18 Nov
Best Practices For Designing Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT)
While designing and executing a customer satisfaction survey, many things might go wrong, preventing you from gaining an accurate picture of your client’s experience. And the majority of companies make mistakes in survey design and delivery–often in several ways.
Because the chance of getting invalid data but still using it to guide company strategy is higher if you send out a faulty survey, it may be worse than not surveying your consumers in the first place.
On the other hand, creating an ideal survey involves more study and planning than you may think. Thankfully, we’ll walk you through everything you’ll need to know to construct the customer satisfaction survey of your dreams.
What Are Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) Surveys?
Customer satisfaction surveys (CSAT) are surveys delivered to customers to gauge their overall happiness with different parts of your business. It might be your products, services, market strategy, or quality of customer service – pretty much any aspect of your business that needs to be improved.
Customer satisfaction surveys are essential for businesses to determine how new customers, future clients, or random visitors feel about the products and services they provide. The resulting insights can be examined and utilized to launch a new product or service, make policy changes, or even change a firm’s brand identity altogether.
On the other hand, customer surveys must be designed so that you can get exactly the information you want. A poorly structured customer satisfaction survey is a waste of time and important resources, such as staff and money. Finally, the responses will tell you what you need to do or delete to improve customer experience, increase customer retention, and get happy customers if you ask the correct questions in the right way.
Let’s look at some practices to increase participation and capture a wider range of experiences.
Keep The Surveys Short
The most important goal is to be concise and to the point, finding the fastest way to ask a question without obscuring its meaning. It’s not only about minimizing the number of characters in your questions; you also need to remove unnecessary phrasing.
At the same time, overall survey duration is critical for maintaining low abandonment rates. Consider the last time you sat down and excitedly completed a 30-minute survey. It’s probably never happened.
Offer Multiple Channels For Surveys
Customers can be surveyed through post-call surveys, email, chat, and, most importantly, SMS/text. Focus on delayed response channels (email and SMS/text) so users can complete the survey when it’s most convenient for them, rather than real-time surveys, which are given when it’s most convenient for the company. You have a better chance of appealing to customers and encouraging their engagement if you respect their time.
Offer A Participation Incentive
Although incentives are not a new concept, using them in customer surveys is not yet widespread. Smaller incentives, such as a discount voucher for future purchases or even free delivery, can be used as incentives (for retail operations). When a discount can be applied to the order/service that the customer is interacting with at the time of the survey, it is the most effective incentive. The customer is practically rewarded right away for simply expressing their viewpoint. It’s also worth noting that the higher the incentive, the higher the tolerance for multiple questions will be.
Ask Open-Ended, Smart Questions
Although it’s tempting to stay with multiple-choice questions and scales, open-ended questions that enable consumers to express their true feelings onto the page can provide some of the most insightful feedback.
Nothing, on the other hand, makes a survey seem more intimidating than a large text box next to the first question. It’s better to start with a few simple questions to create a feeling of progress. Then provide those who have made it to the end of the survey the chance to elaborate on their responses.
One strategy is to use a basic introduction to get people to commit to a subject, then follow up with an open-ended inquiry such as, “Why do you feel this way?”
CSAT Surveys Are NOT A One-Time Thing
Ask for consumer feedback regularly. Instead of making it a quarterly or even annual thing, ask your customers for feedback regularly. Any unexpected spikes, whether good or bad, will alert you to where you should focus your attention. This way, you’ll stay on top of the current customer trends and ensure that you get diverse positive and negative feedback.
Ask One Question At A Time
We’ve all been bombarded with a series of questions, such as, “How did you find our website? Do you think our product is good? “Can you tell us why or why not?”
It might seem like you’re being questioned by someone who won’t let you complete your sentences. Give people time to think about each question individually if you want good responses.
When you bombard people with many questions at once, you’ll receive half-hearted answers from people who are simply trying to get to the end — assuming they don’t abandon you before then. Instead, keep things simple by focusing on only one main thing at a time.
Think About Timing
Don’t wait too long. When the consumer’s memory of you is still fresh, ask for feedback at the appropriate point in the customer journey.
Consider mailing surveys after a few encounters rather than after each response if you’re having several interactions with your customers. In that case, sometime between 2 and 4 days after a support agent closed a ticket would be a decent example.
Follow Up
Not all surveys can or should be done immediately after an interaction. If you send a follow-up survey to customers by email or SMS/text, they will have completely experienced the entire offering, whether it is the bought service or product, and will be more informed about the overall quality of service. These are most suited to operations when the “product” being purchased/used comes after the interaction, such as a travel experience.
Final Thoughts
Customer satisfaction surveys are a powerful and useful weapon in your brand’s fight for customer loyalty. You can optimize your product, service, and overall customer experience with the feedback they offer, resulting in more revenue and more loyal consumers. The best practices discussed in this article will help you increase participation rates and capture a wider range of experiences.
