Do you want to know what your customers need or expect from your business? Are you having challenges on how to present a good customer survey that will give you a fast response? Do you want to learn how to write a customer satisfaction survey? Then read on. A customer service satisfaction survey is a very important research tool in business because it gives you an insight into the indecisive mind of the customers.
It helps you understand what your customers think of your business, what they like and dislike, their suggestions, criticisms, etc. Now how do you go about creating this important customer research tool? How do you write a customer survey that will not annoy your customers but make them excited and responsive? Well, you can find your answers below.
How to Write a Good Customer Service Satisfaction Survey
1. Develop practical objectives
Before you start your survey design, it is very essential to know the reasons of your survey. What kind of information do you require? What will the survey help you to decide? Are you taking action based on the survey? It will be wise having your objectives to be simple and clearly defined.
Analysis, measurement and outcome execution will be actively more result oriented, if your objective are clear and precise. To develop your survey design, you must put this two objectives into consideration:
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First objective
To discover the thought of your customers about your newest survey product. What action will you embark on if you are told that they appreciate or do not appreciate it? It is better you gather much fact to work with before commencing your work.
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Second objective
The second objective should concentrates on features of the survey products (and not yours) and feed backs should very well inspire you to invest future effort in addressing the results from the survey.
2. Prepare an introduction
The purpose, goal and possible results of your company survey should be clear. You can start by writing a useful title and brief introductory paragraph. Add the benefits of the survey and how long it should last. Before you complete any survey, you should understand why the survey is important to you, what the investment is and how it may benefit your business if you complete it.
Will you take part in the survey influence price of a product you use? Will it result in new components you wanted? A nice introduction explaining the advantage and qualitative importance of the survey will assist to increase the number of customers who will take their time to complete it.
3. Make your survey questions brief
This time around, nobody has time to stop and chat any longer. Your customers certainly have no time to waste up to 45 minutes answering questions on your survey. So make sure your survey is brief and focused on the goal. If you can gather the facts that you require in less 5 minutes brief questions, then do it. All question on a survey should be relevant to your goal.
4. Always ask one question at a time
Avoid asking multiple questions that needs the customer to render an answer based on more than one element. Instead of writing for example; “How important is design and style in survey questionnaires?“, split it into two separate questions, one for design and another for style.
5. Avoid open-ended questions
In traditional market research, open ended questions can provide useful facts about behaviors and attitudes. The challenges with open-ended questions comes when you are analyzing the facts gathered. Now because it is very challenging to measure written responses, it is best to keep questions near and direct.
If you still desire to let your respondents provide free-flowing content, put the open-ended questions at the end of your survey so that users will not be discourage by the time investment needed at the beginning.
6. Do not use technical words and jargon
When writing a customer service satisfaction survey, you must make use of pure and simple language in your questions. While RSS, XML and ISP may be very familiar to you and your industry, they may not be familiar to many of your customers.
7. You must avoid using leading questions
At times, we try to influence respondents with questions that sway their answers towards what we like. If you ask someone, a leading question, they may be influenced to answer positively; knowing from your question that it is something you want to hear. To avoid biased answers, you must not use any leading content that will sway responses.
8. Make use of contextual group of questions
Organize questions in relevant groups so that they will be clear in the context. Grouping sets of related questions in one place makes the survey clearer to the respondents and will be regarded easier to complete.
9. Incentives should be made available
If worried about your sample size, you should render an incentive to the respondent for completing the survey. Although small representative samples are considered to be important, large sample sizes provides a big accurate reflection of the market. Think about rendering a discount to the respondent on a particular products or services; or issuing to them a free electronic book or your newsletter subscription; this will encourage them to fill the survey form.
10. Always acknowledge your customers effort
Do not hesitate to acknowledge the effort and time your customers, affiliates, re-sellers, suppliers, employees and prospects invested to take part in your survey. So always commend them and be grateful to them for their effort because their efforts are priceless.
In conclusion, i believe the procedure or steps listed above are the basic steps for writing a good and effective customers service satisfaction survey that will encourage your customer to respond effectively; and invariable affect your business positively in the long run.