of information you want. Are you looking for feedback about front-line staff? Do you want to see if customers are satisfied with wait times? Think about the goals for your customer feedback survey, and connect it with your bigger strategic goals for your business. Knowing the data you want to collect will help you craft the appropriate questions.

Tip #2 Keep it short

Making your customer feedback survey short is an important way to increase the completion rate. People are busy and time is precious. Asking your customers to fill out your survey is helping you and your business. Make it easy for them to help you by having no more than 5 questions. Time your survey so you can honestly tell your customers how much time you are asking of them. For example, saying “Please help us improve our service by completing this 1 minute feedback survey” will help you get more responses.

Tip #3 Be consistent

This is a key tip for customer feedback surveys - be consistent! There are two reasons for this. First, it helps with completion time. Using different question and answer formats slows  down reading, comprehension, and processing time. It’s just how our brains work. Using the same format and rating scale for your questions makes it quicker and easier for your customers to complete your survey. Second, being consistent with your question formats increases getting accurate answers. If one question asks to rate on one scale and the next question uses a different scale, it’s easy for people to misunderstand. Since you’ll be using this feedback to guide business decisions, you want to be sure the data is solid and correct. Respect that your customers may be completing this survey while in a rush to get to something else, so make it easy to answer. A consistent set of yes/no questions are simple and fast to answer, and will give you very clear customer feedback from your survey.

Tip #4 Go Paperless

There are 3 reasons to go paperless with your customer feedback surveys. First, it makes it much faster and easier for your customers to complete. Second, processing answers and measuring data is much easier. When you use a form builder software for your survey, all those answers can be exported. Having all answer data available in a spreadsheet allows you to create graphs and charts to analyze the customer feedback you collected. Isn’t that much better than manually typing answers in from a paper survey? Anything that saves time also saves money. And on the topic of saving money, another reason to go paperless is to save the expense of printing costs of paper and ink. Think ahead also to the time and money to shred your paper surveys, especially if you’ve collected any personal information. Go paperless with an online form to create your customer feedback survey, and you’ll save time and money.

Our customers love how easy Paperless Forms is to make customer surveys. See for yourself, and get started with your free trial today.